There are plenty of types of stars out there, but one stands out for being just a little weirder than the others. You might even say it’s strange. According to a paper from researchers at Guangxi University in China, the birth of one might have recently been observed for the very first time.
A strange star is a (so far theoretical) compact star that is so dense it literally breaks down regular parts of atoms (like neutrons) into their constituent quarks. Moreover, even those quarks (the up and down that comprise a neutron) get compressed into an even rarer type of quark called a strange quark—hence the name strange star.
Technically, the “strange” matter that a strange star would be composed of is a combination of up, down, and strange quarks. But, at least in theory, this mix of sub-hadronic particles could even be more stable than a traditional neutron star, which is similar to a strange star but doesn’t have enough gravity to break down the neutrons.
Physicists have long attempted to find a single theory that unites quantum mechanics and general relativity.
This has been very tricky because quantum mechanics focuses on the unpredictable nature of particles at microscopic scales, whereas general relativity explains gravity as the curvature of spacetime caused by massive objects.
The two theories discuss forces existing on different scales. Bianconi employed an interesting approach to deal with this challenge. She proposes an entropic action where, instead of being a fixed background, spacetime works like a quantum operator — acting on quantum states and deciding how they change over time.
The behaviour of quantum fields in curved spacetime is simulated using a two-dimensional trapped quantum gas of potassium atoms with a configurable trap and adjustable interaction strength.
About 100 trillion neutrinos are passing through your body at this very second. The particles are the second most abundant form of matter in the universe (behind light), but they interact very, very rarely. That property makes them ideal objects for studying the fundamentals of quantum mechanics; however, it also complicates measurements.
For example, neutrinos were discovered in the 1950s, but their properties are still obscure. New research, published in Nature by a team including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists, introduces an experimental technique to constrain the size of the neutrino’s wavepacket.
Imagine measuring a neutrino like finding a needle in a haystack. The particles are so elusive that, previously, researchers didn’t even know where on Earth the haystack was located. Now, they’ve identified the haystack, or, scientifically, the size of the neutrino’s “wavepacket.” This measurement doesn’t say exactly where the neutrino is located or how big it is, but it does constrain what those answers could be.
There is a peculiar alchemy woven into the very structure of spacetime, an unseen flux of quantum fluctuations from which the most ephemeral of entities — virtual particle-antiparticle pairs — bubble in and out of existence. The vacuum, so named for its ostensible emptiness, is anything but void. It seethes with quantum activity, a perpetual genesis and annihilation of matter and antimatter that, if properly harnessed, could redefine the very foundations of energy production. Here, we propose a speculative yet theoretically plausible mechanism by which this ceaseless quantum froth might be coerced into yielding usable energy — energy on a scale that would render conventional sources mere curiosities of an earlier epoch.
The quantum vacuum is not merely an absence of matter but rather a dynamical system governed by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, where transient pairs of particles emerge momentarily before annihilating back into the void. This effect, first mathematically formalized in quantum electrodynamics (QED) by Dirac (1930), finds experimental validation in phenomena such as the Casimir effect, where vacuum fluctuations exert measurable forces between conductive plates (Lamoreaux, 1997, p. 57). If such fluctuations can manifest macroscopically, might they not be engineered into a usable power source?
One tantalizing possibility arises from artificially stabilizing these virtual particles long enough to force matter-antimatter interactions within a controlled environment. Conventional particle-antiparticle annihilation is known to release energy per Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence relation (E=mc²), a principle routinely exploited in positron emission tomography (PET) but never yet on an industrial scale. The key challenge lies in capturing these spontaneous virtual entities before they dissolve, a feat requiring an unprecedented interplay of quantum field manipulation and high-energy containment systems.
By miniaturizing cold atom trapping with integrated photonics, researchers are making quantum technologies portable. Their photonic chip system replaces traditional free-space optics, offering a path toward highly precise, deployable quantum sensors and computing tools. Bringing Quantum Experime.
What is faster than the fastest hypersonic missile?, well a beam of light, microwaves or subatomic particles but they are impossibly small and have almost no mass compared to a projectile. However, if you have enough energy you can make a weapon that works at the speed of light and in theory can shoot down anything projectile weapon we have now. So why don’t we have phasers like in Star Trek?, in this video we look at Directed Energy Weapons and what they can do now and in the future.
Written, researched and presented by paul shillito.
