Category Archives: Quantum Physics

Its a very good thing Carlo Rovelli did not get eaten by a bear in 1976though even he admits it would have been his own fault. Camping alone in western Canada, he decided to save the money it would have cost him to pitch his tent in a designated area, and picked instead a wilder part of the wilderness. No sooner had he set up camp and prepared to settle in than the grizzly appeared.

Fortunately for Rovelli, the bear was more interested in the easy pickings of the food supplies he had left out in the open than it was in human prey. I packed super rapidly, he says, left the food, took my tent and backpack, ran to the campsite, and was happy to pay the $2 it cost to camp there.

That $2 ensured that Rovelli remained in the world, andto the gratitude of millions of his modern-day readers and followersthat the world got to keep Rovelli. It turned out to be a good deal all around.

The 65-year-old research physicist now directs the quantum-gravity research group at the Centre de Physique Thorique in Marseilles, France, and is the best-selling author of seven books, including 2014s Seven Brief Lessons on Physicswhich has been translated into more than 40 languagesand the new There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness, coming May 10, a collection of his newspaper columns originally published from 2010 to 2020.

Read More: The 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade

Quick-talking and small-framed, Rovelli is rather blas about trafficking in the nearly hallucinogenic concepts of his field, from quantum theorywhich involves the behavior of matter and energy at the atomic and subatomic levels, where the precepts of classical physics break downto relativity, to certainty (which, for what its worth, he insists does not exist). Im a simple mechanic, he says. In Italian thats almost a pejorative. However, Im not the person who thinks that science is a fundamental explanation of everything. I think scientists should be humble. They are not the masters of todays knowledge.

Maybe not. And yet, Rovellis lifes goal is to be the first physicist to reconcile quantum mechanics and more traditional theories of gravity and Einsteinian space-time. That work, should he achieve it, would make Rovelli more than just an accomplished physicist and a gifted communicator. It would make him a legend.

Rovelli began breaking rules long before he pitched his tent in a place he wasnt supposed to. Born in Bologna, Italy, he ran away from home at age 14 and hitchhiked across Europe. At 16, he began experimenting with LSD, which he credits with first allowing him to understand that linear time, as we experience it, may not be all there is. The experience, he writes in his new book, left me with a calm awareness of the prejudices of our rigid mental categories.

That kind of thinking predisposed Rovelli as much to philosophy as to physics, and when he enrolled in college, at the University of Bologna, he had yet to decide firmly. But when it came time to register for classes, the queue at the physics table was much shorter than the one for philosophy.

Physics was a little bit of a random choice, he says. I also discovered, to my surprise, that I was good at it.

Read More: What Einstein Got Wrong About the Speed of Light

Good indeed. After earning his PhD at the University of Padova, Rovelli held postdoctoral positions at numerous schools, including Yale University and the University of Rome, and taught for a decade at the University of Pittsburgh. Rovelli has come to conclude that if you want to understand how the universe worksand he would be very happy to teach youits important to grasp three essential concepts. First, things dont happen according to exact equations, but rather only to probability. Next, space-time is not a continuum but is ultimately reducible to grains, the smallest possible units of the universe. We should think about space around us as if were immersed in a bucket of sand, he says. At some point, you get down to a single grain and cannot get it to break.

Finally, Rovelli argues, all objectseven grizzly bearsdo not have their own properties, but properties only insofar as they relate to other objects. The world is not made of stones, he says. Its made of kisses.

Rovelli concedes that theres a limit to how much sense any of what he traffics in daily is comprehensible to most people. Work as a heart surgeon and you can explain straightforwardly what your job involves. Work as a theoretical physicist and youre left resorting to metaphor.

What makes things really challenging is that the universe does a good job misleading us with what appears to be simplicity. The ground is down there; spacewhich has no grains as far as we can seeis up there; time moves forward. The trick for all of us, physicists included, is not learning new truths but unlearning old falsehoods. Galileo Galileis seminal book, which explained the motion of the earth, is perhaps historys best example of that process.

Its meant to convince you that the earth goes around the sun and that the earth rotates, Rovelli says. But whats remarkable is that the actual arguments for the earth moving take a few pages. Most of the book is devoted to trying to bring the reader out from the obvious conviction that thats impossible.

Read More: Teleportation Is Real and Heres Why it Matters

Where humanity as a whole fits into the cosmos is not a matter that Rovelli addresses muchor that seems, within his science, to require that much addressing. Consciousness and life itself, he says, are a trick of biochemistry and thermodynamics and not a whole lot more. Life is a super-complicated phenomenon, but theres no mystery here, he says. Whats more, death brings an end to things utterly.

