Suppose you and your cousin are about to inherit some moneyand you each have a version of the will on your computer. What is the least amount of information your computers must share to determine whether the versions are the same?

This hypothetical scenario raises a communication complexity problem. These problems deal with how much information you need to exchange from computer to computer, orfrom network node to node to perform a certain task or function. The less information transmitted to complete the task, the more energy and time saved and the more privacy is preserved.

Li QianandHoi-Kwong Lo, both professors in the University of Toronto's Edward S. Rogers Sr. department of electrical and computer engineeringin the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering,and Xiaoqing Zhong, a PhD candidate in the department of physics in the Faculty of Arts & Science,have developed an improved quantum fingerprinting (QF) protocol to more efficiently and securely solve these types of problems, which come up in contexts such as computer networking andVery Large Scale Integration (VLSI) chip design, among other situations.

The teams protocol used the many different frequencies of a photons quantum state a novel approach to encode information. Their paper wasrecently published inNature Communications.

Lets say you and your cousin each have a data file of a million bytes a megabyte, Qian says. In classical protocol, the smallest fingerprint required to determine whether the information is the same to a certainty near 100 per centis found by the square root of the total number of bits. So, a one megabyte file would require the transmission of roughly 300 bytes. With quantum fingerprinting, the amount scales logarithmically: a one megabyte file would only require around three bytes.

The advantage becomes even more pronounced as the files get bigger, Qian adds.

As the data string becomes larger and larger, quantum fingerprinting can drastically reduce the amount of information that you need to exchange.

The QF protocol is achieved by exploiting a property called superposition. In classical communication, a photon encodes information as either a one or zero, but in quantum mechanics a photon can exist in many states between this binary. The possible combinations of these intermediate states are what alloweach single photon to carry far more information, reducing the overall number and saving time, energy and bandwidth.

In addition, it greatly diminishes information leaks, Qian says, which lessens privacy and security concerns.

One challenge of implementing the QF is that the detectors used to register the photons are very sensitive and can produce signal noise. Currently, superconducting photon detectors must be housed in cryogenic dewars, which cool down the environment to milli-Kelvin temperatures. Still, random errors creep in.

The teams improved QF protocol used a technique called multiplexingthe simultaneous sending and measuring of many frequencies of photons to speed up communication time and make QF much less susceptible to detector noise. In the lab, they demonstrated this measurement with six frequencies, but in principle it could be thousands, says Qian.

It makes QF a more practical option, she says. We can use off-the-shelf components: run-of-the-mill semiconductor-based single photon detectors, which are orders of magnitude cheaper than superconductor detectors.

Though QF is accessible technology in todays marketplace, quantum communication is hampered by a lack of compatible infrastructure. Quantum signals are fragileand, though they can coexist with the classical signal in our present fibre optic network, they are easily contaminated. Much of the data terminal equipment in the existing network, such as amplifiers, switches and routers, is not suitable for quantum signals.

More research in progress at the joint labs of Qian and Lo needs to be done to bring quantum and classical signals together in the same optical fibre.

Engineering often finds a balance between the practical and the theoretical, says ProfessorDeepa Kundur, chair of the department of electrical and computer engineering.And Professors Qian and Los research is a great example of this. Theyve fine-tuned a cutting-edge protocol with sights firmly set on the future landscape of telecommunications and by doing soare helping to realize it.

When asked what motivated her to work on quantum technologies, Qian points to the uniqueness of quantum properties.

Theyre simply not found anywhere else in nature, she says. Think of how the unique property of laserscoherent light revolutionized optical technologies in a few short decades. I am convinced the quantum properties of photons will do the same.

Originally posted here:

U of T researchers develop new quantum 'fingerprinting' protocol to improve information exchange - News@UofT

As for why he wanted to write about his outsider status, he says its precisely because physics has all those unresolved questions. For example: How does gravity work? Dark matter appears to account for most of the stuff in the universe, but what is it? Whats inside the singularity of a black hole? What is consciousness? As Alexander sees it, his field might be getting stuck on subjects like these because it needs more people with diverse backgrounds and interests who are likelier to challenge long-standing assumptions and look at things in new ways.

