Lifeboat Foundation

The so-called “Father of the Atomic Bomb” J. Robert Oppenheimer was once described as “a genius of the nuclear age and also the walking, talking conscience of science and civilization”. Born at the outset of the 20th century, his early interests in chemistry and physics would in the 1920s bring him to Göttingen University, where he worked alongside his doctoral supervisor Max Born (1882−1970), close lifelong friend Paul Dirac (1902−84) and eventual adversary Werner Heisenberg (1901−76). This despite the fact that even as early as in his youth, Oppenheimer was singled out as both gifted and odd, at times even unstable. As a child he collected rocks, wrote poetry and studied French literature. Never weighing more than 130 pounds, throughout his life he was a “tall and thin chainsmoker” who once stated that he “needed physics more than friends” who at Cambridge University was nearly charged with attempted murder after leaving a poisoned apple on the desk of one of his tutors. Notoriously abrupt and impatient, at Göttingen his classmates once gave their professor Born an ultimatum: “either the ‘child prodigy’ is reigned in, or his fellow students will boycott the class”. Following the successful defense of his doctoral dissertation, the professor administering the examination, Nobel Laureate James Franck (1882−1964) reportedly left the room stating.

“I’m glad that’s over. He was at the point of questioning me”

From his time as student at Harvard, to becoming a postgraduate researcher in Cambridge and Göttingen, a professor at UC Berkeley, the scientific head of the Manhattan project and after the war, the Director of the Institute for Advanced Study, wherever Oppenheimer went he could hold his own with the greatest minds of his age. Max Born, Paul Dirac, John von Neumann, Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, Richard Feynman, they all admired “Oppie”. When he died in 1967, his published articles in physics totaled 73, ranging from topics in quantum field theory, particle physics, the theory of cosmic radiations to nuclear physics and cosmology. His funeral was attended by over 600 people, and included numerous associates from academia and research as well as government officials, heads of military, even the director of the New York City Ballet.

In quantum physics, particles exist in many states at once until you measure them. Can reality really work that way?

Electronic measurements can determine entropy in quantum dots and single molecules — a measurement that has been historically difficult to perform.

As science fiction would have you believe, you can’t really go to “another dimension.” Dimensions are more about how we see the world. But some things point to not just one, but two dimensions of time, according to one expert. If it were true, the theory could fix the biggest problem in physics, which is that quantum mechanics and general relativity don’t agree with each other.

Itzhak Bars from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles says that’s the case. Up, down, left, right, forward, back, and space-time are the normal three dimensions. In Bars’s theory, time is not a straight line. Instead, it is a curved 2D plane that is woven into all of these dimensions and more.

Dr. Bars has been working on “two-time physics” for more than ten years. All of this started when he started to wonder what time has to do with gravity and other forces. Even though the idea of more dimensions sounds strange, more and more physicists are thinking about it because it could help create the “theory of everything” or “unified theory of physics” that everyone wants. This would put all of the basic forces of the universe into a single, simple math equation.

The race is on to develop a quantum computer that can outpace a conventional supercomputer, and researchers from around the world are full-steam ahead. If scaled to adequate sizes, quantum computers represent the largest leap forward in computing for decades, carrying the potential to leave our current machines in the dust, but significant hurdles still remain.

Now, a team of researchers from China have created a superconducting quantum processor with 66 functional qubits which, when faced with a complex sampling task, was able to blast past even the most powerful supercomputers and complete it in just a fraction of the time. What makes the research so impressive is how it demonstrates a huge leap towards quantum primacy, a milestone in which quantum computers complete a task that is infeasible for a conventional computer to complete.

Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here.

Over the last half-decade, quantum computing has attracted tremendous media attention. Why?

After all, we have computers already, which have been around since the 1940s. Is the interest because of the use cases? Better AI? Faster and more accurate pricing for financial services firms and hedge funds? Better medicines once quantum computers get a thousand times bigger?

Studies of how a nitrogen-vacancy center’s spin interacts with a surrounding 2D layer of spins could lead to new platforms for quantum metrology and simulation.