I dont like to feel consolation in the idea that I will be welcomed by God after my death, he writes in his new book. I like to look directly at the limited length of our lives, to learn to look at our sister, death, with serenity. I like to wake in the morning, look at the sea, and thank the wind, the waves, the sky the life that allows me to exist.

The stem-winding title of Rovellis new book comes from a 2016 essay in which he visits a mosque in Senegal. He removes his sandals before stepping inside the building, as directed, but carries them inside with him. A young man approaches him and points to the sandals; Rovelli realizes that the rule is actually that dirtshedding shoes should not enter the building at all. He hurries back outside and leaves the sandals behind. An old man picks the sandals back up, places them in a bag, and carries them into the mosque himself to hand them back to Rovelli. The mans desire to put the travelers mind at ease about his shoes has taken precedence over even that rule.

I am speechless, Rovelli writes; there are places in the world where rules are less important than kindness.

The universe Rovelli has devoted his life to explaining might be a cold, indifferent, even unkind oneat least insofar as it largely limits us to our tiny little beachhead of earth. But it is a clearer and more elegant one for Rovellis efforts. That, in a very real sense, is its own act of kindness.

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Write to Jeffrey Kluger at jeffrey.kluger@time.com.

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Carlo Rovelli Explains the Universe In His New Book - TIME

image:Professor Mattias Christandl has helped find a new form of security identification, that could soon see the light of day and help us protect our data from hackers and cybercriminals. view more

Credit: University of Copenhagen, Quantum for Life Centre

A new form of security identification could soon see the light of day and help us protect our data from hackers and cybercriminals. Quantum mathematicians at the University of Copenhagen have solved a mathematical riddle that allows for a person's geographical location to be used as a personal ID that is secure against even the most advanced cyber attacks.

People have used codes and encryption to protect information from falling into the wrong hands for thousands of years. Today, encryption is widely used to protect our digital activity from hackers and cybercriminals who assume false identities and exploit the internet and our increasing number of digital devices to steal from us.

As such, there is an ever-growing need for new security measures to detect hackers posing as our banks or other trusted institutions. Within this realm, researchers from the University of Copenhagens Department of Mathematical Sciences have just made a giant leap.

There is a constant battle in cryptography between those who want to protect information and those seeking to crack it. New security keys are being developed and later broken and so the cycle continues. Until, that is, a completely different type of key has been found., says Professor Matthias Christandl.

For nearly twenty years, researchers around the world have been trying to solve the riddle of how to securely determine a person's geographical location and use it as a secure ID. Until now, this had not been possible by way of normal methods like GPS tracking.

"Today, there are no traditional ways, whether by internet or radio signals for example, to determine where another person is situated geographically with one hundred percent accuracy. Current methods are not unbreakable, and hackers can impersonate someone you trust even when they are far far away. However, quantum physics opens up a few entirely different possibilities," says Matthias Christandl.

Quantum physics makes hacking impossible

Using the laws of quantum physics, the researchers developed a new security protocol that uses a person's geographical location to guarantee that they are communicating with the right person. Position-based quantum encryption, as it is called, can be used to ensure that a person is speaking with an actual bank representative when the bank calls and asks a customer to make changes to their account.

"Ask yourself, why do I trust an employee at the bank counter? Because they're in a bank. Their location creates trust. This explains the principle behind pposition-based cryptography, where physical location is used to identify oneself," explains postdoc Andreas Bluhm.

The researchers' recipe for securing a person's location combines the information in a single quantum bit a qubit followed by classical bits, consisting of the ones and zeroes that we are familiar with from ordinary computers.

Both types of bits are needed to send a message that is impossible for cybercriminals to read, hack or manipulate, and which can confirm whether a person is in your banks office or in some far-off country.

The quantum bit serves as a kind of lock on the message, due to the role of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics, which causes quantum information to be disrupted and impossible to decode when trying to measure it. It is also due to what is known as the "no-cloning theorem", which makes quantum information impossible to intercept and secretly copy. This will remain the case for quite some time.

"Until a full-fledged quantum computer is built and hackers gain access to one, our method is completely secure and impossible to hack," says Andreas Bluhm.

Could soon be a reality

The researchers highlight the fact that the new method is particularly handy because only a single quantum bit is needed for position verification. So, unlike many other quantum technologies that require further development, this new discovery can be put to use today. Suitable quantum sources that can send a quantum bit of light already exist.

