Daily Archives: April 25, 2022

Try to picture a proton the minute, positively charged particle within an atomic nucleus and you may imagine a familiar, textbook diagram: a bundle of billiard balls representing quarks and gluons. From the solid sphere model first proposed by John Dalton in 1803 to the quantum model put forward by Erwin Schrdinger in 1926, there is a storied timeline of physicists trying to visualize the invisible.

Now, MIT professor of physics Richard Milner, Jefferson Laboratory physicists Rolf Ent and Rik Yoshida, MIT documentary filmmakers Chris Boebel and Joe McMaster, and Sputnik Animations James LaPlante have teamed up to depict the subatomic world in a new way. Presented by MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) and Jefferson Lab, Visualizing the Proton is an original animation of the proton, intended for use in high school classrooms. Ent and Milner presented the animation in contributed talks at the April meeting of the American Physics Society and also shared it at a community event hosted by MIT Open Space Programming on April 20. In addition to the animation, a short documentary film about the collaborative process is in progress.

Its a project that Milner and Ent have been thinking about since at least 2004 when Frank Wilczek, the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at MIT, shared an animation in his Nobel Lecture on quantum chromodynamics (QCD), a theory that predicts the existence of gluons in the proton. There's an enormously strong MIT lineage to the subject, Milner points out, also referencing the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to Jerome Friedman and Henry Kendall of MIT and Richard Taylor of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory for their pioneering research confirming the existence of quarks.

For starters, the physicists thought animation would be an effective medium to explain the science behind the Electron Ion Collider, a new particle accelerator from the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science which many MIT faculty, including Milner, as well as colleagues like Ent, have long advocated for. Moreover, still renderings of the proton are inherently limited, unable to depict the motion of quarks and gluons. Essential parts of the physics involve animation, color, particles annihilating and disappearing, quantum mechanics, relativity. It's almost impossible to convey this without animation, says Milner.

In 2017, Milner was introduced to Boebel and McMaster, who in turn pulled LaPlante on board. Milner had an intuition that a visualization of their collective work would be really, really valuable, recalls Boebel of the projects beginnings. They applied for a CAST faculty grant, and the teams idea started to come to life.

The CAST Selection Committee was intrigued by the challenge and saw it as a wonderful opportunity to highlight the process involved in making the animation of the proton as well as the animation itself, says Leila Kinney, executive director of arts initiatives and of CAST. True art-science collaborations are more complex than science communication or science visualization projects. They involve bringing together different, equally sophisticated modes of making creative discoveries and interpretive decisions. It is important to understand the possibilities, limitations, and choices already embedded in the visual technology selected to visualize the proton. We hope people come away with better understanding of visual interpretation as a mode of critical inquiry and knowledge production, as well as physics.

Boebel and McMaster filmed the process of creating such a visual interpretation from behind the scenes. It's always challenging when you bring together people who are truly world-class experts, but from different realms, and ask them to talk about something technical, says McMaster of the teams efforts to produce something both scientifically accurate and visually appealing. Their enthusiasm is really infectious.

In February 2020, animator LaPlante welcomed the scientists and filmmakers to his studio in Maine to share his first ideation. Although understanding the world of quantum physics posed a unique challenge, he explains, One of the advantages I have is that I don't come from a scientific background. My goal is always to wrap my head around the science and then figure out, OK, well, what does it look like?

Gluons, for example, have been described as springs, elastics, and vacuums. LaPlante imagined the particle, thought to hold quarks together, as a tub of slime. If you put your closed fist in and try to open it, you create a vacuum of air, making it harder to open your fist because the surrounding material wants to reel it in.

LaPlante was also inspired to use his 3D software to freeze time and fly around a motionless proton, only for the physicists to inform him that such an interpretation was inaccurate based on the existing data. Particle accelerators can only detect a two-dimensional slice. In fact, three-dimensional data is something scientists hope to capture in their next stage of experimentation. They had all come up against the same wall and the same question despite approaching the topic in entirely different ways.

My art is really about clarity of communication and trying to get complex science to something that's understandable, says LaPlante. Much like in science, getting things wrong is often the first step of his artistic process. However, his initial attempt at the animation was a hit with the physicists, and they excitedly refined the project over Zoom.

There are two basic knobs that experimentalists can dial when we scatter an electron off a proton at high energy, Milner explains, much like spatial resolution and shutter speed in photography. Those camera variables have direct analogies in the mathematical language of physicists describing this scattering.

