Lifeboat Foundation

The quantum computing effort at Honeywell appears to be heating up. Over the last several months, the company has announced a series of new developments in its trapped ion quantum computer research, which suggests that it is close to launching its first system.

If you weren’t aware that Honeywell had a quantum computing program, you are not alone. While the occasional terse news statement about this effort is posted on the company’s quantum solutions page, the tech giant has otherwise been rather tight-lipped about its plans in this area. A request from us for more information was met with: “We don’t have anything further to add on this front.”

Since October of last year, Honeywell has been offering these smaller tidbits on a regular basis. In November, the company revealed it had started testing its first-generation qubit devices, followed in January by the claim that it had “demonstrated record-breaking high fidelity quantum operations” on its trapped-ion qubits. In March, it announced it had demonstrated “parallel operating zones” on the device, which it believes will provide faster execution and more flexible qubit connectivity.

Continue reading “Honeywell One Step Closer To Universal Quantum Computer” »

A pair of researchers, one at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and another at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of Tokyo, have recently investigated a set of old conjectures about symmetries in quantum gravity. The specific conjectures of focus: Quantum gravity does not allow for global symmetries; For gauge symmetry, all possible charges must be realized; Internal gauge groups must be compact. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, shows that these old assumptions hold within the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory (AdS-CFT) correspondence.

“Historically, the concept of symmetry has played important roles in physics, both in identifying and formulating fundamental laws of nature, and in using these laws to understand and predict natural phenomena such as dynamics and phases of matters,” Hirosi Ooguri, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “However, there has been theoretical evidence to suggest that, once we combine gravity and quantum mechanics (the two fundamental ideas in modern physics), all global symmetries are gone.”

In physics, symmetries can be of two kinds: gauge and global. For several decades, researchers have proposed the idea that global symmetries should not be possible in quantum gravity, as the unified theory of gravity and quantum mechanics would not allow for any symmetry. This is a profound claim with important consequences. For instance, it predicts that a proton would not be stable against decaying into other particles.

Continue reading “Researchers demonstrate constraints on symmetries from holography” »

Scientist have just discovered that, at an atomic level, these elements have both liquid and solid states, giving context to what may be hidden in the cores of celestial bodies.

A New State of Water Reveals a Hidden Ocean in Earth’s Mantle — https://youtu.be/pgm4z8vJVVk

Continue reading “This New State of Matter Is a Liquid and a Solid at the Same Time!” »

Some research topics, says conventional wisdom, a physics PhD student shouldn’t touch with an iron-tipped medieval lance: sinkholes in the foundations of quantum theory. Problems so hard, you’d have a snowball’s chance of achieving progress. Problems so obscure, you’d have a snowball’s chance of convincing anyone to care about progress. Whether quantum physics could influence cognition much.

Quantum physics influences cognition insofar as (i) quantum physics prevents atoms from imploding and (ii) implosion inhabits atoms from contributing to cognition. But most physicists believe that useful entanglement can’t survive in brains. Entanglement consists of correlations shareable by quantum systems and stronger than any achievable by classical systems. Useful entanglement dies quickly in hot, wet, random environments.

Brains form such environments. Imagine injecting entangled molecules A and B into someone’s brain. Water, ions, and other particles would bombard the molecules. The higher the temperature, the heavier the bombardment. The bombardiers would entangle with the molecules via electric and magnetic fields. Each molecule can share only so much entanglement. The more A entangled with the environment, the less A could remain entangled with B. A would come to share a tiny amount of entanglement with each of many particles. Such tiny amounts couldn’t accomplish much. So quantum physics seems unlikely to affect cognition significantly.

Continue reading “Quantum information in quantum cognition” »

The universe of problems that a computer can check has grown. The researchers’ secret ingredient? Quantum entanglement.

Microsoft, Alphabet and Brilliant are offering a course that teaches you the ins and outs of quantum computer coding.

Australian scientists have been inspired by noise-cancelling headphones to develop a system for protecting delicate quantum data.

Quantum physics, the study of the universe on an atomic scale, gives us a reference model to understand the human ecosystem in the discrete individual unit. It helps us understand how individual human behavior impacts collective systems and the security of humanity.

Metaphorically, we can see this in how a particle can act both like a particle or a wave. The concept of entanglement is at the core of much of applied quantum physics. The commonly understood definition of entanglement says that particles can be generated to have a distinct reliance on each other, despite any three-dimensional or 4-dimensional distance between the particles. What this definition and understanding imply is that even if two or more particles are physically detached with no traditional or measurable linkages, what happens to one still has a quantifiable effect on the other.

Now, individuals and entities across NGIOA are part of an entangled global system. Since the ability to generate and manipulate pairs of entangled particles is at the foundation of many quantum technologies, it is important to understand and evaluate how the principles of quantum physics translate to the survival and security of humanity.

Continue reading “A Quantum Revolution Is Coming” »

Quantum computing’s processing power could begin to improve artificial-intelligence systems within about five years, experts and business leaders said.

For example, a quantum computer could develop AI-based digital assistants with true contextual awareness and the ability to fully understand interactions with customers, said Peter Chapman, chief executive of quantum-computing startup IonQ Inc.

“Today, people are frustrated when a digital assistant says, ‘Sorry, I couldn’t understand that,’” said Mr. Chapman, who was named CEO of the venture-capital-backed startup this week after about five years as director of engineering for Amazon.com Inc.’s Amazon Prime. Quantum computers “could alleviate those problems,” he said.

Continue reading “When Quantum Computing Meets AI: Smarter Digital Assistants and More” »