"The particular strength of our technique is that it is relatively straightforward to implement. Were already able to send individual quantum bits, which is all this technique requires," says Matthias Christandl.

The security ID needs to be developed commercially, by a company for example, before it can be widely adopted. However, its quantum foundation is in place.

The new research result is particularly useful in contexts where communications between two parties need to be extremely secure. This could be payments on the internet or transmission of sensitive personal data.

"Secure communication is a key element of our daily lives. Whenever we communicate with public authorities, our banks or any party that manages our personal data and information, we need to know that the people were dealing with are those who we expect them to be and not criminals," says Andreas Bluhm.

The research has just been published in Nature Physics and was presented at the QCrypt 2021 conference. Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xt5gsEuPL4&list=PLVgC3LSv44hCboHkzAjBsDYUr6PxficlU&index=23

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Phone call results in 35-million-dollar bank heist

In 2020, swindlers robbed a bank in the United Arab Emirates of 35 million dollars using deep voice technology.

Using the imitated voice of the bank director on a phone call, the fraudsters told a bank manager that the bank was about to acquire a company and asked the manager to transfer funds to the company's lawyer. However, the lawyer was one of the scammers and the money immediately vanished into several accounts. The heist could have been averted if the bank manager had been able to verify that it was indeed the bank director giving the order over the phone.

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About the study

The article "A single-qubit position verification protocol that is secure against multi-qubit attacks" has just been published in Nature Physics. The article was written in collaboration with Florian Speelman, a researcher based at the University of Amsterdam.

Contact:

Matthias ChristandlProfessorDepartment of Mathematical SciencesUniversity of CopenhagenMobile: +45 51 82 43 25christandl@math.ku.dk

Andreas BluhmPostdocDepartment of Mathematical SciencesUniversity of CopenhagenMail: bluhm@math.ku.dk

Michael Skov JensenJournalistThe Faculty of ScienceUniversity of CopenhagenMobile: +45 93 56 58 97msj@science.ku.dk

A single-qubit position verification protocol that is secure against multi-qubit attacks

28-Apr-2022

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Scientific advance leads to a new tool in the fight against hackers - EurekAlert

An experiment has been designed that could confirm the fifth state of matter in the universe and change physics as we know it. If proven correct, it would show that information is the fifth form of matter, alongside solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. In fact, information could be the elusive dark matter that makes up almost a third of the universe.

An experiment that could confirm the fifth state of matter in the universe and change physics as we know it has been published in a new research paper from the University of Portsmouth in England.

Dr. Melvin Vopson, a physicist, has already published findings indicating that information has mass and that all elementary particles, the universes smallest known building blocks, store information about themselves, similar to the way humans have DNA.

Now he has designed an experiment which if proved correct means he will have discovered that information is the fifth form of matter, alongside solid, liquid, gas, and plasma.

Dr. Vopson said: This would be a eureka moment because it would change physics as we know it and expand our understanding of the universe. But it wouldnt conflict with any of the existing laws of physics.

It doesnt contradict quantum mechanics, electrodynamics, thermodynamics, or classical mechanics. All it does is complement physics with something new and incredibly exciting.

Dr. Vopsons previous research suggests that information is the fundamental building block of the universe and has physical mass.

He even claims that information could be the elusive dark matter that makes up almost a third of the universe.

He said: If we assume that information is physical and has mass, and that elementary particles have a DNA of information about themselves, how can we prove it? My latest paper is about putting these theories to the test so they can be taken seriously by the scientific community.

Dr. Vopsons experiment proposes how to detect and measure the information in an elementary particle by using particle-antiparticle collision.

He said: The information in an electron is 22 million times smaller than the mass of it, but we can measure the information content by erasing it.

We know that when you collide a particle of matter with a particle of antimatter, they annihilate each other. And the information from the particle has to go somewhere when its annihilated.

The annihilation process converts all the remaining mass of the particles into energy, typically gamma photons. Any particles containing information are converted into low-energy infrared photons.

In the study, Dr. Vopson predicts the exact energy of the infrared photons resulting from erasing the information.

Dr. Vopson believes his work could demonstrate how information is a key component of everything in the universe and a new field of physics research could emerge.

The paper is published in the journal AIP Advances.