As exposure time, or Bjorken-X, which in QCD is the physical interpretation of the fraction of the protons momentum carried by one quark or gluon, is lowered, you see the proton as an almost infinite number of gluons and quarks moving very quickly. If Bjorken-X is raised, you see three blobs, or Valence quarks, in red, blue, and green. As spatial resolution is dialed, the proton goes from being a spherical object to a pancaked object.

We think we've invented a new tool, says Milner. There are basic science questions: How are the gluons distributed in a proton? Are they uniform? Are they clumped? We don't know. These are basic, fundamental questions that we can animate. We think it's a tool for communication, understanding, and scientific discussion.

This is the start. I hope people see it around the world, and they get inspired.

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Visualizing the Proton through animation and film | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT News

Does time exist? The answer to this question may seem obvious: of course it does! Just look at a calendar or a clock.

But developments in physics suggest the non-existence of time is an open possibility, and one that we should take seriously.

How can that be, and what would it mean? Itll take a little while to explain, but dont worry: even if time doesnt exist, our lives will go on as usual.

Physics is in crisis. For the past century or so, we have explained the universe with two wildly successful physical theories: general relativity and quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics describes how things work in the incredibly tiny world of particles and particle interactions. General relativity describes the big picture of gravity and how objects move.

Both theories work extremely well in their own right, but the two are thought to conflict with one another. Though the exact nature of the conflict is controversial, scientists generally agree both theories need to be replaced with a new, more general theory.

Physicists want to produce a theory of quantum gravity that replaces general relativity and quantum mechanics, while capturing the extraordinary success of both. Such a theory would explain how gravitys big picture works at the miniature scale of particles.

It turns out that producing a theory of quantum gravity is extraordinarily difficult.

One attempt to overcome the conflict between the two theories is string theory. String theory replaces particles with strings vibrating in as many as 11 dimensions.

However, string theory faces a further difficulty. String theories provide a range of models that describe a universe broadly like our own, and they dont really make any clear predictions that can be tested by experiments to figure out which model is the right one.

In the 1980s and 1990s, many physicists became dissatisfied with string theory and came up with a range of new mathematical approaches to quantum gravity.

One of the most prominent of these is loop quantum gravity, which proposes that the fabric of space and time is made of a network of extremely small discrete chunks, or loops.

One of the remarkable aspects of loop quantum gravity is that it appears to eliminate time entirely.

Loop quantum gravity is not alone in abolishing time: a number of other approaches also seem to remove time as a fundamental aspect of reality.

So we know we need a new physical theory to explain the universe, and that this theory might not feature time.

Suppose such a theory turns out to be correct. Would it follow that time does not exist?

Its complicated, and it depends what we mean by exist.

Theories of physics dont include any tables, chairs, or people, and yet we still accept that tables, chairs and people exist.

Why? Because we assume that such things exist at a higher level than the level described by physics.

We say that tables, for example, emerge from an underlying physics of particles whizzing around the universe.

But while we have a pretty good sense of how a table might be made out of fundamental particles, we have no idea how time might be made out of something more fundamental.

So unless we can come up with a good account of how time emerges, it is not clear we can simply assume time exists.

Time might not exist at any level.

Saying that time does not exist at any level is like saying that there are no tables at all.

Trying to get by in a world without tables might be tough, but managing in a world without time seems positively disastrous.

Our entire lives are built around time. We plan for the future, in light of what we know about the past. We hold people morally accountable for their past actions, with an eye to reprimanding them later on.

We believe ourselves to be agents (entities that can do things) in part because we can plan to act in a way that will bring about changes in the future.

But whats the point of acting to bring about a change in the future when, in a very real sense, there is no future to act for?

Whats the point of punishing someone for a past action, when there is no past and so, apparently, no such action?

The discovery that time does not exist would seem to bring the entire world to a grinding halt. We would have no reason to get out of bed.

There is a way out of the mess.

While physics might eliminate time, it seems to leave causation intact: the sense in which one thing can bring about another.

Perhaps what physics is telling us, then, is that causation and not time is the basic feature of our universe.

If thats right, then agency can still survive. For it is possible to reconstruct a sense of agency entirely in causal terms.

At least, thats what Kristie Miller, Jonathan Tallant and I argue in our new book.

We suggest the discovery that time does not exist may have no direct impact on our lives, even while it propels physics into a new era.

Sam Baron, Associate professor, Australian Catholic University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Time Might Not Exist, According To Physicists And Philosophers But That's Okay - IFLScience

In the ultrahigh vacuum of a scanning tunneling microscope, a hydrogen molecule is held between the silver tip and sample. Femtosecond bursts of a terahertz laser excite the molecule, turning it into a quantum sensor. Credit: Wilson Ho Lab, UCI

New technique enables precise measurement of electrostatic properties of materials.