Who will be the next Einstein of this new frontier? he says. Does the fear of failure, the mysterious, the invisible, the ignored, the stigmatized things often associated with Blackness prevent us from unlocking the secrets of the universe?

This interview with Alexander has been condensed and edited.

In the book you argue that physics should be more receptive to ideas from other disciplines, even from ones that are considered unscientific, like the religious traditions. But you also describe intriguing scientific explorations happening now into some far-out concepts such as nonlocal consciousness which holds, among other things, that even inanimate matter can have something akin to an inner life or awareness. So is the pendulum possibly swinging in the direction youd like to see, with more openness to ideas that would have been dismissed 20, 30 years ago?

What you ask is a hard question. But just from my experience, there has been a shift in the pendulum, because when I was a graduate student, I was a laughingstock.

My first year, all the grad students, we shared this one office and we had to go through a hazing you have to take all these exams and youre all working on problems together in the same room, all 18 of us. And thats where people size up against each other: Whos the smart one, whos the dumb one, who got the lowest score on the exams, whos going to work with the top person, whatever. And they wrote me off as being the dumb guy, because they found these books that I was reading, including Roger Penroses books. [Penrose is a physicist who has contended for decades that consciousness arises from the weird principles of quantum mechanics playing out in the brain.] They wrote me off [they said] that I do pseudo-physics because they found that I was reading these books about physics and consciousness. Now, dont get me wrong, I was also taking the same physics courses that everybody else was taking, but I definitely had these other questions. I guess there was a side of me that was a philosopher as well and an artist.

Back then, Penrose, as brilliant as he was he got a Nobel Prize last year he was a laughingstock too. Neuroscientists said he was a smart guy in physics and math but didnt know what he was talking about [when it came to the brain]. It was because he was an outsider, he was an interloper. Theres a judgment made that youre not worthy enough to even think about this in this field.

There are other ways these judgments are made. If you are, in my case, presumed to be benefiting from affirmative action that got you into grad school, then you would definitely not be the one that should be working on the hard problems.

Anyway, to make a long story short, a few years ago there was a conference somewhere about consciousness and physics. And everybody and their grandfather wanted to be part of this conference. It became more acceptable to talk about it and work on it. Some leaders in the field who normally would have dismissed it embraced it, and then everybody wants to follow the trend because a leader said so.

How can scientists wall off ideas that couldnt possibly be true, like flat-earth stuff, while remaining open to ones that have a chance of being right?

We need to populate the landscape with scientific ideas and see which ones hold water. But to filter an idea out before you even put it on the table its not good for science.

You write that a huge aspect of getting more ideas on the table is to have scientists come from a greater variety of cultural and intellectual backgrounds.

I mean, if we look at the history of some of the great ideas, including the founders of quantum mechanics, they all dabbled and sought out ideas outside of physics. Like [Erwin] Schroedinger: After he discovers quantum mechanics, after he gets a Nobel, all that stuff, he starts writing about What is life? Some people will get the hall pass to be that way maybe a Richard Feynman [a theoretical physicist known for being an eccentric genius]. And a lot of the judgments made, unfortunately, are based on the biases that people have about African Americans. Somebody thats culturally on the inside can act in the same way that I act and theyll say hes a genius. But me, they might say, He doesnt know his physics.

Is this why you still see yourself as an outsider despite being a tenured professor of physics with a great deal of published work and other high-caliber credentials?

I think of this in the tradition of graffiti artists. For them to continue doing great art, at least in their tradition, they had to deliberately keep one foot on the outside as well as one in the art establishment, the art galleries. John Coltrane was like this too. After mastering everything thats in Western tonal harmony, he started embracing Ornette Coleman and Pharoah Sanders [jazz musicians who pioneered free-form techniques].

