Category Archives: Quantum Physics

The so-called black-body was one of the first experiments that could not be reconciled with classical physics and led to quantum mechanics. A cavity that absorbed all light falling upon it was also radiant, and this could only be explained by rethinking the nature of light itself.

Musician, artist, and activist Camae Ayewa considers quantum Black bodies as potential, not as a problem. Under her Moor Mother moniker, her 2016 record Fetish Bones reviewed race riots throughout time, merging influences from punk and Sun Ra to bear witness to injustices. In her latest record, Black Encyclopedia of the Air, she invokes the same elements of time travel and witness, but with a lighter touch. She describes the album as:

a sonic mirage of prophetic soul mesmerizing tracks about memory and imprinting and the future, all of them wafting through untouched space like the ghostly cinders of a world on fire, unbound and uncharted, vast and stretching across the universe

and if one listens to the music, perhaps on a cold bench the morning of summers death, the music does waft unbound and uncharted. But this relaxed beat and shrouded mood had to transition into a release party on September 19, 2021 at The Kitchen in New York City. To solve this problem, Moor Mother and Senior Curator Lumi Tan conceived an event that predominantly recruited other artists to build experiential layers that climaxed in Moor Mothers performance a non-narrative program unified by strength and eroticism that transcended sexuality.

AnteloperPhoto by Paula Court

Anteloper, the Brooklyn-based duo of Jaimie Branch and Jason Nazary, kicked off the evening transforming noise into submersive trance. Their opening sequences were body-shaking, hyper-amplified cacophony, but the duo settled into rhythm, synth, and trumpet structures as our audience ears adjusted. For the first few minutes, my mind focused on the discomfort of the extreme volume, but I was surprised to notice my body loved the music, picking up on oblique rhythms and rocking subconsciously to the beat. Over the course of the set, more and more people joined in, relaxing into an embrace of blazing sound that seemed part of a burning world hungry to stay alive.

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,Here is a strange and bitter crop.

First, DJ Marcelline stabbed a pomegranate with an elaborately carved knife. Then, she trampled it underfoot, pressing every drop of juice onto the The Kitchen floor until she lay in a bed of seeds. With projections of a burning house behind her, DJ Marcelline shed her neon blue leotard under a sheer confined structure and emerged as Eve with agency. After writing SIN on a hand mirror with lipstick, she made her choice on a pedestal, knifing open a watermelon and wiping juice and pulp on her skin. With each pomegranate trample, every watermelon dig, grunge house beats underscored Black fertility in this transition of power.

MarcellinePhoto by Paula Court

Finally, Moor Mother took the floor with a spare DJ setup. She prefers to create musical experiences instead of discrete songs, and this performance embodied that approach. Rather than simply recreate Black Encyclopedia of the Air or use it as a choreography score, she ballooned one sample from the albums first track into a dance piece exploring gender and societal expectation.

see how you have made God in your image, in your gender

Moor Mothers presence emanated solidity. She swayed with her music the light R&B, the easy jazz, the pops of Gospel harmony and was undisturbed by dancer Vitche-Boul Ras sudden spatial takeover. Ra began dancing through genders, entering as a she, revealing and highlighting a male body, and then remaining gender-neutral for the rest of the dance. Ra strode across the black stage in direct, calm, full erratic lines. Moor Mothers music simply went from one block of style to another, without hiding the seams of genre and emotion, while Ra flowed across the stage in all the ways she could: athletic, shivering, acrobatic.

Moor Mother and Vitche-Boul RaPhoto by Paula Court

Then, with a turn of jacket, Ra revealed himself anew. The costume altered but remained mostly intact black heels, black skirt, black hairbun and spiraling movement highlighted Ras easy strength matched with Moor Mothers relaxed grooves. He continued to move: mesmerizing, elegant, and beautiful. There was a thick trust between the two independent collaborators, and Moor Mothers abrupt musical transitions became anchors in Ras magnificent choreography as they balanced upside-down on a chair, tumbled, and clawed against the wall.

Quantum mechanics teaches us that, to understand nature at its most fundamental level, we must go beyond dualistic and supposedly antithetical labels. A quantum function can be understood only if we accept that it is not a wave or a particle but something else, a more refined something that includes both natures. This arrogant-tender, shy-confident, party-release connected Moor Mothers playful Black Encyclopedia of the Airproject to her serious Afrofuturism workand proves the Black body as an ultimate solution.

I CARE IF YOU LISTEN is an editorially-independent program of the American Composers Forum, funded with generous donor and institutional support. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author and may not represent the views of ICIYL or ACF.

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Mother Moor Redefines Album Release Parties at The Kitchen - I CARE IF YOU LISTEN

ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs.

In a U.S. government laboratory on Long Island, scientists have forged matter out of pure light using a sophisticated particle accelerator, while also demonstrating an elusive phenomenon for the first time ever on Earth.

The experimental breakthrough validated predictions made by influential physicists nearly a century ago and sheds new light on mysterious processes that occur on both quantum and cosmic scales.

This conversion of photons, which are massless light particles, into electrons, an elementary form of matter, was achieved by a team of researchers working with the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the U.S. Department of Energys Brookhaven National Laboratory. Though the theoretical groundwork of the new research has its origins in the early 20th century, it took special upgrades to an experiment called the Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC (STAR) detector to finally make it a reality.

All the stars lined up for us to get this right, said Zhangbu Xu, a member of the STAR collaboration and the lead author of a recent study about the experiment in Physical Review Letters, in a joint call with fellow STAR members Lijuan Ruan and Daniel Brandenburg.

Ruan, a physicist at Brookhaven and a co-spokesperson for STAR, added that the kinematics of the experiment sit right in the sweet spot for this type of ground-breaking transformation of energy into matter.

Achieving this star-aligned sweet spot is a dream that dates back to 1934, when physicists Gregory Breit and John Wheeler suggested that smashing photons together could produce a matter-antimatter pair composed of electrons, which are negatively charged particles of matter, and positrons, which are antimatter counterparts of electrons that carry a positive charge.

The idea, now known as the Breit-Wheeler process, was inspired in part by the dawn of quantum mechanics during this period, which revealed that photons could interact on quantum levels in ways that are not predicted by classical mechanics. The physicists were also building on Albert Einsteins famous mass-energy equivalence, written as E=mc2, which demonstrates that mass and energy are two sides of the same coin.

That said, it is much trickier to transform energy into matter than it is to convert matter into energy. It would have seemed especially inconceivable back in the 1930s. As a credit to their foresight, Breit and Wheeler speculated that a device that could accelerate ions, which are atoms stripped of electrons, might be able to do the trick, even though no such machine existed at the time.

It shows some of their brilliance because this was in the early 30s, before many of the modern experiments that we have, said Brandenburg, who is a Goldhaber Fellow at Brookhaven. But they already predicted, in the last paragraph of their paper, how you could actually achieve this really difficult process, and they discuss exactly the experiment that we finally have been able to do.

I find it very amazing that they had the insight to predict not only this theory calculation, but that they predicted experimentally how it would come about nearly 100 years before we had the technology to do it, he added.

The experiment that Breit and Wheeler envisioned, and that the STAR collaboration has now successfully conducted, requires shooting heavy ions (in this case gold) past each other at 99.995 percent the speed of light. The strong positive charge and extremely high speeds of the ions create a circular magnetic field and a cloud of photons that travel with the particles through the collider.

As the gold ions skim each other, their halos of light particles interact and produce the matter-antimatter pairs that were predicted so many decades ago. While RHIC was able to demonstrate the Breit-Wheeler process, the STAR detector was the instrument that actually observed, measured, and confirmed the achievement.

Though the milestone is the result of a century of theoretical groundwork, there was also an element of serendipity involved, as STAR researchers only recently realized their setup could experimentally prove this otherworldly conversion of energy into matter.

It's actually only a few years back, in 2018, that we started to see something interesting, but at that time we didn't realize it was the Breit-Wheeler process, said Ruan. We saw something different from what we regularly expected from heavy ion collisions, but it was really when Daniel [Brandenburg] started to do the data analysis with STAR-caliber precision, with all the differential kinematics measurements, that we could say: Oh, this is really the Breit-Wheeler process.

This landmark validation of a long-theorized process is exciting by itself, but the experiment achieved another equally important breakthrough: the first Earth-based demonstration of a phenomenon known as vacuum birefringence, a concept that also dates back nearly a century.