Diamond defects, nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in particular, serve as a rich playground for studies of spin physics. Over the past two decades, techniques for manipulating and reading out the quantum states of NVs with optical and microwave radiation have been fine-tuned for applications of these defects as magnetometers and qubits. An important research direction involves understanding and controlling how interactions with the environment can affect the NV’s quantum properties. Now two independent teams, led by Nathalie de Leon at Princeton University [1] and by Norman Yao at the University of California, Berkeley [2], respectively, have addressed this question for a configuration relevant to multiple applications: an NV center interacting with a 2D ensemble of spins formed by unpaired surface electrons or by impurities engineered within the diamond.

Quantum Hylomorphism

What is most original in Koons’s book is his argument that quantum mechanics is best interpreted as vindicating the Aristotelian hylomorphist’s view of nature. To be sure, there have been others who have made such claims, not the least of them being Werner Heisenberg, one of the fathers of modern quantum physics. But Koons is the first prominent philosopher to make the case at book-length, in a way that combines expertise in the relevant philosophical ideas and literature with serious and detailed engagement with the scientific concepts. Future work on hylomorphism and the philosophy of quantum mechanics will have to take account of his arguments.

As Koons notes, there are several aspects of quantum mechanics that lend themselves to an Aristotelian interpretation. For example, there is Heisenberg’s famous principle that the position and momentum of a particle are indeterminate apart from interaction with a system at the middle-range level of everyday objects (such as an observer). There is physicist Richard Feynman’s “sum over histories” method, in which predictions must take account of every possible path a particle might take, not just its actual path. There are “entanglement” phenomena, in which the properties of a system of particles are irreducible to the particles considered individually or their spatial relations and relative velocity. There is quantum statistics, in which particles of the same kind are treated as fused and losing their individuality within a larger system.

Year 2020 o.o!

Explorations into the nature of reality have been undertaken across the ages, and in the contemporary world, disparate tools, from gedanken experiments [1–4], experimental consistency checks [5,6] to machine learning and artificial intelligence are being used to illuminate the fundamental layers of reality [7]. A theory of everything, a grand unified theory of physics and nature, has been elusive for the world of Physics. While unifying various forces and interactions in nature, starting from the unification of electricity and magnetism in James Clerk Maxwell’s seminal work A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism [8] to the electroweak unification by Weinberg-Salam-Glashow [9–11] and research in the direction of establishing the Standard Model including the QCD sector by Murray Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman [12,13], has seen developments in a slow but surefooted manner, we now have a few candidate theories of everything, primary among which is String Theory [14]. Unfortunately, we are still some way off from establishing various areas of the theory in an empirical manner. Chief among this is the concept of supersymmetry [15], which is an important part of String Theory. There were no evidences found for supersymmetry in the first run of the Large Hadron Collider [16]. When the Large Hadron Collider discovered the Higgs Boson in 2011-12 [17–19], there were results that were problematic for the Minimum Supersymmetric Model (MSSM), since the value of the mass of the Higgs Boson at 125 GeV is relatively large for the model and could only be attained with large radiative loop corrections from top squarks that many theoreticians considered to be ‘unnatural’ [20]. In the absence of experiments that can test certain frontiers of Physics, particularly due to energy constraints particularly at the smallest of scales, the importance of simulations and computational research cannot be underplayed. Gone are the days when Isaac Newton purportedly could sit below an apple tree and infer the concept of classical gravity from an apple that had fallen on his head. In today’s age, we have increasing levels of computational inputs and power that factor in when considering avenues of new research in Physics. For instance, M-Theory, introduced by Edward Witten in 1995 [21], is a promising approach to a unified model of Physics that includes quantum gravity. It extends the formalism of String Theory. There have been computational tools relating to machine learning that have lately been used for solving M-Theory geometries [22]. TensorFlow, a computing platform normally used for machine learning, helped in finding 194 equilibrium solutions for one particular type of M-Theory spacetime geometries [23–25].

Artificial intelligence has been one of the primary areas of interest in computational pursuits around Physics research. In 2020, Matsubara Takashi (Osaka University) and Yaguchi Takaharu (Kobe University), along with their research group, were successful in developing technology that could simulate phenomena for which we do not have the detailed formula or mechanism, using artificial intelligence [26]. The underlying step here is the creation of a model from observational data, constrained by the model being consistent and faithful to the laws of Physics. In this pursuit, the researchers utilized digital calculus as well as geometrical approach, such as those of Riemannian geometry and symplectic geometry.