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QHT Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2008.09356.pdf. Non-technical Explanation: https://jespergrimstrup.org/research/.… 0:00 — Does reductionism end? 2:24 — Why there probably is a final theory 7:00 — Quantum Holonomy theory 12:53 — Surprising implications of QHT Does a final theory exist that can end our reductionist probing into ever shorter distances? Or is there no end to reductionism? There should be an end point because as the object of our measurement gets small enough, the high energies needed to measure it will create a black hole. And no information can get out of a black hole. So there is a limit to measurable reality. We have united seemingly dissimilar forces in the past. For example, the unification of electricity and magnetism, and weak and electromagnetic forces. To continue this reductionism, we want a theory that unifies all known forces. Today we have two overarching theories for forces: Einstein’s Theory of General relativity for gravity, and The standard model for the electromagnetic, weak and strong force. The problem is that the standard model is a quantum field theory, but general relativity is a classical field theory. The two are not compatible. Past attempts for a theory of everything include string theory and loop quantum gravity. But string theory does not produce any falsifiable results. Its mathematics is too flexible. Loop quantum gravity only addresses gravity and not the other forces. Quantum Holonomy Theory or QHT was pioneered by two Danish scientists, physicist Jesper Grimstrup and mathematician Johannes Aastrup. It begins by asking question, how can a theory be immune to further scientific reductions, so that reductionism ends? The presumptive idea is that the simplest way to describe the universe is objects moving around in three dimensional space. The theory is based on the mathematics of empty 3-dimensional space, just space, not even time. So the starting point of QHT is the mathematics of moving stuff around. There are an infinite many ways you can move an arbitrary object between points in space. Any one of these combination of movements from point A to point B, is called a recipe. A recipe for a combination of movements in physics is called a gauge field. A gauge field is the recipe of how to move one particle from point A to point B. Gauge fields are what makes up the forces in the standard model. Since they are recipes of moving things around in space, they represent how things interact with each other, or how forces work. The sum of all mathematical recipes is called the “Configuration space” of these recipes. The key insight in QHT is that the this space has a geometry and stores a lot of information. Geometry means that two different recipes for moving stuff around can be said have a relationship between each other. This is complicated but can be proven mathematically. Grimstrup and Aastrup found is that this geometry results in mathematics that looks almost identical to the mathematics that we already know from quantum field theory – this includes the mathematics of the Standard model. From the geometry you can obtain a a Bott-Dirac operator. The square of this operator gives us the Hamiltonian for both matter particles and force carrying particles. The Hamiltonian represents the formula for all the energy in a system. #QHT #Theoryofeverything Once you have a description of the energies of all the matter and forces in the universe, that’s all you need to need to understand how matter interacts in the universe, and is essentially everything we would need to describe the universe, once all the math is worked out. By simply considering the movements of objects in empty space, all this rich mathematics that appears to resemble the known mathematics of the universe comes out. If QHT is correct, then here are the implications: 1) The universe is quantum because the only way you can describe things moving in empty space is via quantization. 2) Gravity is not quantized, so there is no theory of quantum gravity. 3) No singularities can exist 4) There is no infinite curvature of space-time inside black holes 5) The universe could not have come from nothing, but from a prior universe — a Big Bounce! Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=17… 0:00 — Does reductionism end? 2:24 — Why there probably is a final theory. 7:00 — Quantum Holonomy theory. 12:53 — Surprising implications of QHT Does a final theory exist that can end our reductionist probing into ever shorter distances? Or is there no end to reductionism? There should be an end point because as the object of our measurement gets small enough, the high energies needed to measure it will create a black hole. And no information can get out of a black hole. So there is a limit to measurable reality.
We have united seemingly dissimilar forces in the past. For example, the unification of electricity and magnetism, and weak and electromagnetic forces. To continue this reductionism, we want a theory that unifies all known forces. Today we have two overarching theories for forces: Einstein’s Theory of General relativity for gravity, and The standard model for the electromagnetic, weak and strong force.
The problem is that the standard model is a quantum field theory, but general relativity is a classical field theory. The two are not compatible. Past attempts for a theory of everything include string theory and loop quantum gravity. But string theory does not produce any falsifiable results. Its mathematics is too flexible. Loop quantum gravity only addresses gravity and not the other forces.
Quantum Holonomy Theory or QHT was pioneered by two Danish scientists, physicist Jesper Grimstrup and mathematician Johannes Aastrup. It begins by asking question, how can a theory be immune to further scientific reductions, so that reductionism ends?
For the first time, scientists have ‘photographed’ a rare plasma instability, where high-energy electron beams form into spaghetti-like filaments.
A new study, published in Physical Review Letters, outlines how a high-intensity infrared laser was used to generate filamentation instability—a phenomenon that affects applications in plasma-based particle accelerators and fusion energy methods.
Plasma is a super-hot mixture of charged particles, such as ions and electrons, which can conduct electricity and are influenced by magnetic fields. Instabilities in plasmas can occur because the flow of particles in one direction or within a specific region can be different from the rest, causing some particles to group up into thin spaghetti-like filaments.