Reference: Experimental protocol for testing the massenergyinformation equivalence principle by Melvin M. Vopson, 4 March 2022, AIP Advances.DOI: 10.1063/5.0087175

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An Experiment That Could Confirm the Fifth State of Matter in the Universe And Change Physics As We Know It - SciTechDaily

Quantum theory has predicted many phenomena that are difficult, if not impossible, to observe in practice. One particularly tricky example is the Unruh effect, which would take longer than the age of the universe to reveal itself in straightforward experiments. However, a team of physicists have argued it is theoretically possible to shorten this process to a few hours. They're now working on ways to actually carry the idea out, hopefully catching a thermal glow that will confirm one part of our understanding of the basic laws of the universe.

The Unruh (or Fulling-Davies-Unruh) effect is thought to cause accelerating objects to be bathed in a thermal bath of electromagnetic radiation. If some immense power allowed a spacecraft to rapidly approach light speed, passengers not squashed by the extreme g forces would witness a warm glow around them. As envisaged, it's a counterpart to Hawking radiation produced by black holes, and observing either would help confirm the other. The problem for experimentalists is the amount of radiation produced under most circumstances is so low as to be effectively undetectable.

However, in Physical Review Letters physicists note you can stimulate the Unruh effect by accelerating your object in the presence of electromagnetic radiation. Although this light would normally induce other effects that would once again make the Unruh radiation undetectable, they claim to have found ways around this.

One of the mind-bending consequences of quantum theory is that there are no true vacuums pairs of subatomic virtual particles are constantly fluctuating into existence before almost immediately annihilating each other. Unruh's theory postulates objects with mass amplify these quantum fluctuations when accelerating, warming themselves and creating a thermal glow that others should be able to see.

Most acceleration simply isn't large enough to produce anything noticeable, however, and even when we apply all the power we can muster in a particle accelerator we're unlikely to witness anything. However, every photon of light passing through a vacuum increases the density of quantum fluctuations, making it more likely an accelerated particle will experience a noticeable Unruh effect.

However, an atom can also absorb the light used to stimulate Unruh radiation, raising its energy level enough to overwhelm something so subtle. This is just one of three resonant effects light can have on an atom. Observing the effect becomes a little like trying to spot a planet by the reflected light of its star. Extra starlight makes the planet brighter, but also makes it harder to see in the star's glare.

Just as astronomers mask stars to let us see their planets, University of Waterloo PhD student Barbara Sodaargues it is possible to make the atom invisible to the light so it cannot absorb any of the photons. This would prevent the absorption from obscuring our view of the Unruh radiation. Soda and co-authors call this acceleration-induced transparency.

Provided the accelerating object's path through a field of photons is right, the authors conclude we can get the Unruh effect without the absorption. We show that by engineering the trajectory of the particle, we can essentially turn off [the resonant] effects, Soda said in a statement.

Co-author Dr Vivishek Sudhir of MIT is working on designing a practical experiment to implement the idea by firing electrons at close to the speed of light through a microwave laser at the appropriate angle.

Now we have this mechanism that seems to statistically amplify this effect via stimulation, Sudhir said. Given the 40-year history of this problem, weve now in theory fixed the biggest bottleneck.

Unexpected acceleration of certain spacecraft as they flew by Earth has been attributed to the Unruh effect, but competing explanations exist. If the Unruh effect actually is the cause it would reveal a real-world influence, one we might even be able to harness.

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There May Be A Fast Way To Observe This Never-Before-Seen Quantum Effect - IFLScience

Measuring time has always been fundamental for humans, and different societies across history have developed different ways of tracking it. As I explored some years ago in my book About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang, the pace of cultural evolution can often be tied to the machines available for measuring time. Almost every new timekeeping technology has ushered in new societal arrangements. What is especially remarkable about the technology we use in the modern world is that it all rests on physics operating at the atomic scale.

In the pre-industrial age, people only needed to measure years and months to a fair amount of accuracy. The position of the sun in the sky was good enough to break up the day. Timing at the level of fractions of a second was simply not needed.

Eventually, modern industry arose. Fast-moving machines came to dominate human activity, and clocks required hands that could measure seconds. In the current era of digital technology, the timing of electronic circuitry means that millionths or billionths of a second actually matter. None of the high-tech stuff we need, from our phones to our cars, can be controlled or manipulated if we cannot keep close track of it. To make technology work, we need clocks that are faster than the timing of the machines we need to control. For todays technology, that means we must be able to measure seconds, milliseconds, or even nanoseconds with astonishing accuracy.