In 1936, physicists Hans Heinrich Euler and Werner Heisenberg (of Heisenberg uncertainty principle fame) predicted that powerful magnetic fields could polarize a vacuum, an effect that would shape the path of light traveling through this empty space in bizarre ways. About 20 years later, physicist John Toll elaborated on this idea by describing vacuum birefringence, which describes how polarization affects the absorption of light by a magnetic field in a vacuum.

Birefringence produces a double image through a crystal. Image: APN MJM

Birefringence can be observed in more familiar materials, like crystals, resulting in light splitting its waveform and producing a double image. This effect can also be observed in extreme environments in space, such as the region surrounding neutron stars, which are collapsed dead stars with extremely strong magnetic fields that can expose the polarization of light.

The STAR collaboration has now captured vacuum birefringence on Earth for the first time, which is a major experimental validation of a bedrock quantum mechanical principle.

The reason that this is so interesting is because a photon has no charge, so it shouldn't, in the classical sense, be affected by a magnetic field, Brandenburg explained. That's why this is a clear proof of these very fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics. A photon can constantly fluctuate into this electron-positron pair that does interact with the magnetic field, and that's exactly what we measured.

The real discovery here is that you can do this in the vacuum of space with a strong magnetic field, and the reason that's so important is that its the first time ever that you can measure the wavefunction of the photon directly, he added.

The dual demonstration of the Breit-Wheeler process and vacuum birefringence is what distinguishes the STAR breakthrough from previous experiments that have converted energy into matter.

During an influential experiment in 1997, the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory used collisions between lasers and electron beams to create electron-positron pairs from photons. However, that process was not captured with the high-level precision achieved by the STAR team, which revealed never-before-seen details of the conversion that stemmed, in part, from the vacuum birefringence effect.

This is the first measurement that can say, from an experimental standpoint, that we actually observeeven though it's only just for a blink of an eyethese ultrastrong electric and magnetic fields, Brandenburg said. That led to the ability for us, for the first time, to experimentally prove that we have these ultra strong-magnetic fieldsthe strongest in the universe. There's nothing else in the universe that produces such strong fields.

A recent experiment at the Large Hadron Collider transformed energy into mass by smashing photons together to produce W bosons, which are short-lived forms of matter that mediate the weak nuclear force: one of the four fundamental forces of nature. However, compared to electrons, W bosons are an extremely exotic form of matter that decays within a tiny fraction of a second. While the achievement represents a unique breakthrough of its own, it is not a demonstration of the Breit-Wheeler process (nor does the LHC claim that it is).

It is two photons colliding to create something which has a mass, but clearly its not what Breit and Wheeler calculated or predicted, said Xu. In their time, there was no concept of the weak interactions, or [quantum chromodynamics]. The laser was not even invented.

In this way, the LHC, SLAC, and Brookhaven experiments serve as complementary proofs that Einsteins famous formula works both ways, even though it is significantly harder to create mass out of energy than the reverse. The additional demonstration of vacuum birefringence from the STAR collaboration has added a new layer of innovation and insight that can shed light on exotic processes that range in scale from the tiny quantum interiors of atoms to enormous cosmic expanses.

For instance, the new measurements can help astrophysicists and cosmologists model the creation of electron-positive pairs from light around the most energetic objects and events in the universe, such as supernovae or the explosive environments near some black holes. The STAR collaboration also plans to follow up on this experiment by attempting to take the first 2D pictures of the nucleus of an atom, exposing unprecedented details about these fundamental structures of matter.

Beyond the scientific implications of the new experiment, the discovery also illustrates how federally funded research can bring people together to unravel some of the biggest mysteries in physics. After all, the STAR collaboration includes more than 700 scientists from 14 nations, each with their own unique path toward their current role as part of the detector team.

Growing up in China during the 1970s and 80s, Xu recalled that physics, math, and chemistry were treated as golden subjects by his peers and teachers, which sparked his early interest in science. But it was ultimately Xus PhD advisor at Yale University, Jack Sandweiss, who motivated him to become a leading researcher in his field.

He was very passionate about science and was an interesting, inspiring character, Xu said of Sandweiss, who died last year at the age of 90. He was part of the original committee to actually approve the RHIC project which was filled with inspiring characters involved in the heavy ion program at Brookhaven.

When I graduated, I joined the RHIC program, he added, so I have a long connection to RHIC even before I started there.

Brandenburg, who was raised on Floridas Space Coast, was also shaped by a childhood immersed in science-centric culture. His father worked on the Apollo Moon missions and Space Shuttle flights, so its no wonder he dreamt of following his footsteps into the frontiers of science while watching rocket launches from his backyard.

My dad is a naturally curious person and he was always talking to me about what they were working on, Brandenburg said. I'm not sure I can give you a direct route to how I got into high-energy nuclear physics, but I was really fascinated by the colliders, the huge amount of data that's produced, and the fact that it takes really advanced computing techniques just to analyze all of it.

Like Xu and Brandenburg, Ruan said she owed her journey to Brookhaven in part to an exceptional role model: in this case, a fourth grade math teacher. Her teachers talent and love for math instilled such an intense curiosity in Ruan that she began devouring high-school-level textbooks while she was still in elementary school.

Ruans career has since evolved alongside the STAR detector; she spent her PhD at the University of Science and Technology of China working on the machine, and was reunited with it at Brookhaven in 2007. Now, she and her colleagues are guiding a new generation of scientists to push the limits of what can be achieved with the detector.

The STAR experiment is now about 20 years old, but it's still a discovery machine, Ruan said. Thats because we have all these outstanding scientists and students who work really tirelessly to make these things happen. That's the value of the STAR collaboration.

Excerpt from:

Government Scientists Are Creating Matter From Pure Light - VICE

Theoretical physicists have spent nearly a century trying to reconcile a unified physical theory of our universe out of quantum mechanics and general relativity.

The problem they face is that both prevailing theories work incredibly well at describing our world, and have both held up under repeated experimentation.

But the two might as well be describing two entirely different realities that never actually intersect.

General relativity can mathematically describe a leaf falling from a tree, the orbits of moons and planets, even the formation of galaxies, but is not much use when trying to predict the motion of an electron.

Quantum mechanics, meanwhile appears to violate nearly everything we know about the universe that matter can only be in one place at any given time, that something can only be in one state at a time, or that observing something is not the same thing as interacting with it but which nonetheless gives us the mathematical tools we need to create lasers, quantum computers, and many other modern technologies.

Recently, though, an interesting proposal about a thorny paradox involving black holes,ER = EPR, has been causing quite a stir among physicists, and it's easy to see why. This simple equation might be the wormhole we've been looking forthat bridges the two seemingly irreconcilable theories.

The equation ER = EPRwas proposed in 2013 by the theoretical physicists Leonard Susskind andJuan Maldacena as a possible solution to one of the most contentious issues in modern physics: the black hole firewall.

The problem began in 1974, when British cosmologist Stephen Hawking proposed that black holes would actually leak particles and radiation, and eventually explode. This combined general relativity with quantum theory, but there was a big problem. Dr. Hawking concluded that the radiation coming from a black hole would be completely random, and would convey no information about what had fallen into it. When the black hole finally exploded, that information would be erased from the universe forever.

For particle physicists, this violated a basic tenet of quantum theory, that information is always preserved. Following a 30-year controversy, Dr. Hawking announced in 2004 that his theory was incorrect. However,Dr. Hawking might have been too hasty. At the time, nobody had figured out how information could get out of a black hole. But a group of researchers based in Santa Barabara may have found an answer.

First put forward in a 2012 paper published in the Journal of High Energy Physics, the black hole firewall theory states that immediately behind every event horizon of a black hole there must exist a veil of energy so intense that it completely incinerates anything that falls into it.

The authors demonstrated thatinformation flowing out of a black hole is incompatible with having an area of Einsteinian space-time, the event horizon, at its boundary. Instead of the event horizon, a black hole would have a region of energetic particles a firewall located just inside.

The reason for this, according to the paper's authors, Ahmed Almheiri, Donald Marolf, Joseph Polchinski, and James Sully known collectively as AMPS is that three key assumptions about black holes can't all be true: that information which falls into a black hole is not lost forever (unitarity); that physics outside the event horizon still functions as normal even if it breaks down beyond the event horizon (quantum field theory); and that an object passing the beyond the event horizon would not experience an immediate change (equivalence).

It is this last assumption that AMPS says gives rise to the firewall. AMPS argues that the entanglement of a pair of virtual particles responsible for Hawking radiationis broken at the event horizon, releasing an incredible amount of energy just behind and all along the entire visible boundary of a black hole.