That tradition of deliberately keeping one foot on the outside and one foot on the inside: Just being a person of color in these spaces will naturally keep me on the outside. But theres a part of me that embraces it and Im proud of it. My point here is to celebrate that, to encourage it. Its not that Im like, Oh, woe is me, but more like: Hey, here are my hidden strengths, because I dont have to prove anything to anybody to be in their club.

Brian Bergstein can be reached at brian.bergstein@globe.com.

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Q&A: Greater diversity in science could unlock the secrets of the universe - The Boston Globe

The universe started with a Big Bang. Everything that was ever going to be anything was compacted into a tiny ball of whatever-ness and then it exploded outward and the universe begin expanding.

At least, thats one way of looking at it. But emergent new theories and ages-old philosophical assertions are beginning to find a foothold in cutting-edge quantum physics research. And its beginning to look more and more like we might actually be the center of the universe after all.

Thats not to say Earth or the Milky Way is at the geographical center of the universe. Itd be arrogant to make such a literal assumption.

Im saying humans are the figurative center of the universe. Because, theoretically, were gods.

This is a two-parter. First we need to establish that the universe is conscious. It might not be, but for the sake of argument lets say we agree with the growing number of scientists who support the theory.

Heres a quote I found in Mind Matters News that explains it nicely. Its from Georgia Techs Tim Andersen, a quantum physics researcher:

The key to understanding Will is in examining our own sense of consciousness. We have, in a sense, two levels of consciousness. The first is of experience. We experience a flowers color and smell. Therefore, we are conscious of it. The second is that we are aware of our consciousness of it. That is a meta-consciousness which we sometimes call reflection. I reflect on my awareness of the flower.

Andersens referring to Will as an underlying force in the universe thats analogous to consciousness.

The gist is that everything is capable of experience. If you kick a rock it experiences force, velocity, and gravity. It cant reflect on these experiences and, thus, the rock itself is capable of changing nothing on its own.

Its conscious because it exists. And, because it sort of doesnt exist. Its not actually a rock, but a bunch of molecules smashed together. And those arent molecules, really. Theyre particles smashed together. And so on and so forth.

Eventually you get to whatever the quantum version of bedrock is, and the whole universe is just an infinite amount of pretty much the same stuff it was the exact moment before the Big Bang happened.

So our rock is a rock, but its also not a rock because we can clearly see its just regular universe material if we look close enough. A tree, a rock, a Volvo, an AI reporter named Tristan: theres not much difference between these things in the quantum realm.

Its kind of like Minecraft. No matter what you build its all just ones and zeros on a computer chip.

Heres where things get cool. The rock, for whatever reason, doesnt appear to experience secondary consciousness. As Andersen explains it, the rock cannot reflect on its experience.

But humans can. Not only can we experience, for example, falling, but we can also reflect on that experience and create change based on that reflection.

Whats even more interesting, cosmically speaking, is that we can internalize the experiences of other humans and use those to inform our decision-making. Were capable of reflecting on the reflections of others.

This implies that human free will is the sole known entity in the universe capable of eliciting change based on conscious reflection.

The rock can never choose not to fall, but humans can. We can even choose to fly instead.

The result of our existence is that the universes entire trajectory is, potentially, changed. Whatever the particles in the universe were going to do before humanity emerged, their course has been altered.

Who knows what changes weve wrought upon the cosmos. Weve only been around for a few million years and our planet already looks like a frat house after a kegger.

What will the galaxy look like when we can travel to its edges in a matter of months or weeks? What happens when we can traverse the universe?

Its possible theres an intelligent creator there somewhere chuckling right now. Or perhaps the universes plan always included the inception and evolution of humans.

But the evidence, of which theres admittedly very little, says otherwise.

Quantum physics makes a strong argument for universal consciousness and, if thats the case, its hard to define the human experience without separating everything capable of reflection from those things only capable of experience.

If it turns out were the only entities capable of producing a secondary reality out of the universal consciousness, well, that would be something.

Im not saying youre the God, Im simply pointing out that youre the only thing in the entire universe that we can show evidence for having free will and the capacity to reflect on its experiences.