Physicists at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) have demonstrated the use of a hydrogen molecule as a quantum sensor in a terahertz laser-equipped scanning tunneling microscope, a technique that can measure the chemical properties of materials at unprecedented time and spatial resolutions.

This novel technique can also be applied to the analysis of two-dimensional materials which have the potential to play a role in advanced energy systems, electronics, and quantum computers.

On April 21, 2022, in the journal Science, the researchers in UCIs Department of Physics & Astronomy and Department of Chemistry describe how they positioned two bound atoms of hydrogen in between the silver tip of the STM and a sample composed of a flat copper surface arrayed with small islands of copper nitride. With pulses of the laser lasting just trillionths of a second, the scientists were able to excite the hydrogen molecule and detect changes in its quantum states at cryogenic temperatures and in the ultrahigh vacuum environment of the instrument, rendering atomic-scale, time-lapsed images of the sample.

This project represents an advance in both the measurement technique and the scientific question the approach allowed us to explore, says co-author Wilson Ho, UCI Donald Bren professor of physics & astronomy. Credit: Steve Zylius / UCI

This project represents an advance in both the measurement technique and the scientific question the approach allowed us to explore, said co-author Wilson Ho, Donald Bren Professor of physics & astronomy and chemistry. A quantum microscope that relies on probing the coherent superposition of states in a two-level system is much more sensitive than existing instruments that are not based on this quantum physics principle.

Ho said the hydrogen molecule is an example of a two-level system because its orientation shifts between two positions, up and down and slightly horizontally tilted. Through a laser pulse, the scientists can coax the system to go from a ground state to an excited state in a cyclical fashion resulting in a superposition of the two states. The duration of the cyclic oscillations is vanishingly brief lasting mere tens of picoseconds but by measuring this decoherence time and the cyclic periods the scientists were able to see how the hydrogen molecule was interacting with its environment.

The UCI team responsible for the assembly and use of the terahertz laser-equipped scanning tunneling microscope pictured here are, from left to right, Dan Bai, UCI Ph.D. student in physics & astronomy; Wilson Ho, Bren Professor of physics & astronomy and chemistry; Yunpeng Xia, Ph.D. student in physics & astronomy; and Likun Wang and Ph.D. candidate in chemistry. Credit: Steve Zylius / UCI

The hydrogen molecule became part of the quantum microscope in the sense that wherever the microscope scanned, the hydrogen was there in between the tip and the sample, said Ho. It makes for an extremely sensitive probe, allowing us to see variations down to 0.1 angstrom. At this resolution, we could see how the charge distributions change on the sample.

The space between the STM tip and the sample is almost unimaginably small, about six angstroms or 0.6 nanometers. The STM that Ho and his team assembled is equipped to detect minute electrical current flowing in this space and produce spectroscopic readings proving the presence of the hydrogen molecule and sample elements. Ho said this experiment represents the first demonstration of a chemically sensitive spectroscopy based on terahertz-induced rectification current through a single molecule.

The ability to characterize materials at this level of detail based on hydrogens quantum coherence can be of great use in the science and engineering of catalysts, since their functioning often depends on surface imperfections at the scale of single atoms, according to Ho.

As long as hydrogen can be adsorbed onto a material, in principle, you can use hydrogen as a sensor to characterize the material itself through observations of their electrostatic field distribution, said study lead author Likun Wang, UCI graduate student in physics & astronomy.

Joining Ho and Wang on this project, which was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Basic Energy Sciences, was Yunpeng Xia, UCI graduate student in physics & astronomy.

Reference: Atomic-scale quantum sensing based on the ultrafast coherence of an H2 molecule in an STM cavity by Likun Wang, Yunpeng Xia and W. Ho, 21 April 2022, Science.DOI: 10.1126/science.abn9220

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Hydrogen Molecule Turned Into a Quantum Sensor With Unprecedented Time and Spatial Resolutions - SciTechDaily

Speaking over Zoom, the Daniels proclaimed themselves devoted fans of pop science and cosmology. They sent me a copy of A Vast Pointless Gyration of Radioactive Rocks and Gas in Which You Happen to Occur (A24 LLC), a collection of science and speculative writing by authors including Jorge Luis Borges and Carl Sagan, which they edited.

Needless to say, there is not just one theory of the multiverse but many, depending on the physics you adopt. For instance, the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics posits that whenever you make a decision say, to turn left out of your driveway instead of right the universe splits in two and continues branching at every intersection. There is a universe for every way you could turn, every way a ball could come off Aaron Judges bat, every way a cookie could crumble.