This violation of a key principle of Einstein's General Relativity, however, would essentially lead to the unraveling of the core model of modern physics. If physicists don't like that idea, AMPS argues, then one of the other two pillars of physics as we know it must fall instead.

This has produced fierce debate ever since, with no satisfactory solution. Raphael Bousso,a string theorist at the University of California, Berkeley, says the problem posed by the firewall theory, "shakes the foundations of what most of us believed about black holes...It essentially pits quantum mechanics against general relativity, without giving us any clues as to which direction to go next."

Susskind andMaldacena, however, proposed a novel solution to this problem: wormholes, and this has far-reaching implications beyond just the firewall paradox.

When Albert Einsteinpublished his theory of general relativity in 1916, he revolutionized our understanding of gravity by describing it as the curvature in the fabric of space and time created by the masses of objects in space.

Curvature in space-time can vary with mass, and in theory, in extreme cases, space-time can even curve so much that it touches some other point in the fabric, linking the two points together even if they are separated by vast distances, represent different points in time, or exist in different universes entirely.

Formally known as an Einstein-Rosen (ER) bridge, named for Einstein and his co-author of the 1935 paper describing the bridge, Nathan Rosen, this theoretical bridge in space time is more popularly called a wormhole.

Among the cases where wormholes are hypothesized to be most likely to form are black holes, and if two black holes form an ER bridge with each other, then the point where one black hole begins and the other one ends would essentially disappear.

An ER bridge isn't restricted to singularities though, and if the entwining of two distinct objects into a connected pair sounds familiar, then you're on your way to understanding ER = EPR.

Quantum entanglement, which Einstein famously derided as "spooky action at a distance", is the quantum phenomenon where two interacting particles becoming inextricably linked, so that knowledge of one of the pair immediately gives you knowledge of the other.

More critically, however, because a particle can be in more than one quantum state at once and will only assume a definite state when it is observed or interacted with in some manner, a particle's collapse from superposition into a defined state forces its entangled partner to collapse into the complementary quantum state instantaneously, regardless of the distance between the two.

For example, if one entangled particle's superposition, also described as its waveform or wave function, collapses into an "up" state when it is observed, its entangled partner simultaneously collapses into a "down" state, even if it is on the other side of the universe and it is not being observed at all. How does the other particle know to do this?

This question is what so rattled Einstein and others. This phenomenon clearly implies the communication of information from one particle to the other in violation of General Relativity, since this information exchange appears to travel faster than the speed of light, which is supposed to be the official speed limit of everything in the universe, information included.

Einstein, along with co-authors Rosen andBoris Podolsky, wrote in a 1935 paper that this violation of Relativity meant, "either (1) the description of reality given by the wave function in quantum mechanics is not complete or (2) these two quantities cannot have simultaneous reality."

Essentially, quantum mechanics as described must be leaving out some key principle that conforms it to general relativity, or the two particles could not instantaneously communicate.

Yet, entangled particles appear to be capable of doing exactly what Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen say they cannot possibly do, giving rise to the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox, a more formal way of describing quantum entanglement.

In fact, quantum entanglement plays a crucial role in quantum computing and, apparently, in explaining how information encoded in the Hawking radiation could get out of a black hole.

With the second half of the equation laid out, we can finally start to reckon with the implications of ER = EPR and how it could be key to unlocking the "Theory of Everything."

When Susskind and Maldacena first approached the black hole paradox in 2012, they weren't the first to see the possible connection between quantum entanglement and the structure of space-time.

Mark Van Raamsdonk, a theoreticalphysicist at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, described an important thought experiment that suggests that an inscrutably complex network of quantum entanglements could actually be the threads that form the fabric of space-time itself.

What Susskind and Maldacena did was take this assumption and make the logical step that wormholes (ER) could be a form of quantum entanglement (EPR), and so entangled particles falling into black holes could still be connected to their partners outside the black hole via quantum-sized wormholes, orER = EPR.

This form ofentanglement would maintain the link between the particles on the interior of a black hole with the older exterior Hawking radiation without having to cross the event horizon and without having to violate the principle that a particle cannot be strongly entangled with two separate partners at once, thus avoiding the creation of the dreaded firewall.

This theoryisn't without its critics though, especially since this kind of entanglement would require a re-evaluation of quantum mechanics itself (as AMPS rightly predicted it would). But what would it mean if Susskind and Maldacena are right and ER = EPR? It could mean everything, at least for the long-elusive unified theory of physics.

What makes ER = EPR more interesting, beyond AMPS' Firewall problem, is what it would mean if we had a describable principle that was the same in both quantum mechanics and relativistic physics.

If quantum entanglement and wormholes are fundamentally linked, then we would have our first real overlap between Relativity and quantum mechanics. Much like the wormholes or entangled particles they describe, these two seemingly disparate fields that have been separated for nearly a century would finally have a thread connecting them.

There is other evidence that this may be the case beyond ER = EPR. There is a lot of excitement around something known as tensor networks, a way of linking entangled particles with other entangled particles, so that A is linked to B and C is linked to D, but also that A and B are collectively linked as a pair to the pair C and D.

These linked pairs could be linked to other linked pairs and start to build complex quantum geometry that implies a strong connection to a curved, hyperbolic geometry of space-time. Our observations of the microwave background radiation strongly suggest a flat, Euclidean plane as a model for our universe, however, at least for the parts that are observable.

In both spherical and hyperbolic geometric models of the universe, though, the universe could still appear flat locally, with the curvature of space-time only becoming apparent once we take the part of space-time beyond the 13.8 billion light-years limit of the observable universe into account.

It's would be similar to the way the Earth looks flat from where you're standing (or sitting) right now, but that's only because you aren't high enough off the ground to perceive its true shape. Get high enough into the air and the spherical shape of the Earth becomes indisputable.

Using ER = EPRto connect quantum mechanics to relativistic physics could, in a way, provide us the theoretical elevation we've been missing to see the true shape of things and finally start to understand how the two theories are actually one and the same.

That's the idea, anyway. Whether that turns out to be the case remains to be seen, and ER = EPR could turn out to be a dud in the end. It wouldn't be the first time, but even those who express warranted skepticism, likeAMPS' own Polchinski, find the idea worth looking into: "I dont know where its going, but its a fun time right now."

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A Simple Equation Indicates Wormholes May Be the Key to Quantum Gravity - Interesting Engineering

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What to expect from the Market of Global Quantum Computing Technologies and know the Market scenario 2030? Stillwater Current - Stillwater Current

We think of the universe as having a timeline, a point at which it began, until now. But how much do modern cosmologists really know about time? Image via Alex Mittelmann/ Wikimedia.What is time?

By Thomas Kitching, UCL

Imagine time running backwards. People would grow younger instead of older and, after a long life of gradual rejuvenation unlearning everything they know they would end as a twinkle in their parents eyes. Thats time as represented in a novel by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick but, surprisingly, times direction is also an issue that cosmologists are grappling with.

While we take for granted that time has a given direction, physicists dont: most natural laws are time reversible which means they would work just as well if time was defined as running backwards. So why does time always move forward? And will it always do so?

Help EarthSky bring you more articles about the cosmos. Please donate what you can to our annual crowd-funding campaign.

Any universal concept of time must ultimately be based on the evolution of the cosmos itself. When you look up at the universe, youre seeing events that happened in the past it takes light time to reach us. In fact, even the simplest observation can help us understand cosmological time: for example, the fact that the night sky is dark. If the universe had an infinite past and was infinite in extent, the night sky would be completely bright filled with the light from an infinite number of stars in a cosmos that had always existed.

For a long time, scientists, including Albert Einstein, thought that the universe was static and infinite. Observations have since shown that it is in fact expanding, and at an accelerating rate. This means that it must have originated from a more compact state that we call the Big Bang, implying that time does have a beginning. In fact, if we look for light that is old enough, we can even see the relic radiation from Big Bang the cosmic microwave background. Realizing this was a first step in determining the age of the universe (see below).

But there is a snag, Einsteins special theory of relativity shows that time is relative: The faster you move relative to me, the slower time will pass for you relative to my perception of time. So in our universe of expanding galaxies, spinning stars and swirling planets, experiences of time vary: Everythings past, present and future is relative.

It turns out that because the universe is on average the same everywhere, and on average looks the same in every direction, there does exist a cosmic time. To measure it, all we have to do is measure the properties of the cosmic microwave background. Cosmologists have used this to determine the age of the universe: its cosmic age. It turns out that the universe is 13.799 billion years old.

