Lifeboat Foundation

The universe is kind of an impossible object. It has an inside but no outside; it’s a one-sided coin. This Möbius architecture presents a unique challenge for cosmologists, who find themselves in the awkward position of being stuck inside the very system they’re trying to comprehend.

It’s a situation that Lee Smolin has been thinking about for most of his career. A physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, Smolin works at the knotty intersection of quantum mechanics, relativity and cosmology. Don’t let his soft voice and quiet demeanor fool you — he’s known as a rebellious thinker and has always followed his own path. In the 1960s Smolin dropped out of high school, played in a rock band called Ideoplastos, and published an underground newspaper. Wanting to build geodesic domes like R. Buckminster Fuller, Smolin taught himself advanced mathematics — the same kind of math, it turned out, that you need to play with Einstein’s equations of general relativity. The moment he realized this was the moment he became a physicist. He studied at Harvard University and took a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, eventually becoming a founding faculty member at the Perimeter Institute.

Continue reading “We’re Stuck Inside the Universe. Lee Smolin Has an Idea for How to Study It Anyway” »

The quantum computer Sycamore reportedly performed a calculation that even the most powerful supercomputers available can’t reproduce.

New book by Caltech astrophysicist Sean Carroll explores the ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics and its bizarre implications.

Quantum computers use the fundamentals of quantum mechanics to potentially speed up the process of solving complex computations. Suppose you need to perform the task of searching for a specific number in a phone book. A classical computer will search each line of the phone book until it finds a match. A quantum computer could search the entire phone book at the same time by assessing each line simultaneously and return a result much faster.

The biggest problem caused by panpsychism is known as the “combination problem”: Precisely how do small particles of consciousness collectively form more complex consciousness? Consciousness may exist in all particles, but that doesn’t answer the question of how these tiny fragments of physical consciousness come together to create the more complex experience of human consciousness.

Any theory that attempts to answer that question, would effectively determine which complex systems—from inanimate objects to plants to ants—count as conscious.

An alternative panpsychist perspective holds that, rather than individual particles holding consciousness and coming together, the universe as a whole is conscious. This, says Goff, isn’t the same as believing the universe is a unified divine being; it’s more like seeing it as a “cosmic mess.” Nevertheless, it does reflect a perspective that the world is a top-down creation, where every individual thing is derived from the universe, rather than a bottom-up version where objects are built from the smallest particles. Goff believes quantum entanglement—the finding that certain particles behave as a single unified system even when they’re separated by such immense distances there can’t be a causal signal between them—suggests the universe functions as a fundamental whole rather than a collection of discrete parts.

This does work it essentially is a very powerful microwave oven but it uses the exotic transfer of energy to propel an object. Plasma-based fusion reactors could power it indefinitely as well essentially it just be able to float out of the atmosphere. When it comes to more euclidean geometry or even like curl-free quantum mechanics for essentially space warping I think you could make warp drive with less energy just essentially slip through the ocean of space that is how black holes do it but they do it with gravity wells. I think if a genetic material could do similar things that are how essentially extraterrestrials do it as well it is more just a simple understanding of physics essentially. If the fabled q continuum exists it be essentially the realm of aliens because essentially it allows for travel through the universe without a ship. In fictional stories nightcrawler, a teleporting being was rumored. I think teleportation does exist as it is a qutrit but it is hard understanding travel instantaneously although I think some agencies rumor about it. If we can essentially teleport a photon we can teleport a human being even without a ship it would just require exotic physics and advanced biology. Essentially a portal gun from the Higgs boson could essentially make a physical transfer from one part to another part but it is hard to keep such things stable also there is a problem possibly of radiation you would probably need a suit to travel through a portal. Essentially it could work it just essentially be a wormhole from one point to another point but making that on the skin is essentially too hard unless you understand the properties of wormhole travel better by spaceship it would be easier. Essentially if you knew the physical space-time point by scanning an area you could essentially make a wormhole to that point and travel there. But doing that with genetics is harder as you need exotic properties or a better understanding of essentially of slipping through one place and coming out another.

Scientists have debated for decades whether the propulsion concept known as EmDrive is real or wishful thinking. A sensitive new tool may at last provide an answer.

More accurate clocks and sensors may result from a recently proposed experiment, linking an Einstein-devised paradox to quantum mechanics. University of Queensland physicist Dr Magdalena Zych said the international collaboration aimed to test Einstein’s twin paradox using quantum particles in a ‘superposition’ state.

Quantum mechanics is one of the most successful theories of natural science, and although its predictions are often counterintuitive, not a single experiment has been conducted to date of which the theory has not been able to give an adequate description.

Along with colleagues at bigQ (Center for Macroscopic Quantum States—a Danish National Research Foundation Center of Excellence), center leader Prof. Ulrik Lund Andersen is working on understanding and utilizing macroscopic quantum effects.

“The prevailing view among researchers is that quantum mechanics is a universally valid theory and therefore also applicable in the macroscopic day-to-day world we normally live in. This also means that it should be possible to observe quantum phenomena on a large scale, and this is precisely what we strive to do in the Danish National Research Foundation Center of Excellence bigQ,” says Lund Andersen.

The universe is getting messy. Like a glass shattering to pieces or a single wave crashing onto the shore, the universe’s messiness can only move in one direction – toward more chaos and disorder. But scientists think that, at least for a single electron or the simplest quantum computer, they may be able to turn back time, and restore order to chaos. This doesn’t mean we’ll be visiting with dinosaurs or Napoleon any time soon, but for physicists, the idea that time can run backward at all is still a pretty big deal.

Normally, the universe’s trend toward disorder is a fundamental law: the second law of thermodynamics. It says more formally that any system can only move from more to less ordered, and that the chaos or disorder of a system – its entropy – can never decrease. But an international team of scientists led by researchers at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology think they may have discovered a loophole.