Lifeboat Foundation

Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist and science journalist. His work can be found in publications including The Atlantic, the New York Times, Scientific American, and BBC Future. He has also authored academic papers for prestigious peer-reviewed journals, such as Human Brain Mapping and Cognition & Emotion.

Below, Bobby shares 5 key insights from his new book, Listen to the audio version—read by Bobby himself—in the Next Big Idea App.

If you’re listening to this then congratulations, you’re lucky enough to be alive during the most exciting time in history. We are on the verge of a paradigm shift of unparalleled magnitude. Such a shift occurs when new science forces us to adopt a different overall framework and perspective.

Cutting intricate patterns as small as several billionths of a meter deep and wide, the focused ion beam (FIB) is an essential tool for deconstructing and imaging tiny industrial parts to ensure they were fabricated correctly. When a beam of ions, typically of the heavy metal gallium, bombards the material to be machined, the ions eject atoms from the surface—a process known as milling—to sculpt the workpiece.

Beyond its traditional uses in the semiconductor industry, the FIB has also become a critical tool for fabricating prototypes of complex three-dimensional devices, ranging from lenses that focus light to conduits that channel fluid. Researchers also use the FIB to dissect biological and material samples to image their internal structure.

However, the FIB process has been limited by a trade-off between high speed and fine resolution. On the one hand, increasing the ion current allows a FIB to cut into the workpiece deeper and faster. On the other hand, the increased current carries a larger number of positively charged ions, which electrically repel each other and defocus the beam. A larger, diffuse beam, which can be about 100 nanometers in diameter or 10 times wider than a typical narrow beam, not only limits the ability to fabricate fine patterns but can also damage the workpiece at the perimeter of the milled region. As a result, the FIB has not been the process of choice for those trying to machine many tiny parts in a hurry.

From my understanding, inertia is typically taken as an axiom rather than something that can be explained by some deeper phenomenon. However, it’s also my understanding that quantum mechanics must reduce to classical, Newtonian mechanics in the macroscopic limit.

By inertia, I mean the resistance to changes in velocity — the fact of more massive objects (or paticles, let’s say) accelerating more slowly given the same force.

What is the quantum mechanical mechanism that, in its limit, leads to Newtonian inertia? Is there some concept of axiomatic inertia that applies to the quantum mechanical equations and explains Newtonian inertia, even if it remains a fundamental assumption of quantum theory?

Enhancing overall combat system effectiveness

“Lockheed Martin and the U.S. Navy share a common vision and enthusiasm for developing and providing disruptive laser weapon systems,” said in the statement Rick Cordaro, vice president of Lockheed Martin Advanced Product Solutions.

The US Navy is exploring the novel technology of Directed Energy Weapons (DEWs) against Chinese and Russian hypersonic weapons in the absence of a potent defense against these highly maneuverable missiles.

The top admiral of the US Navy, Michael Gilday stated that directed energy systems are being developed as a potential countermeasure against hypersonic missiles, calling the advancements made by Russia and China in hypersonic weapon technology “a significant concern.”

The development of devices that would use high-energy lasers or high-power microwaves to remove a threat is a major priority for the Navy, according to Adm. Michael Gilday, Chief of Naval Operations, who is also the Chief of US Missile Defense Agency.

This episode focuses on the basic concepts and misconceptions of wars fought in space and examines the notions of weapons, defenses, stealth in space, and the distance involved.

Project Rho: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php.
Military Science Fiction: http://www.milsf.com.

Continue reading “Space Warfare” »

The flow of time from the past to the future is a central feature of how we experience the world. But precisely how this phenomenon, known as the arrow of time, arises from the microscopic interactions among particles and cells is a mystery—one that researchers at the CUNY Graduate Center Initiative for the Theoretical Sciences (ITS) are helping to unravel with the publication of a new paper in the journal Physical Review Letters. The findings could have important implications in a variety of disciplines, including physics, neuroscience, and biology.

Fundamentally, the arrow of time arises from the second law of thermodynamics: the principle that microscopic arrangements of physical systems tend to increase in randomness, moving from order to disorder. The more disordered a system becomes, the more difficult it is for it to find its way back to an ordered state, and the stronger the arrow of time. In short, the universe’s tendency toward disorder is the fundamental reason why we experience time flowing in one direction.

“The two questions our team had were, if we looked at a particular system, would we be able to quantify the strength of its arrow of time, and would we be able to sort out how it emerges from the micro scale, where cells and neurons interact, to the whole system?” said Christopher Lynn, the paper’s first author and a postdoctoral fellow with the ITS program. “Our findings provide the first step toward understanding how the arrow of time that we experience in daily life emerges from these more microscopic details.”

Watch a movie backwards and you’ll likely get confused—but a quantum computer wouldn’t. That’s the conclusion of researcher Mile Gu at the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) at the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University and collaborators.

In research published 18 July in Physical Review X, the international team shows that a quantum computer is less in thrall to the arrow of time than a classical computer. In some cases, it’s as if the quantum computer doesn’t need to distinguish between cause and effect at all.

The new work is inspired by an influential discovery made almost 10 years ago by complexity scientists James Crutchfield and John Mahoney at the University of California, Davis. They showed that many statistical data sequences will have a built-in arrow of time. An observer who sees the data played from beginning to end, like the frames of a movie, can model what comes next using only a modest amount of memory about what occurred before. An observer who tries to model the system in reverse has a much harder task—potentially needing to track orders of magnitude more information.

The CATL tech with impressive claims for energy density, cooling, and range will first go into the Chinese premium EV brand.