So we know time most likely started during the Big Bang. But there is one nagging question that remains: what exactly is time?

To unpack this question, we have to look at the basic properties of space and time. In the dimension of space, you can move forwards and backwards; commuters experience this everyday. But time is different, it has a direction, you always move forward, never in reverse. So why is the dimension of time irreversible? This is one of the major unsolved problems in physics.

To explain why time itself is irreversible, we need to find processes in nature that are also irreversible. One of the few such concepts in physics (and life!) is that things tend to become less tidy as time passes. We describe this using a physical property called entropy that encodes how ordered something is.

Imagine a box of gas in which all the particles were initially placed in one corner (an ordered state). Over time they would naturally seek to fill the entire box (a disordered state) and to put the particles back into an ordered state would require energy. This is irreversible. Its like cracking an egg to make an omelette. Once it spreads out and fills the frying pan, it will never go back to being egg-shaped. Its the same with the universe: as it evolves, the overall entropy increases.

It turns out entropy is a pretty good way to explain times arrow. And while it may seem like the universe is becoming more ordered rather than less going from a wild sea of relatively uniformly spread out hot gas in its early stages to stars, planets, humans and articles about time its nevertheless possible that it is increasing in disorder. Thats because the gravity associated with large masses may be pulling matter into seemingly ordered states with the increase in disorder that we think must have taken place being somehow hidden away in the gravitational fields. So disorder could be increasing even though we dont see it.

But given natures tendency to prefer disorder, why did the universe start off in such an ordered state in the first place? This is still considered a mystery. Some researchers argue that the Big Bang may not even have been the beginning, there may in fact be parallel universes where time runs in different directions.

Time had a beginning, but whether it will have an end depends on the nature of the dark energy that is causing it to expand at an accelerating rate. The rate of this expansion may eventually tear the universe apart, forcing it to end in a Big Rip; alternatively, dark energy may decay, reversing the Big Bang and ending the universe in a Big Crunch; or the universe may simply expand forever.

But would any of these future scenarios end time? Well, according to the strange rules of quantum mechanics, tiny random particles can momentarily pop out of a vacuum, something seen constantly in particle physics experiments. Some have argued that dark energy could cause such quantum fluctuations giving rise to a new Big Bang, ending our time line and starting a new one. While this is extremely speculative and highly unlikely, what we do know is that only when we understand dark energy will we know the fate of the universe.

So what is the most likely outcome? Only time will tell.

Thomas Kitching, Lecturer in Astrophysics, UCL

This article was originally published in The Conversation. Read the original article.

Bottom line: What is time, and why does it move forward? Cosmologist Thomas Kitching of University College London explains how the arrow of time points to the future.

Members of the EarthSky community - including scientists, as well as science and nature writers from across the globe - weigh in on what's important to them.

Read more from the original source:

What is time, and why does it move forward? - EarthSky

Yesterday, we looked at Untitled Earth Sim 64, a science fiction comedy based on the idea that Earth is a messed up simulation created by entities that are in themselves simulations. And maybe their simulators were in turn simulated And so forth. The problem is, wheres the original? Surprisingly, perhaps, there is a physics theory that offers an answer: The universe simulated itself:

A new hypothesis says the universe self-simulates itself in a strange loop. A paper from the Quantum Gravity Research institute proposes there is an underlying panconsciousness. The work looks to unify insight from quantum mechanics with a non-materialistic perspective.

How real are you? What if everything you are, everything you know, all the people in your life as well as all the events were not physically there but just a very elaborate simulation? Philosopher Nick Bostrom famously considered this in his seminal paper Are you living in a computer simulation?, where he proposed that all of our existence may be just a product of very sophisticated computer simulations ran by advanced beings whose real nature we may never be able to know. Now a new theory has come along that takes it a step further what if there are no advanced beings either and everything in reality is a self-simulation that generates itself from pure thought?

The paper, which appeared in Entropy in 2020, is open access.

The most significant element of this new theory is surely that it is explicitly a theory of panconsciousness and non-materialism.

Thus it bears comparison with newer theories of consciousness, which are explicitly panpsychist.

Remarkably, the science world is growing comfortable with non-materialist theories of consciousness. Is that because materialist theories of consciousness are not providing much insight and end in absurdities or for other reasons? It would be hard to say at present.

It will be most interesting to see what sort of reception this self-simulation approach gets. Formulated as a model of quantum gravity, it riffs Nick Bostroms simulation approach, with this explicit difference:

One important aspect that differentiates this view relates to the fact that Bostroms original hypothesis is materialistic, seeing the universe as inherently physical Their hypothesis takes a non-materialistic approach, saying that everything is information expressed as thought. As such, the universe self-actualizes itself into existence, relying on underlying algorithms and a rule they call the principle of efficient language.

This is something like John Wheelers it from bit principle (information precedes matter). But it is somewhat more radical.

Are the researchers saying that the universe is a thinking being? More or less:

Under this proposal, the entire simulation of everything in existence is just one grand thought. How would the simulation itself be originated? It was always there, say the researchers, explaining the concept of timeless emergentism. According to this idea, time isnt there at all. Instead, the all-encompassing thought that is our reality offers a nested semblance of a hierarchical order, full of sub-thoughts that reach all the way down the rabbit hole towards the base mathematics and fundamental particles. This is also where the rule of efficient language comes in, suggesting that humans themselves are such emergent sub-thoughts and they experience and find meaning in the world through other sub-thoughts (called code-steps or actions) in the most economical fashion.

This sounds like traditional theism, with the universe as a self-existent God, right down to the creation of humans (as emergent sub-thoughts).

However off-the-beaten-track this QGR hypothesis may seem, it does solve two problems:

First, it offers an account of consciousness that conforms to what we experience. Materialist accounts generally fail at that. Famously, Darwinian philosopher Daniel Dennett describes consciousness as a user illusion. Its not really there. Which prompts the question, whose illusion is it then? The QGR researchers see human consciousness as a sub-thought of a grand thought. Agree or disagree, that is somewhat closer to what we experience.

Second, the researchers approach that the universe simulates itself into existence gets rid of the problem of infinite regress (what simulated the universe?), in the same way that In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth gets rid of it. Of course, as noted above, anything that simulates itself into existence as one grand thought might as well be God. But it is the researchers right to prefer their own terminology.

It will be most interesting to see whether further papers on the origin of the universe, arguing along substantially the same lines, come to be accepted in science journals. If so, we may be seeing the same thing happen in cosmology as in consciousness studies: It becomes necessary to take the reality of consciousness seriously.

Note: Heres a series of videos at YouTube that offers more details. It features Klee Irwin, founder of Quantum Gravity Research.

You may also wish to read: When a simulated world begins to fall apart. In Untitled Earth Sim 64, Marie has reason to expect trouble when the simulator who explains reality to her cannot get her name right If Marie has found God amid strange events, as her friend thinks, the God she has found is highly disorganized one.

New theory of mind offers more information, less materialism First, lets begin by noting a remarkable fact: Panpsychism seems to have triumphed in the area of theories of consciousness. Are there materialist theories of consciousness out there any more? Yes. But it is unclear how many of them are taken seriously. Except in pop science mags.

and

The final materialist quest: A war on the reality of the mind Going to war with the very concept is an approach even George Orwell did not think up. When George Orwell wrote 1984, he addressed destroying minds, not denying their possibility and changing the language associated with them.

Originally posted here:

Researchers: The Universe Simulated Itself Into Existence - Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence

The Hot Springs Geology Club will resume its program meetings for local members or anyone interested in attending at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts, 200 Whittington Ave.

The program speaker will be a fellow club member, retired Arkansas Geological Survey geologist J. Michael Howard.

Howard's talk, "without using quantum physics," will describe the basics of fluorescence -- what it is, and why it happens.

"Of the known over 5,500 minerals, at least 443 are known to fluoresce," a news release said.

"Also, there are a few minerals, some glasses and some common objects, like clothing, that fluoresce different colors in either short wave and long wave ultraviolet light. We will explain the differences between short wave and long wave UV. There is also a second type of shortwave UV that has significant commercial uses, which will be discussed Thursday.

"The highlight of the presentation will be the examination of a number of different fluorescent minerals and glass samples, in a darkened room. If you have not seen minerals or glass under a UV lamp, then be prepared to be amazed! After all, where do you think the term fluorescent paint came from?" the release said.

Howard will also bring a few books and reference sources for anyone interested in further reading on the topic.