Another version of the multiverse arises from string theory, the purported theory of everything that describes elementary particles as vibrating strings of energy. Theory of Anything might be a better moniker; it turns out that the theory has at least 10^500 solutions in 11 different dimensions, each of which represents an alternate universe, perhaps with its own laws.

Still another multiverse springs from the prevailing, though not fully confirmed, theory of cosmic inflation. Thanks to a violent whoosh fueled by negative gravity at the dawn of time, an endless array of bubble or pocket universes are branching off from one another at a dizzying, exponentially increasing rate.

The Daniels described their multiverse as a combination of Many Worlds and the cosmic bubble bath implied by inflation theory. Its fun to imagine both versions, Mr. Kwan said. Both of them are pointing toward infinity or just pointing toward the unknown.

But, they added, their film is less about physics than about how physics makes you feel. If you could see alternate lives, that would be that would send you spiraling, Mr. Scheinert said. It would send any of us kind of spiraling about, like, lives you could have led and choices you could have made.

The multiverse, they said, could also be a metaphor for the attention-deficient lives weve embraced in our bubbles of social-media truth. I think our stories have to constantly be looking for ways to calm us down again or to bring us back to another version of being centered and grounded again, Mr. Kwan said.

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Tripping Through the Universes - The New York Times

When President Grover Cleveland pushed a button to light the 100,000 incandescent lamps at the 1893 Worlds Fair in Chicago, the luminous glow, which left attendees awestruck in the face of modernity, finally shined the world from the proverbial dark ages toward the future. In Jenny Lumet and Alex Kurtzmans Showtime limited series The Man Who Fell to Earth, a slew of tech royalty look out windows at a London skyline dazzlingly lit by quantum fusion power, capturing a similar sense of promise and wonder. This show understands the tricky balance between mystery and intrigue, madness and lucidity, progress and heartbreak. It doesnt always set its own world ablaze in the same way, but it manages to offer a hearty spark.

Based on Walter Tevis 1963 science fiction novel of the same name, the shows titular character, Faraday (Chiwetel Ejiofor), crashes from the heavens, naked, in search of water. Police pick him up, and he requests the presence of Justin Falls (Naomie Harris), a disgraced MIT graduate in quantum physics now shoveling manure in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Faraday can barely speak. He learns by listening, then regurgitating what he hears in a spatter of phrases and obscenities that worries everyone around him. Its not the first time hell face the police. And if theres one major failing of the series, its the color-blind scenarios of Black characters interacting with cops (particularly when Faraday is acting unhinged) but surviving mostly unscathed and ignored, which requires a real suspension of disbelief.

Faraday is on a mission ordered by Thomas Newton (Bill Nighy), a once-great inventor, presently gone and barely remembered except by his heirs. Before Spencer Clay (Jimmi Simpson), a needling CIA agent, can stop him, Faraday must find Justin, the worlds expert in quantum fusion technology, so they might build a machine thatll save his planet and Earth from the ravages of climate change. But departing with Faraday on a globetrotting adventure isnt easy for Justin. For one, she doesnt know him except as a troubled stranger without personal boundaries; Faraday often says exactly whats on his mind, no matter how casually cruel or weird he sounds. She also has a young daughter, Molly (Annelle Olaleye), and an arthritic father in constant need of care and medicine, Josiah (a delightful Clarke Peters).

The Man Who Fell to Earth initially subsists on Faradays quirkiness. Ejiofor delivers a torrent of accents in a William Shatner cadence. His spasms and kinetic physical energy offer a full range of emotions that at once dole out laughs and heartache if given the chance, he wouldve made a great Doctor in Doctor Who. Simply put, this show isnt afraid to be silly: In one scene Faraday, searching for water, sticks a few feet of garden hose down his throat. In another he vomits a mountain of gold rings to pawn.

Similar to the 1976 film starring David Bowie (who was always like an alien in his own right), Lumet and Kurtzman lean toward Tevis meditations on apocalypses and human error. Enter Harris Justin, a brilliant woman hiding her genius because of a mistake she committed long ago. The emotive Harris usually provides major wattage, and she doesnt disappoint here, as she crumbles and rebuilds to craft a character whose strength resides not in her anger but her admittedly shaky moral center. Together, she and Ejiofor add immeasurable potency to a series that sometimes slows to a crawl as it dissects the various apocalyptic scenarios around us.

