{"id":57605,"date":"2017-05-22T15:42:30","date_gmt":"2017-05-22T22:42:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/05\/a-fundamental-quantum-physics-problem-has-been-proved-unsolvable"},"modified":"2017-06-01T22:00:28","modified_gmt":"2017-06-02T05:00:28","slug":"a-fundamental-quantum-physics-problem-has-been-proved-unsolvable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/05\/a-fundamental-quantum-physics-problem-has-been-proved-unsolvable","title":{"rendered":"A fundamental quantum physics problem has been proved unsolvable"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/a-fundamental-quantum-physics-problem-has-been-proved-unsolvable.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>For the first time a major physics problem has been proved unsolvable, meaning that no matter how accurately a material is mathematically described on a microscopic level, there will not be enough information to predict its macroscopic behaviour.<\/p>\n<p>The research, by an international team of scientists from UCL, the Technical University of Music and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid \u2013 ICMAT, concerns the spectral gap, a term for the energy required for an electron to transition from a low-energy state to an excited state.<\/p>\n<p>Spectral gaps are a key property in semiconductors, among a multitude of other materials, in particular those with superconducting properties. It was thought that it was possible to determine if a material is superconductive by extrapolating from a complete enough microscopic description of it, however this study has shown that determining whether a material has a spectral gap is what is known as \u201can undecidable question\u201d.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"http:\/\/factor-tech.com\/connected-world\/21062-a-fundamental-quantum-physics-problem-has-been-proved-unsolvable\/\">http:\/\/factor-tech.com\/connected-world\/21062-a-fundamental-q...nsolvable\/<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For the first time a major physics problem has been proved unsolvable, meaning that no matter how accurately a material is mathematically described on a microscopic level, there will not be enough information to predict its macroscopic behaviour. The research, by an international team of scientists from UCL, the Technical University of Music and the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":387,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1497,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/387"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57605"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57605\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57655,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57605\/revisions\/57655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}