Every timekeeping device works via a version of a pendulum. Something must swing back and forth to beat out a basic unit of time. Mechanical clocks used gears and springs. But metal changes shape as it heats or cools, and friction wears down mechanical parts. All of this limits the accuracy of these timekeeping machines. As the speed of human culture climbed higher, it demanded a kind of hyper-fast pendulum that would never wear down.

Luckily, that is what scientists found hiding inside the heart of each atom.

Every atom absorbs and emits electromagnetic radiation at special frequencies. These frequencies (and their related wavelengths) change based on the element. Expose an atom of hydrogen to the full spectrum of optical light, and it will absorb only a few frequencies (colors). Other frequencies remain untouched. In the early decades of the 20th century, the field of quantum mechanics explained this strange behavior. Quantum theory showed how the transitioning of electrons defines the interaction of light and matter. The electrons jump from one orbit around their atoms nucleus, to another.

Absorption entails an electron jumping to a more energetic orbit as a light particle, or photon, is captured. Emission is the opposite an electron jumps to a lower orbit, releasing energy as a photon is emitted. Using quantum mechanics, physicists learned how to precisely predict the frequencies of absorption and emission of all atoms, ions, and molecules.

Though no one knew it at the time, these quantum jumps would make for a new kind of clock. Frequency is nothing but inverse time (1/seconds). This means extremely accurate measurements of the transition frequency of an atom or molecule can transcribe a precise measurement of time.

In World War II, the development of radar allowed waves in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum to be used in photon-atom interaction experiments. This led to the first atomic clock, which was based on ammonia molecules and their microwave frequency transitions.

Cesium atoms later became the preferred tool for time measurement, and in 1967 the second was formally defined as exactly 9,192,631,770 cycles of the cesium atoms transition frequency. Modern atomic clocks are now so precise that their accuracy is measured in terms of gaining or losing nanoseconds per day.

None of the modern miracles that facilitate our daily lives would work without these pendula inside atoms. From the GPS satellites sending and receiving signals across the globe, to the tiny switches inside your cell phone, it is the most basic aspect of modern physics quantum jumps that allows such delicate filigrees of time.

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A clock beats inside the heart of every atom - Big Think

For participants, it's all about intellectual stimulation and fun.

SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine Makers of board games are seeking the smarty seal of approval at a round-the-clock event this weekend.

The 2022 American Mensa Mind Games are underway at hotel in South Portland, Maine, where hundreds of intellectually gifted individuals are getting a crack at new board games during a three-day event.

Out of 65 games submitted for evaluation, five will be chosen for the Mensa Select seal of approval, theBangor Daily News reported. Past winners include Scattergories, Trivial Pursuit and Taboo.

For participants, it's all about intellectual stimulation and fun.

Ive been looking forward to this for three years, Kimberly Kohler, of Illinois, told the Daily News. My goal is to absolutely forget about the rest of the world for a few days and just play board games.

Mark Grand, of Georgia, called the event the perfect vacation even though he doesnt plan to leave the hotel. Im here for the games, he said. Ill eat lobster and see the sights some other time.

Mensa is a social club with members who have IQs in the top 2 percent of the public, as judged by accepted tests. The group has more than 50,000 members in the U.S.

But they arent all nerds geeking out on quantum physics.

Nicole Bissonnette, head of Mensas Maine chapter, said her first Mensa event was a dinner that brought together an accountant, librarian, copywriter, merchant mariner, professional poker player and a store clerk.

It's a diverse mix of people, she said, that makes Mind Games so much fun.

Even for those of us who do not play games at this level," she said, it is a wonderful opportunity to see friends.

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Hundreds gather for round-the-clock board games in South Portland - NewsCenterMaine.com WCSH-WLBZ

Irvine, Calif., April 28, 2022 A quartet of professors at the University of California, Irvine, has been elected as members by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The 242nd class of AAAS inductees includes 261 extraordinary people from around the world,recognized for their accomplishments and leadership in academia, the arts, industry, public policy and research.

This is an outstanding recognition of the accomplishments of these four faculty members, said Hal Stern, UCI provost and executive vice chancellor. The range of disciplines covered demonstrates the high level of scholarship across our campus.

UCIs inductees into the class of 22 are:

Jeffrey Barrett is a Chancellors Professor of logic and philosophy of science. Much of Barretts research has concerned the quantum measurement problem and the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics more generally. His research has also involved using evolutionary game theory to model basic features of empirical and mathematical inquiry.Barrett is a founding member of UCIs LPS department.

