Lifeboat Foundation

In the quantum world, the concepts of ‘before’ and ‘after’ can blend together.

Electrons tend to avoid one another as they go about their business carrying current. But certain devices, cooled to near zero temperature, can coax these loner particles out of their shells. In extreme cases, electrons will interact in unusual ways, causing strange quantum entities to emerge.

At the latest TechCrunch Disrupt conference IBM provided a visionary speech on the future of compute using quantum computing. IBM Research COO Dario Gil gave a very cogent description of quantum computing and how it will change the computing landscape in the near future.

Quantum computing is a very complex and esoteric technology to try to explain to an audience of entrepreneurs and developers looking to raise money for the next Snapchat. Interestingly enough, there was a quantum computing start up at Disrupt, Rigetti Computing, pitching a quantum computing cloud service. IBM introduced its quantum computing cloud service in May 2016.

In a multi-‘cat’ experiment, the textbook interpretation of quantum theory seems to lead to contradictory pictures of reality, physicists claim.

Quantum mechanics is expected to provide a consistent description of reality, even when recursively describing systems contained in each other. Here, the authors develop a variant of Wigner’s friend Gedankenexperiment where each of the current interpretations of QM fails in giving a consistent description.

The first new uncertainty principle to be formulated in decades helps explain why a quantum object can be two temperatures at once.

It’s not easy being a “theory of everything.” A TOE has the very tough job of fitting gravity into the quantum laws of nature in such a way that, on large scales, gravity looks like curves in the fabric of space-time, as Albert Einstein described in his general theory of relativity. Somehow, space-time curvature emerges as the collective effect of quantized units of gravitational energy — particles known as gravitons. But naive attempts to calculate how gravitons interact result in nonsensical infinities, indicating the need for a deeper understanding of gravity.

String theory (or, more technically, M-theory) is often described as the leading candidate for the theory of everything in our universe. But there’s no empirical evidence for it, or for any alternative ideas about how gravity might unify with the rest of the fundamental forces. Why, then, is string/M-theory given the edge over the others?

The theory famously posits that gravitons, as well as electrons, photons and everything else, are not point-particles but rather imperceptibly tiny ribbons of energy, or “strings,” that vibrate in different ways. Interest in string theory soared in the mid-1980s, when physicists realized that it gave mathematically consistent descriptions of quantized gravity. But the five known versions of string theory were all “perturbative,” meaning they broke down in some regimes. Theorists could calculate what happens when two graviton strings collide at high energies, but not when there’s a confluence of gravitons extreme enough to form a black hole.

Continue reading “Why Is M-Theory the Leading Candidate for Theory of Everything?” »

Machine-learning algorithms are helping to unravel the quantum behaviour of a type of superconductor that has baffled physicists for decades.

Researchers used artificial intelligence to spot hidden order in images of a bizarre state in high-temperature superconductors.

Alice controls Bob via quantum measurements. Bob can’t reciprocate.