See the original post:

Geology Club to resume meetings on Thursday - Hot Springs Sentinel

Newswise The novel design for a next-generation diamond sensor with capabilities that range from producing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of single molecules to detecting slight anomalies in the Earths magnetic field to guide aircraft that lack access to global positioning systems (GPS) will be developed by a collaboration of scientists led by the U.S. Department of Energys (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL).

Leading the collaboration to develop a new quantum sensor, under a highly competitive three-year, $5.2-million award from the DOE, is David Graves, PPPL associate laboratory director for low temperature plasma surface interactions, who will work closely with co-designers Nathalie de Leon of Princeton University, a renowned expert in quantum hardware, and physicist Alastair Stacey of Australias Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT).

"Technologies of tomorrow"

The award was one of 10 critically reviewed DOE microelectronic grants for national laboratories. Microelectronics are the key to the technologies of tomorrow, said Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm, and with DOEs world-class scientists leading the charge, they can help bring our clean energy future to life and put America a step ahead of our economic competitors.

The award brings PPPL, traditionally a fusion-focused research lab, fully into the often-bizarre world of quantum physics. This is the start of a whole new activity for the laboratory that will make us leaders in the use ofplasma to make diamond to improve sensors, said Steve Cowley, PPPL director. It is also a marvelous example of how the laboratory, under David Gravess leadership, iscollaborating with Princeton University and Professor Nathalie de Leon and physicist Alastair Stacey in Melbourne.

Creation of diamond sensors calls for the synthesis of designer diamond material that begins with a diamond seed that is built up through the gradual deposition of plasma-enhanced vapor. The trick is to replace carbon atoms of the growing material with nitrogen atoms and vacant spaces a combination referred to as NV centers in diamonds. This combination creates the sensor and is commonly called a color center since it glows red when a light shines on it.

Tricky materials design

The tricky materials design requires the exquisitely careful doping, or implantation, of nitrogen atoms together with the creation of vacant spaces in the color center. The doping is done with microwave reactors that produce the plasma-enhanced vapors that enlarge the diamond. These reactors are in some ways similar to the microwave ovens used in homes but are modified to enable them to ignite plasmas. Such reactors are very touchy and peculiar, Graves said. You have to do the process just right to get the doping to work.=

The PPPL venture will follow the pathway suggested by Stacey of Australias RMIT, who explained thatincreasing the number of color centers addressed at a time will make the sensor more sensitive.However, he said, the traditional methodofdoing this byincreasing the densityof the centerscreates defects in the diamond that degrade the color center properties and thus limit the sensor improvement.To avoid that problem, he proposed adding the innovative step of co-doping the diamond with phosphorus plasma to increase the density without electrical interference.

The plasma must be carefully controlled to successfully incorporate both dopants and that requires significant advances in plasma physics and chemistry. Key plasma researchers include PPPL physicists Yevgeny Raitses and Igor Kaganovich, leaders of PPPLs Laboratory for Plasma Nanosynthesis, who will examine plasma used in the synthesis of diamond sensors. Plasma, the fourth state of matter that makes up 99 percent of the visible universe, consists of free electrons and atomic nuclei, or ions.

Room-temperature plasmas

Kaganovich and his team will model the room-temperature plasmas and perform quantum-chemistry calculations of diamond growth, while Raitses will use state-of-the-art diagnostics to measure the chemical species, or substances, in the plasma. The plasma studies will help guide the choice of synthesis conditions. The low-temperature, or cold, plasmas studied compare with the million-degree fusion plasmas that have been the hallmark of PPPL research.

The basic idea is to combine plasma science with modeling the surface chemistry of the plasma and doing experiments to grow the diamond, Graves said. We also want to understand the science behind how you build and operate a plasma reactor to give you this highly specialized and defect-free material for useful quantum sensors.

The plan calls for buying two commercial reactors to co-dope the diamond at PPPL: one for light phosphorous doping and one for heavy phosphorous doping. The combination will enable a range of doping concentrations, Graves said.

The development process will bring all collaborators together. The group headed by Princetons de Leon will lead measurements that include what are called the coherence properties of the diamonds color centers. Such properties refer to the length of time that electrons in the color center spin in quantum superposition, or simultaneously up and down, to activate the sensor.

"Tight collaboration"

Having a tight collaboration between diamond synthesis, plasma modeling, and quantum measurement will enable a new frontier in quantum sensors, de Leon said. These research areas are typically completely separate research communities, and I am excited about what we can achieve together.

Meanwhile, Stacey will lead measurements of the doping characteristics and growth of the diamond crystal, beginning with the seed. The seed is a piece of existing high-purity single= crystal diamond, Stacey said. We often only add a tiny bit of new diamond, just as a new layer on the surface, but this new layer has precisely engineered properties [such as doping agents and increased densities] which the original seed did not have.

Graves notes the significance of the project for PPPL. This is a big step, he said. Its our first competitive [quantum] proposal. Its a pretty big deal for PPPL to get a grant in an area like this that is so different from our traditional research, and I think symbolically its important.

PPPL, on Princeton University's Forrestal Campus in Plainsboro, N.J., is devoted to creating new knowledge about the physics of plasmas ultra-hot, charged gases and to developing practical solutions for the creation of fusion energy. The Laboratory is managed by the University for the U.S. Department of Energys Office of Science, which is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visitenergy.gov/science(link is external).

Read more from the original source:

A gem of a lab will design next-generation diamond sensors, bringing the world of quantum physics into the light - Newswise

Electrons exhibit wave properties as well as particle properties, and can be used to construct images or probe particle sizes just as well as light can. Here, you can see the results of an experiment where electrons are fired one-at-a-time through a double-slit. Once enough electrons are fired, the interference pattern can clearly be seen. (Credit: THIERRY DUGNOLLE / PUBLIC DOMAIN)

At a fundamental level, we often assume that there are two ways of describing nature that each work well in their own regime, but that dont seem to play well together. On the one hand, we know that the matter and energy that makes up the Universe, from stars to atoms to neutrinos to photons, all require a quantum description in order to extract their properties and behavior. The Standard Model, the pinnacle of quantum physics, works perfectly well to describe every interaction weve ever measured in the Universe.

On the other hand, we also have General Relativity: our theory of gravity. However, this is fundamentally a classical theory, where the presence of matter and energy curves the fabric of space, and that curved space in turn tells matter and energy how to move through it. Although each one works quite well over its own range of validity, there are plenty of questions that require a thorough knowledge of both, together to answer. Due not only to their fundamental differences but their fundamental incompatibilities, many questions that we can imagine are currently beyond our ability to answer.

That doesnt necessarily imply that anything is broken with physics, but it certainly seems to indicate that our current understanding of matters is, at the very least, incomplete. In an attempt to uncover just what it is that we know, what we dont, and what the path forward might look like, I sat down in an interview with physicist Lee Smolin, wholl be appearing at the HowTheLightGetsIn festival in London this September 18 and 19. Lee is a pioneer in the field of quantum gravity and someone whose latest book, Einsteins Unfinished Revolution, details the search for what lies beyond whats presently known about the quantum Universe.

Ethan Siegel: What are the motivations behind why you would say quantum field theory and the Standard Model, and General Relativity for gravity, why can that not describe the Universe at a fundamental level?

Lee Smolin: Well it just cant. Its easy to think of experiments that that collection of ideas doesnt give consistent predictions for. More than that, there are reasons, in principle, why the principles that quantum physics is based on contradict the principles that General Relativity is based on, and we need to make these things fit together on a level of principle, because its supposed to be a fundamental theory of nature.

There are both experimental reasons and reasons of principle and between them there are also lots of technical problems that we see when we get to know them are a consequence of these conceptual clashes: clashes of principle.

ES: Can you give one example?

LS: Sure, what does collapse of the wavefunction, which is a part of quantum mechanics, look like in a spacetime which is dynamical, and which evolves according to some equations of motion in General Relativity?

ES: Einsteins original idea of unification was originally to geometrically add in classical electromagnetism to General Relativity, and we know that cant be right because we know the Universe is quantum mechanical in nature. You write about what you call Einsteins unfinished dream. Why is this dream important, even if Einsteins original ideas about it are no longer relevant?

LS: Well, I disagree with you about how relevant Einsteins original ideas were, for better or for worse. There are, in the history of science revolutions, where our understanding of nature changes profoundly and on every possible scale. When you go from being an Aristotelian scientist to a Newtonian scientist, your picture of the world changed drastically, on all scales, and there are many applications of that.