The adaptations themes can often leave a bad taste in your mouth too. At one point, it resorts to ableism, pitching one characters disability as a burden for their family, leading to a moment reminiscent of The Green Mile. The writers, admirably, want to make The Man Who Fell to Earth a commentary on refugees. The series, in fact, begins in the future, with a successful Faraday as a Steve Jobs-style tech master talking to an auditorium filled with fans. He proclaims himself an immigrant who will tell his story. But what are the key elements to an immigrants story? Certainly, theres the fish-out-of-water element of being a traveler in a strange land with odd customs and a difficult language barrier. But the series fails to address the political element of it in a series featuring several strata of American law enforcement. Admittedly, only four of the shows 10 episodes were screened for review, but so far, the immigrant component is reedy at best.

For all the thematic holes, the series does offer visual wonderment. Wide vistas of desert landscapes, emphasizing the repetition of desolation, imbues the rough terrain with the spirit of the unexplainable. The cinematic lighting in particular, as it cuts sharp beams through austere compositions, emphasizes the series tinge of thriller, as does the thrumming score. Tranquil waters do flow through some episodes, such as Ejiofor and Peters dueting on Papa Was a Rollin Stone (its as adorable as it sounds) as well as Faraday and Falls supporting the other, even when everyone doubts them.

An unmistakable urgency pushes The Man Who Fell to Earth not just in Faradays mission and his belief in the ends justifying the means, but the environmental criticism guiding his journey and ours. Our planet is dying. And the people in power care very little about that fact. Sooner than we think, the damage will be irreversible. Faraday comes from a world where the only way to turn back the hands of time requires him to literally travel through space and time. Why are we letting petty rivalries and grievances destroy our collective future? Most likely because were human. Its our flaw and our strength. We can reach for the future when the light shines clearest, and then smash the switch when the light reveals an uncomfortable truth.

The Man Who Fell to Earth is filled with those truths but doesnt necessarily smash the switch or even reinvent it. A narrative universe exists where the show could be weirder, more boundary-pushing. Instead, the series needs more fortifying before its thematic investments yield any firm results, but good performances melded with an eccentric tone rife for tantalizing storytelling opportunities makes it worth exploring.

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The Man Who Fell to Earth review: a 2022 remake that almost sees a future - Polygon

Even without superhuman enhancements, many Marvel characters have a base-level intelligence that far exceeds any mere mortal mind. Some are physicists, others are surgeons, whereas many are just brilliantly gifted. Marvel has its fair share of brainiacs, but without the advantage of godly status or otherworldly influence, who can be named the smartest human being in the universe?

Providing the choice between Tony Stark, Reed Richards, Bruce Banner, Stephen Strange, Hank Pym, Shuri, Doctor Octavius and Norman Osborn, Reddit user DrDreidel82 took to the internet in search of answers as to who the most intelligent human in the Marvel Cinematic Universe could be.

When comparing so many candidates, the decision becomes an extremely difficult one. Do you prioritize scientific smarts, technological smarts, or generalized genius? Many fans (presumably) would nominate Tony Stark at first thought, but according to Reddit, the opinions are fairly evenly split. Judging by the unanimous agreement, it seems that Reed Richards is the victor.

However, despite the resounding opinions leaning towards Richards, it comes as no surprise that Stark takes the close second. In the vast majority of comments, there seems to be a huge divide between Richards and Stark as the main favorites.

There seems to be one or two comments that sway more towards Shuri and Hank Pym as close seconds to Richards and Stark. Especially given Shuris age, she may have the edge over the older geniuses, who may have slowed in their later years. Avengers: Endgame director Joe Russo stated during a 2018 interview withWired that Shuri (Letitia Wright) fromBlack Pantheroutranks all others.

Ultimately, it all boils down to personal opinions and individual analyses of each candidates achievements in comparison with others. One could argue that Stark is resourceful and persistent, but Hank Pym created Pym Particles that enable time travel and the quantum tunnel to access the quantum realm. Likewise, Shuri created bulletproof armor, Banner (accidentally) created the Hulk, Osborn essentially invented the Green Golbin (including his gear and weapons), Octavius invented octopus arms instilled with artificial intelligence, Strange is a qualified neurosurgeon and mastered the mystic arts and Richards has created several advanced machines.

Like many debates, it all relies on perspective. If quantum physics is conceivably a more significant and impressive achievement than designing bulletproof armor, then naturally Hank Pym would have Shuri beat and so on and so forth.

Clearly, not even an official word from Marvel can quell such a debate, so expect it to rage on until the end of time (or MCU). Whichever comes first.

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Marvel Fans Debate Who's the Smartest Human in the MCU - We Got This Covered