Adriana Darielle Meja Briscoe, known for her work on the evolution of vision in butterflies, is a professor of ecology & evolutionary biology whose discoveries have been featured on television and in museums around the globe. Her lab uses butterflies to examine how natural selection affects photoreceptor proteins in the eye and how it may impact evolutionary changes in color vision and wing coloration. Briscoe also uses modeling and field experiments to examine how color vision impacts butterfly behavior in the context of mimicry and species recognition.In 2021, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship. Other honors include a Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science.

Efi Foufoula-Georgiou is a Distinguished Professor of civil & environmental engineering. Her area of research is hydrology and geomorphology, with special interest in scaling theories, multiscale dynamics and space-time modeling of precipitation and landforms. Foufoula-Georgiou has served as director of the National Science Foundations National Center for Earth-surface Dynamicsand is a presidentialappointee to the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board. Her honors include the John Dalton Medal of the European Geophysical Society,fellow of the American Meteorological Society and American Geophysical Union, and elected member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Virginia Trimble is a professor of physics & astronomy whose early research measured the masses of white dwarfs, calculated the details and evolution of stars with unusual chemical compositions and studied the orbits of close binaries. She became a well-known expert on the history of physics, astronomy and scientometrics, which is the study of how science is done, or should be. She has a publication list exceeding 900 items and is the longest-standing active member of UCIs Department of Physics & Astronomy.

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences, founded in 1780, is one of the nations oldest learned societies and independent policy research centers, convening elected members from the academic, business and government sectors to respond to challenges facing the nation and the world.

The 2022 inductees join a distinguished roster of previously elected members, including Benjamin Franklin (elected in 1781), Alexander Hamilton (1791), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1864), Charles Darwin (1874), Albert Einstein (1924), Robert Frost (1931), Margaret Mead (1948), Milton Friedman (1959), Martin Luther King Jr. (1966), Stephen Jay Hawking (1984),Condoleezza Rice (1997), John Legend (2017), James Fallows (2019), Joan Baez (2020) and Sanjay Gupta (2021).

About the University of California, Irvine:Founded in 1965, UCI is the youngest member of the prestigious Association of American Universities and is ranked among the nations top 10 public universities byU.S. News & World Report. The campus has produced five Nobel laureates and is known for its academic achievement, premier research, innovation and anteater mascot. Led by Chancellor Howard Gillman, UCI has more than 36,000 students and offers 224 degree programs. Its located in one of the worlds safest and most economically vibrant communities and is Orange Countys second-largest employer, contributing $7 billion annually to the local economy and $8 billion statewide. For more on UCI, visit http://www.uci.edu.

Media access: Radio programs/stations may, for a fee, use an on-campus ISDN line to interview UCI faculty and experts, subject to availability and university approval. For more UCI news, visit news.uci.edu. Additional resources for journalists may be found at communications.uci.edu/for-journalists.

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Four professors elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences - UCI News

Microwave ovens to computers, refrigerators to mobile phones, air travel to advanced surgery -- can we imagine a world without these? But most of us are unaware of what they owe to classical and modern physics.

Physics helps us understand motion, the impact of forces on objects and energy -- heat, light, sound, electricity, magnetism -- and what these can do for us. It thus underpins all the technology that makes our lives easier. But, treated as just another subject to mug up and pass exams, students learning by rote the laws and processes of nature, teachers racing to complete the syllabus, boring textbooks, overriding objective to clear exams, and a lack of inclination to imbibe knowledge for its own sake have taken the magic out of Physics.

American physicist Jearl Walker, in the preface to his revised 10th edition of David Halliday and Robert Resnick's seminal 'Fundamentals of Physics', wrote: Physics is the most interesting subject in the world because it is about how the world works, and yet the textbooks had been thoroughly wrung of any connection with the real world. The fun was missing."

Perhaps, if there were textbooks like Walker's own 'The Flying Circus of Physics' (2011), which promises to show how physical phenomena, such as high-flying acrobatics and other stunts, and mind-bending illusions, are all a part of everyday life, or Paul Parsons' engagingly-titled 'How to Destroy the Universe: And 34 Other Really Interesting Uses of Physics' (2012), they would better ignite minds.

This indifference to Physics is well described in 'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman: Adventures of a Curious Character' (1985), the anecdotal autobiography of Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, deemed to be one of the top three physicists of the 20th century -- along with Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.

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Physics beyond exams and classrooms - National Herald

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