Heres what at stake. Einstein started two revolutions at the start of the 20th century: general relativity and quantum mechanics. He understood that they did not give a consistent picture put together. And in fact, he believed, and I agree with him, that quantum mechanics all by itself doesnt give a consistent picture. To put it directly, it just doesnt make sense: the quantum mechanics as it was formulated in the 1920s, by his friends and colleagues.

LS: So we have two tasks on the agenda. One is to make sense of quantum mechanics. And two is to fix that theory which is better than quantum mechanics, and to make that theory thats better than quantum mechanics also complete General Relativity. So I see it as a question of completion.

General Relativity covers very well, to a certain degree of approximation, certain phenomena. Quantum mechanics covers very well, to a certain degree of approximation, certain phenomena. Theyre both incomplete. Highly incomplete. At the level of experiments, you have to use some imagination, but its not all down at the Planck scale. There are experiments which involve timescales of minutes or seconds where we have no clear prediction. But this double revolution needs to be completed on both sides, and thats whats at stake: its to complete the revolution, because were living in a conceptual situation much analogous to that faced by Kepler and Galileo, who were contemporaries, they were each halfway between Aristotelian and Newtonian physics. They understood certain things very well, but they were deeply confused about other things. And thats our situation now.

ES: From the quantum side, Ive heard many people argue, counter to what youre arguing, that quantum physics works exactly fine for describing every quantum phenomenon in the Universe, so long as you dont also fold in quantum gravitational effects. If I can treat spacetime as being a classical or semi-classical background, then I can do everything that my quantum field theory predicts I should do without any errors or uncertainties. Do you disagree with that?

LS: Am I supposed to be impressed by that?

Aristotle worked with orbits and the positions of the planets that were accurate to a part in a thousand over a millennium. That was impressive, but it was bloody wrong. That simple-minded theory that youre describing why would somebody take such a little, little, low-ambitious thing? Of course you can make it work if you put in enough caveats and enough approximations, thats what were trained to do.

And there are some beautiful things that come out of it, like Steve Hawkings prediction of black hole radiation. So thats fine, but man, thats 1970s physics; do we want to do 1970s physics forever? Im being deliberately a bit provocative, but, you know, weve got to wake these people up!

ES: So I read, back in 2003, you co-wrote a paper [with Fotini Markopoulou] that showed what Ill say is an intriguing link between general ideas in quantum gravity and the fundamental non-locality of quantum physics. Now, maybe I should even ask you a setup question for this: we often state that quantum physics is fundamentally a non-local theory. And when we talk about quantum entanglement, we use that as sort of an illustration of that. But critics of that will say that no information ever travels faster than light from one quantum to another. Does this create any conflict in your mind? Would you say that quantum mechanics is fundamentally non-local?

LS: That quantum mechanics is fundamentally non-local, and therefore, making sense of quantum mechanics requires a strong modification in our understanding of what space is. And that General Relativity requires a strong modification in our ideas of what space is. And therefore, the things should go together. We shouldnt try to ignore that and do this and then ignore this and do that, we should fix them together, in one move. And thats what Ive been trying to do since 19 since I was in college.

That [paper], that was mostly [Markopoulous] idea, and that was a very clever demonstration of the principle that space could be is be emergent, so that time could be fundamental. And thats what she believed and she convinced me, and thats what Ive been working on, really, the last 20 years. Is the idea that time and causation are at the bottom, and are fundamental, and that space is a secondary, emergent quantity, like pressure of the air or temperature of the Earth. And so thats what weve been trying to do, and weve been having some moderate success along the road.

So that what we experience of the world, evolving in time event-by-event, event-by-event, is real, thats how the world really is. And out of that fundamental, active notion of time and causation, we make space as a derivative concept, the same way that out of the motion of atoms, you make a gas.

ES: Interesting. So you are very strongly an advocate that this classical notion of cause-and-effect, persists all the way down to the quantum level. I would assume that this means you are not a fan of quantum mechanics interpretations that do not maintain cause-and-effect as a fundamental tenet of all interactions?

LS: Mmm-hmmm, yes.

ES: I know that you have stated, and I dont know if its for ideological or physical reasons, that reality ought to be independent of us, the observer.

LS: Yes, of course.

ES: You say, yes, of course. And many people throughout the history of quantum mechanics have not thought, yes, of course. Can you explain why reality should be independent of the observer?

LS: Because Im a realist, and for me the goal of science is precisely the description of nature as it would be in our absence. Now, that doesnt mean that there isnt a role for the observer. For example, in the theories Ive been developing for the last five years its called the theory of views what is real in that Universe is a view of that Universe, looking back, causally, into the past. And thats exactly whats real. John Bell, who was very much a realist, used to say, we have to say not what the observables are, but what the viewables are. So Ive been developing this theory where we have events, and then have information or news that comes to them from the past, and thats whats real: those views. And the dynamics of the world doesnt depend on differential equations in space, or fields, it depends on the views, and the differences between those views. And the basic dynamical principle of the theory is that the Universe evolves to make the views as varied and as different from each other as possible.

ES: So you have a principle, then, of something thats either maximized or minimized.

LS: Of course.

ES: Is that something you could describe for us?

LS: Sure. Its called, the variety. It can be applied to many different kinds of systems, so lets take cities. Consider an old city: the center of Rome, which was preserved. Think of calling a friend and saying, Im lost, Im at some corner and heres what I see around me. Now, Rome is a city with a lot of variety, so your friend is gonna be able to say, Oh, youre there, near the [whatever] because every corner looks different. Rome is a city with high variety. On the other hand, there are some very suburban-dominated cities, in which you wouldnt know very much about where you are just from what you see when you look around, because many of the corners are similar to each other. So that can give you an example of what we mean when we say, we want to increase the variety.

ES: So when you say, we want to increase the variety, do you think that nature extremizes variety?

LS: Yes, and I can write that down as an equation within the framework I discussed, where there are these causal relations, and theres energy and momentum, but theres no space. We can construct a dynamical theory that extremizes, over time, the variety of the system. And we derive from that, quantum mechanics, and as a limit of that, classical mechanics.

Why do we get quantum mechanics out? Roughly speaking, there was an original realist interpretation of quantum mechanics called pilot wave theory, that Louis de Broglie invented in 1927, and it was reinvented by David Bohm in about 1952. And in that theory, theres potential energy and theres another new function of the wavefunction, and it sits where the potential energy usually sits. And they derive the Schrodinger equation from maximizing the influence of this function. Well, it turns out that this function that David Bohm invented is a certain limit of the quantity we call the variety, by the way with Julian Barbour, back in the 80s. And this was one of the great surprises of my working life.

ES: When you take this limit of the quantity you call the variety, and youre saying, were extremizing over that, this sounds to me like something that would be pretty analogous to some type of entropy, some type of thermodynamic quantity. So far, everyone I know whos tried to come up with a concept of gravity is emergent or space is emergent or some other quantity that we normally look at as fundamental is in fact emergent, takes something that in typical physics thought we view as emergent and makes that fundamental. I would say the typical view of physics is that entropy is an emergent property that you can calculate based on, say, the microscopic quantum state of all the particles aggregated together. Are you basically doing something similar to that, except with this thing you define as variety instead of entropy?

LS: Roughly speaking yes, but thats a long discussion. Because the role of entropy in cosmological theory is something we have to get our heads straight about. Theres a series of three very beautiful papers that Marina Corts, Andrew Liddle and Stu Kauffman have that weve been working on for a few years, and they contain some important new insights about very far-from-equilibrium systems and their relation to cosmology.

ES: Id like to ask about this idea that Heisenberg and a lot of other people had, which is that unless you have what we call an interaction in some sense one quantum interacting with another quantum thats the only thing that provides meaningful information about the Universe. If you dont make a measurement, then you dont have a quantifiable property of the Universe. So all of the information that we have has to come out of that act, which I look at, maybe naively, as fundamentally antagonistic to this idea of an objective reality. The fact that we cant make any measurements that discern between this Heisenberg-esque picture of reality and a objective reality exists picture of reality you have a certainty about your perspective that I dont share and that many physicists dont share. How do you make sense of this if you cant tell experimentally between these different interpretations?

LS: No, thats a fake. I dont know that, but its a good working fake. Let me tell you about how I look at quantum mechanics these days, because its new and its been very exciting to me. Our realization, actually following down some quotes of Heisenberg which were very mysterious at first, you know that Heisenberg said that the wavefunction description does not apply to the past. Somehow, the wavefunction was about the future, and the classical description is about the past. And a few people said this. Freeman Dyson said this at length; Schrodinger said something like that, and even deeper and more mysterious.

