Lifeboat Foundation

O,.o 2016

The irreversibility of time may be a clue as to what makes up the universe’s dark matter.

Circa 2017

One of the more curious challenges in physics is to understand the nature of time. At the microscopic level, the laws of physics are symmetric with respect to time—they work just as well whether time runs forwards or backwards. But at the macroscopic level, processes all have a preferred direction. The great physicist Arthur Eddington called this the “arrow of time.”

Just why this arrow points in one direction but not the other is one of the great scientific puzzles. The standard answer is that the arrow of time follows from the Second Law of Thermodynamics—that disorder, or entropy, always increases in a closed system.

Continue reading “Physicists Demonstrate How to Reverse of the Arrow of Time” »

Circa 2014

Physicists seek new insights into the nature of gravity.

O,.o.

This stunning image captured last year by physicists at the University of Glasgow in Scotland is the first-ever photo of quantum entanglement — a phenomenon so strange, physicist Albert Einstein famously described it as ‘spooky action at a distance’.

It might not look like much, but just stop and think about it for a second: this fuzzy grey image was the first time we’d seen the particle interaction that underpins the strange science of quantum mechanics and forms the basis of quantum computing.

Continue reading “Looking Back on The First-Ever Photo of Quantum Entanglement” »

Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli bounced ideas off each other, Paul Halpern’s book shows.

Does the enormous computing power of neurons mean consciousness can be explained within a purely neurobiological framework, or is there scope for quantum computation in the brain?

Researchers pin down the contentious notion that ideas from the strange world of quantum mechanics underpin plants’ skill at harvesting sunlight.

A long-standing debate over just how “quantum” photosynthesis is may finally be coming to an end.

“Planet Earth Report” provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species.

The Universe Might Be Too Thin, Scientists may have found a new crack in our understanding of the universe, reports The Atlantic and Quanta. The cosmos is starting to look a bit weird. For a few years now, cosmologists have been troubled by a discrepancy in how fast the universe is expanding. They know how fast it should be going, based on ancient light from the early universe, but apparently the modern universe has picked up too much speed—a clue that scientists might have overlooked one of the universe’s fundamental ingredients, or some aspect of how those ingredients stir together.