tagged w/ Quantum Mechanics
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An interview with Stuart Hameroff. Consciousness and brain function are discussed in layman's terms. Hameroff has worked with mathematician Roger Penrose to map neurological brain function to the world of quantum mechanics.An interview with Stuart Hameroff. Consciousness and brain function are discussed in... more
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At the age of 21, the British physicist Stephen Hawking was found to have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease. While A.L.S. is usually fatal within five years, Dr. Hawking lived on and flourished, producing some of the most important cosmological research of his time.
:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/10/science/10hawking.html?ref=scienceAt the age of 21, the British physicist Stephen Hawking was found to have amyotrophic... more
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Extra dimensions are old news. The newest mind-bending descriptions of reality dreamed up by the world’s smartest physicists, and explained by superstar superstring theorist Brian Greene in his latest book The Hidden Reality, include untold numbers of extra universes. A million universes isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Ten to the 500th power universes. Greene likes to drop you into the middle of the action first and then explain the backstory (and sometimes it does feel like a full-scale intellectual invasion is happening), but he has an elegant knack for anticipating questions and immediately dealing with any confusion or objections. http://www.makeahistory.com/index.php/your-details/32324-superstring-theorist-brian-greene-and-his-idea-of-an-infinite-number-of-universesExtra dimensions are old news. The newest mind-bending descriptions of reality dreamed... more
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worrg
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added this
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1 year ago
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Indian Philosophy has stated that difference between matter and non matter is one degree and not in kind.Matter can become Mind and Mind , Matter.Indian Philosophy has stated that difference between matter and non matter is one... more
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Schroedinger's Cat - Miss Cellania -
--Quantum mechanics is way out there, about as far above my head as science can get. Schrodinger’s Cat has become a metaphor for the incomprehensibility of quantum theory. And it’s hard to spell, too... Schrodinger, Schroedinger, Schrödinger? The one thing that is clear is that Schroedinger understood physics a lot better than he understood cats. When you mix science with a little bit of philosophy and a whole lot of the internet’s favorite animal, you know a bunch of folks had to go and make something funny out of it. Ergo, Schroedinger’s LOLcat.
http://www.misscellania.com/miss-cellania/2007/9/5/schroedingers-cat.htmlSchroedinger's Cat - Miss Cellania -
--Quantum mechanics is way out... more
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If you ever want to get your head around the riddle that is quantum mechanics, look no further than the double-slit experiment. This shows, with perfect simplicity, how just watching a wave or a particle can change its behaviour. The idea is so unpalatable to physicists that they have spent decades trying to find new ways to test it. The latest such attempt, by physicists in Europe and Canada, used a three-slit version — but quantum mechanics won out again.
In the standard double-slit experiment, a wide screen is shielded from an electron gun by a wall containing two separated slits. If the electron gun is fired with one slit closed, a mound of electrons forms on the screen beyond the open slit, trailing off to the left and right — the sort of behaviour expected for particles. If the gun is fired when both slits are open, however, electrons stack along the screen in comb-like divisions. This illustrates the electrons interfering with each other — the hallmark of wave behaviour.
Such a crossover in behaviour — known as wave–particle duality — is perhaps not too hard to swallow. But quantum mechanics gets weirder. Slow down the gun so that just one electron at a time reaches the screen, and the interference pattern remains. Does each electron pass through both slits at once and interfere with itself? The obvious way to answer this question is to watch the slits as the gun fires, but as soon as you do this the interference pattern disappears.
It's as if the electrons know when they're being watched and decide to behave as particles again. According to Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, the phenomenon "has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery".
More 'splits' at the link . . .
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100722/full/news.2010.371.htmlIf you ever want to get your head around the riddle that is quantum mechanics, look no... more
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Over the last century as simple addition, subtraction and the occasional algebraic banking formulas made way for a quantum field of monetary possibilities to finance the desires of our imagination, the steady progression of projecting one's wealth onto things has created a very tricky economic matrix of imaginary numbers.Over the last century as simple addition, subtraction and the occasional algebraic... more
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Nanosciences and nanotechnologies represent a formidable challenge for the research community and industry. World-class infrastructure, new fundamental knowledge, novel equipment for characterization and manufacturing, multi-disciplinary education and training for innovative and creative engineering, and a responsible attitude to societal demands are required. This documentary film, made available by the European Commission, provides a glimpse of some of the many activities that are being carried out in Europe in these fast-growing fields of research and technological development.Nanosciences and nanotechnologies represent a formidable challenge for the research... more
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No matter how many times researchers try, there's just no getting around the weirdness of quantum mechanics.
In the latest attempt, researchers at the University of Geneva in Switzerland tried to determine whether entanglement—the fact that measuring a property of one particle instantly determines the property of another—is actually transmitted by some wave-like signal that's fast but not infinitely fast.
Their test involved a series of measurements on pairs of entangled photons (particles of light) that were generated in Geneva (satellite view at left) and then split apart by optical fiber to two villages 18 kilometers (11 miles) apart where the team had set up photon detectors. (In 2007, researchers transmitted entangled light 144 kilometers between two of the Canary Islands.)
The idea in the new experiment is that the photons in each entangled pair are hitting the distant detectors simultaneously, so there's no time for them to exchange a signal. By comparing results from the two detectors, the researchers determined whether the photons were entangled or not, using a test known as Bell's inequalities.
The photons were indeed entangled, the group reports in Nature. But in reality, no experiment is perfect, so what they end up with is a lower limit on how fast the entanglement could be traveling: 10,000 times the speed of light.
To appreciate the weirdness of entanglement, consider that the outcome of a single quantum measurement is random. By all tests, a photon *has* no definite polarization until it hits a detector capable of measuring it. So it's like the entangled particles share one big quantum state.
There's one other subtlety to the experiment. If entanglement is traveling through space like some kind of faster-than-light wave, that would violate Einstein's theory of special relativity, which says the laws of nature are the same no matter which way you're moving with respect to anything else.
So the group had to run their experiment repeatedly for more than 24 hours, counting on Earth's rotation to sample all the different orientations relative to the stars. (Imagine a laser pointer shining into space along the direction of the optical fiber.)
It's always conceivable that quantum mechanics might break down (read: show some signs of everyday normalcy) if experimenters could test it the right way. In a 2007 study, researchers in Vienna tested the idea that maybe the instantaneous-ness of entanglement (called nonlocality) was consistent with hidden "variables" that can explain the randomness of quantum measurements. But no dice for that idea.
Theoretical physicist Terence Rudolph of Imperial College London, author of a commentary on the new paper, says that putting bounds on faster-than-light entanglement is useful for researchers trying to imagine theories that might extend beyond quantum mechanics.
What might such a theory look like? Rudolph says we're probably stuck with instantaneous entanglement, which seems impossible to us because we're stuck in everyday space and time. "We need to understand how quantum mechanics sees space and time," he says. "I think there's probably much deeper issues."No matter how many times researchers try, there's just no getting around the... more
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The Super Mario Multiverse-Popular Science popsci.com
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