What we realized they were trying to say is that in the Copenhagen version of quantum mechanics, there is a quantum world and there is a classical world, and a boundary between them: when things become definite. When things that are indefinite in the quantum world become definite. And what theyre trying to say is that is the fundamental thing that happens in nature, when things that are indefinite become definite. And thats what now is. The moment now, the present moment, that all these people say is missing from science and missing from physics, that is the transition from indefinite to definite. And quantum mechanics, the wavefunction, is a description of the future which is indefinite and incomplete. And classical physics is how we describe the past.

Why? Because the past happened, what happened was definite, and it doesnt change, because its the past. So we have this different way of thinking about quantum mechanics, and it seems to be helpful, were having a good time.

ES: Its very hard to disagree with that. So when you look at, lets say, Wheelers delayed choice experiment. And Im thinking in particular of one where you send in a photon and you have a beam splitter, and the photon can take two paths around mirrors, and theyll meet up on the other side. And either youll have another beam splitter that will combine them and youll get your detector that will see an interference pattern of the recombined photons, or you wont put the splitter in there, and youll just get one of the photons that comes into your detector.

So, you can do this, and Wheelers idea is that you can send the photon through that first splitter, to have it go those two different ways. And then you can either put the second splitter there or not. And at the last second, you can either remove the splitter that was there (or not) or you can insert the splitter that wasnt there to try and, he called it, catch the photon deciding on what it was going to do before you made that measurement.

In hindsight, to no ones surprise, what did you measure at the detector? Well, if the splitter was there, you get the interference pattern back. And if the splitter wasnt there, youd just get the one photon back. Basically, nature doesnt know in advance what youre going to do. But once you do it, its like it knew all along what you were going to do. That, to me, and youre going to tell me thats not the only interpretation, has always meant the act of interacting, itself, is what gives you that meaningful information. If you didnt have any interactions taking place, you have not determined your reality yet. Your reality remains indeterminate until you make a measurement that would discern between the different possibilities.

LS: Yeah, but you see, I agree with that. Only, my line is now, is the boundary between the future and the past.

ES: Are you saying that right now, the in progress things, that have not yet been decided, that will be decided with an interaction at some point in the future, are you saying that everything in the past has already been determined, even those things where that measurement that will draw that line has not yet occurred?

LS: So that event has not yet occurred, so thats rather compatible. The notion of the now that gives rise to is not a thin instant, where it has to happen here; its what the philosophers call a thick now. So there can be events that turn something definite, that are late, or that are early, so our now can zigzag quite a bit. At least, thats the way we try to understand those cases. Theyre not in the original two papers, but were going through all these thought experiments in detail and show how to think about whats going on.

ES: This is stuff thats right on the cutting edge of trying to understand what the fundamental nature of reality is. Youve written very much, Id say, non-positively about many of the ideas in string theory, and how theyve become this dominant theoretical paradigm. One of the things Ive noticed about your work is that it seems to be relatively agnostic about other extensions to what might be out there: string theory, supersymmetry, grand unification, etc., you seem pretty agnostic about this all, which is maybe in contrast to what peoples public perception of you is.

LS: If people want to express an opinion about [my 2006 book, The Trouble With Physics], I would ask them the favor that they should read it. There was a lot of angst and conflict in that period, and I think people would be surprised here, but let me just tell you what I think. What I believe is that there are a number of interesting different approaches to quantum gravity, which so far are all incomplete. They all manage to explain something to us about what a quantum description of spacetime may be, but each of them also get stuck somewhere on some characteristic.

String theory is a beautiful set of ideas, which in my view has gotten stuck. And loop quantum gravity, which Im fortunate enough to have had the experience of working on while it was being invented, but its also clearly gotten stuck. Both of them express the same idea: that theres a duality between fields carrying forces, like the electromagnetic field, and quantum excitations of those fields can look like extended objects, like strings or loops, propagating. Both loop quantum gravity and string theory express in different contexts that fundamental conjecture.

What I tried to express in that book, and its always the authors fault when youre misunderstood, that book started as a case study of the role of conflict in science. Being a student of Paul Feyerabend, I think that conflict and disagreement are vital to the progress of science. And that book was meant to be an argument for that, using the case study that I knew best. As the book got shaped by me and by the editors, we flipped the book so that the case study came first and the analysis in terms of how the conflict plays a driving role in science came second, and most people only read the first half.

What I was against, and what I am against wherever I see it, is premature dogmatism: premature believing in something more than what the evidence supports. And this, unfortunately, is very common in science, because we all want to believe that weve done something good and discovered something. There was an atmosphere at the time, which I think is very dissipated now, of over-optimism in my view. I try to give a balanced view of what the strengths of string theory were and what the weaknesses were, and unfortunately some people reacted to that. But that was a long time ago.

ES: Can I ask you what you think of certain effective approaches to quantum gravity? Like asymptotically safe gravity, do you think that offers any promise? Ive always had an appreciation for that one because it seems to allow for predictions to be made in an otherwise inaccessible regime.

LS: Asymptotic safety has some very attractive points. Its basically an application by Steve Weinberg about some ideas about perturbatively non-renormalizable theories that Ken Wilson had, and he applied their ideas to gravity. Its a very attractive story, but theres a problem; as I said theres always a problem. The problem in asymptotic safety is unitarity. We know of an asymptotically safe theory which is present even in perturbation theory. Can we speak a little math here?

ES: Go ahead, Ill translate.

LS: The action principle to the theory is the Einstein action principle, plus the cosmological constant term, plus a term in the Ricci scalar squared plus a term in the Ricci tensor squared. And this last one invariably introduces instabilities and an impossibility to satisfy the principle of unitarity, which among other things means you cant guarantee that the probabilities for all the things that will happen will add up to one. And this has been a known problem since 1978 or 1982 or something, and I wrote the third paper in response to Steves paper that showed the violation of unitarity. So thats where it stands in my mind, but its always good to follow the kids, and theres a bunch of smart, young people working on this. Its not my bet, but its their bet, and theyre really good.

We dont have any senior faculty working on asymptotic safety at Perimeter, but we were so impressed by some of the young people who applied to us that, despite our own misgivings, we hired them for a few years. Because its interesting and exciting to have them around, and if you want your field to prosper, youve got to be able to listen to and promote young people who disagree with you, otherwise its not science.

ES: When Ive felt optimistic about it, Ive looked towards asymptotically safe gravity in the same way I now look back at the time-dependent Schrodinger equation. I say, okay, look, this has cases where it doesnt apply, and cases where it breaks down, because its not a relativistically invariant theory. But if you can find a formulation of it, like the Dirac equation, that is relativistically invariant, or if you could find a more general formulation, like quantum field theory that eliminates the need for that sort of thing. Maybe this idea can be salvaged, despite the fact that the way its formulated now, it doesnt guarantee unitarity.

LS: But if you turn it up so that it is giving you unitary answers to second or third order in perturbation theory, then the condition that there should be a non-trivial fixed point constrains the top quark mass by a measurable amount. They actually get a prediction that if this all works out, then heres the top quark mass.

ES: I remember reading a paper by Wetterich and Shaposhnikov years before they had measured the mass of the Higgs boson where they used the mass of all the particles except the Higgs to say, well, instead of getting the mass of the top were going to get the mass of the Higgs, and the value they got was ~126 1. But if I remember right, since then, the mass of the top has changed a little bit, and now if you put that same math back in, youd get something like 129 or 130, which doesnt agree with what theyve seen at the LHC.

LS: I didnt know that; thats interesting. Thats great. What else excites you?

ES: One thing Id like to press you on a little bit is this: if you have a dynamical spacetime, versus a static spacetime, how can you describe wavefunction collapse in a changing spacetime? If you have a wavefunction in a changing spacetime, what does wavefunction collapse look like, if your spacetime isnt static?

LS: Roger Penroses view of that is that the collapse of the wavefunction is a physical thing that happens when a certain measure of energy involved in that possible event is equal to the planck energy per planck time, or something like that. I dont remember the exact way he did it. So then, youre in a domain where neither the Einstein equation or the Schrodinger equation is quite right.

What Im really, really excited about is that there are some experiments under development where they actually test that. Theres a whole new generation of tabletop gravity or quantum gravity experiments that different people are working on.

ES: I like the tabletop experiments that are happening. One thing that I definitely wanted to ask you about is, youve talked, Ill say derisively about people who treat conclusions as if theyre foregone conclusions without having evidence to back that up. You want to remain open-minded to anything that may be possible before that critical evidence comes in. Do you worry that taking the stance of saying, I am a realist when it comes to quantum physics is violating that piece of advice. Do you worry about saying, Im a realist and I believe that reality is observer-independent is making that mistake?

LS: You know, I dont know whats wrong with me, but I love this stuff to death. I am having so much fun and theres nothing like it to be able to think about this stuff. Some people have this wire in them that says they have to be right, and I dont have that. I dont know why, maybe its a defect? So, sure, if you ask me, yeah, I could be wrong about that. I could be wrong about a lot of things.

Lets put us 1000 years in the future, well all look like fools for having missed the obvious things in neuroscience or planetary science or something that turned out to be important. There was a famous boxer who was asked how he felt about his career, and he said, you know, I did the best I could with what I was given. And Im happy with that. I dont gotta be right, but if I didnt follow what I believe in, I wouldnt be as happy a person now.

ES: I want to pull out a Niels Bohr quote and ask you your opinion of this, then. When we measure something, we are forcing an undetermined, undefined world to assume an experimental value. We are not measuring the world; we are creating it. This strikes me as a statement that I would expect you to fundamentally disagree with, but you might surprise me.

LS: No, it doesnt appeal to me, but wow, Im really sorry I never got to meet Bohr. He was an interesting guy; cant we just be on that level? In the end, Bohr was at a very weird place from our point of view in the development of western culture and society. He was influenced by Schopenhauer and people like that, and so he had what we would consider not just a non-realist viewpoint, but a radical non-realist viewpoint, and he did the best he could with that. But I dont believe that, that doesnt keep me up at night, but sure.

ES: Do you have any thoughts youd like to share that I havent asked you about that you think are too important to not share?

LS: Open up the scientific community to more people who are highly trained and really good. And maybe Im just getting this in because I like these ideas. For me, when people talk about diversity, that means not just women and blacks and aboriginals and who else, those are all very very important, but also very important are people who think differently. Now, to make a success in physics, you cant just be anyone off the streets, its like I couldnt compose a piece of music and send it to the New York Philharmonic and have them play it.

Youve gotta have your tools, youve got to be practiced, you gotta be good with your tools, youve gotta make a convincing case for the results that youve found in your work. Thats what a Ph.D. symbolizes But among the people who are excellent, technically, we want as wide a variety of ideas and viewpoints and types and personalities and gender and race its yes yes yes yes. I would hope that the next generation and the second-to-next generation live in a scientific world that is much more fun. Because if everyones like you, its not fun.

Lee Smolin will be appearing at the HowTheLightGetsIn London 2021 festival this September 18/19, with remaining tickets still available here.

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Are we approaching quantum gravity all wrong? - Big Think

image:Co-doping diamond collaborators from left: Princeton Prof. Nathalie de Leon; David Graves, PPPL associate laboratory director for low temperature plasma surface interactions; Alastair Stacey of Australias Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, with ultraviolet image showing emission from diamond color centers behind them. view more

Credit: From left: Sameer Khan/Fotobuddy; Elle Starkman/Office of Communications; photo courtesy of Alastair Stacey. Ultraviolet image courtesy of Science magazine; collage by Kiran Sudarsanan for Office of Communications.

The novel design for a next-generation diamond sensor with capabilities that range from producing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of single molecules to detecting slight anomalies in the Earths magnetic field to guide aircraft that lack access to global positioning systems (GPS) will be developed by a collaboration of scientists led by the U.S. Department of Energys (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL).

Leading the collaboration to develop a new quantum sensor, under a highly competitive three-year, $5.2-million award from the DOE, is David Graves, PPPL associate laboratory director for low temperature plasma surface interactions, who will work closely with co-designers Nathalie de Leon of Princeton University, a renowned expert in quantum hardware, and physicist Alastair Stacey of Australias Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT).

"Technologies of tomorrow"

The award was one of 10 critically reviewed DOE microelectronic grants for national laboratories. Microelectronics are the key to the technologies of tomorrow, said Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm, and with DOEs world-class scientists leading the charge, they can help bring our clean energy future to life and put America a step ahead of our economic competitors.

The award brings PPPL, traditionally a fusion-focused research lab, fully into the often-bizarre world of quantum physics. This is the start of a whole new activity for the laboratory that will make us leaders in the use ofplasma to make diamond to improve sensors, said Steve Cowley, PPPL director. It is also a marvelous example of how the laboratory, under David Gravess leadership, iscollaborating with Princeton University and Professor Nathalie de Leon and physicist Alastair Stacey in Melbourne.

Creation of diamond sensors calls for the synthesis of designer diamond material that begins with a diamond seed that is built up through the gradual deposition of plasma-enhanced vapor. The trick is to replace carbon atoms of the growing material with nitrogen atoms and vacant spaces a combination referred to as NV centers in diamonds. This combination creates the sensor and is commonly called a color center since it glows red when a light shines on it.

Tricky materials design

The tricky materials design requires the exquisitely careful doping, or implantation, of nitrogen atoms together with the creation of vacant spaces in the color center. The doping is done with microwave reactors that produce the plasma-enhanced vapors that enlarge the diamond. These reactors are in some ways similar to the microwave ovens used in homes but are modified to enable them to ignite plasmas. Such reactors are very touchy and peculiar, Graves said. You have to do the process just right to get the doping to work.=

The PPPL venture will follow the pathway suggested by Stacey of Australias RMIT, who explained thatincreasing the number of color centers addressed at a time will make the sensor more sensitive.However, he said, the traditional methodofdoing this byincreasing the densityof the centerscreates defects in the diamond that degrade the color center properties and thus limit the sensor improvement.To avoid that problem, he proposed adding the innovative step of co-doping the diamond with phosphorus plasma to increase the density without electrical interference.

The plasma must be carefully controlled to successfully incorporate both dopants and that requires significant advances in plasma physics and chemistry. Key plasma researchers include PPPL physicists Yevgeny Raitses and Igor Kaganovich, leaders of PPPLs Laboratory for Plasma Nanosynthesis, who will examine plasma used in the synthesis of diamond sensors. Plasma, the fourth state of matter that makes up 99 percent of the visible universe, consists of free electrons and atomic nuclei, or ions.

Room-temperature plasmas

Kaganovich and his team will model the room-temperature plasmas and perform quantum-chemistry calculations of diamond growth, while Raitses will use state-of-the-art diagnostics to measure the chemical species, or substances, in the plasma. The plasma studies will help guide the choice of synthesis conditions. The low-temperature, or cold, plasmas studied compare with the million-degree fusion plasmas that have been the hallmark of PPPL research.

The basic idea is to combine plasma science with modeling the surface chemistry of the plasma and doing experiments to grow the diamond, Graves said. We also want to understand the science behind how you build and operate a plasma reactor to give you this highly specialized and defect-free material for useful quantum sensors.

The plan calls for buying two commercial reactors to co-dope the diamond at PPPL: one for light phosphorous doping and one for heavy phosphorous doping. The combination will enable a range of doping concentrations, Graves said.

The development process will bring all collaborators together. The group headed by Princetons de Leon will lead measurements that include what are called the coherence properties of the diamonds color centers. Such properties refer to the length of time that electrons in the color center spin in quantum superposition, or simultaneously up and down, to activate the sensor.

"Tight collaboration"

Having a tight collaboration between diamond synthesis, plasma modeling, and quantum measurement will enable a new frontier in quantum sensors, de Leon said. These research areas are typically completely separate research communities, and I am excited about what we can achieve together.

Meanwhile, Stacey will lead measurements of the doping characteristics and growth of the diamond crystal, beginning with the seed. The seed is a piece of existing high-purity single= crystal diamond, Stacey said. We often only add a tiny bit of new diamond, just as a new layer on the surface, but this new layer has precisely engineered properties [such as doping agents and increased densities] which the original seed did not have.

Graves notes the significance of the project for PPPL. This is a big step, he said. Its our first competitive [quantum] proposal. Its a pretty big deal for PPPL to get a grant in an area like this that is so different from our traditional research, and I think symbolically its important.

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PPPL, on Princeton University's Forrestal Campus in Plainsboro, N.J., is devoted to creating new knowledge about the physics of plasmas ultra-hot, charged gases and to developing practical solutions for the creation of fusion energy. The Laboratory is managed by the University for the U.S. Department of Energys Office of Science, which is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visitenergy.gov/science(link is external).

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.

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A gem of a lab will bring the world of quantum physics into the light - EurekAlert