Perhaps our ability to reflect on consciousness itself is what allows experiential reality to manifest. We think, therefore everything is.

Further reading:

New research tries to explain consciousness with quantum physics

Scientists may have found the missing link between brain matter and consciousness

New MIT brain research shows how AI could help us understand consciousness.

Originally posted here:

Theoretical physicists think humans are screwing up the universe's plan - The Next Web

FLASHES OF CREATIONGeorge Gamow, Fred Hoyle, and the Great Big Bang DebateBy Paul Halpern

The universe is changing. But scientists didnt realize that a century ago, when astronomers like Edwin Hubble and Henrietta Leavitt discerned that other galaxies exist and that theyre hurtling away from the Milky Way at incredible speeds. That monumental discovery sparked decades of epic debates about the vastness and origins of the universe, and they involved a clash of titans, the Russian-American nuclear physicist George Gamow and the British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle.

In his new book, Flashes of Creation, Paul Halpern chronicles the rise of Gamow and Hoyle into leaders of mostly opposing views of cosmology, as they disputed whether everything began with a Big Bang billions of years ago.

Halpern, a physicist himself at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, skillfully brings their fascinating stories to light, out of the shadow of the overlapping quantum physics debates between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, which Halpern has written about in an earlier book. Halpern also poses fundamental questions about how science should be done. When do you decide, for example, to abandon a theory? Ultimately, his book seeks to vindicate Hoyle, who in his later years failed to admit his idea had lost.

Until these two bold theoreticians arrived, astrophysics had been stuck at an impasse. Scientists werent sure how to interpret Hubbles observations, and no one understood how the universe created and built up chemical elements. It is clear that the intuitive, seat-of-the-pants styles shared by Gamow and Hoyle were absolutely needed in their time, Halpern writes.

Gamow and Hoyle make for a challenging joint biography, Halpern acknowledges, in part because their parallel stories so rarely intersected. They had only one significant in-person meeting, in the summer of 1956 in La Jolla, Calif., where Gamow had briefly served as a consultant for General Dynamics, the aerospace and defense company. They discussed many ideas in that coastal town, hanging out in Gamows white Cadillac, but for the most part, their debates took place in the pages of physics journals, newspapers and magazines, including Scientific American.

They also frequently appeared on early television and radio programs, becoming among the first well-known science communicators, paving the way for Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Carolyn Porco, Pamela Gay and others today. Hoyle wrote the science fiction novel The Black Cloud and the television screenplay A for Andromeda, while Gamow produced One, Two, Three Infinity and the Mr. Tompkins series, whose main characters predicaments illustrated aspects of modern science.

For years, their dueling theories a Big Bang origin of matter and energy (championed by Gamow) versus a steady-state universe that created matter and energy through quantum fluctuations (championed by Hoyle) remained highly speculative. Initially, the Big Bang theory predicted a universe only a couple billion years old, which conflicted with observations of the sun and other stars, known to be much older. Physicists were evenly divided between the two.

But that changed as more evidence emerged, and a key discovery eventually seemed to settle the debate. In 1964, the astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson noticed a constant signal of radio static with the Holmdel Horn Antenna in New Jersey. After ruling out possible experimental sources of noise (including pigeons and their droppings on the antenna), they deduced that the radio hiss had a cosmic origin. They and their colleagues eventually realized the signal came from relic radiation from the hot fireball of the early universe.

After that, the Big Bang theory quickly became consensus in the field. While Hoyles steady-state idea eventually failed, he made many other significant contributions, especially involving stellar processes and supernova explosions, which he showed could fuse chemical elements into heavier atoms and produce nitrogen, oxygen, carbon and more. In explaining this, and throughout the book, Halpern provides many helpful metaphors and analogies. He also reminds readers that Hoyle, Gamow and their fellow theoretical physicists made these accomplishments well before the heyday of supercomputers.

Halpern doesnt shy away from the characters flaws. In particular, he shows how Hoyles work later in life lay on the fringes of physics, including his controversial panspermia hypothesis, that organic material and even life on Earth came from colliding comets, and his unsuccessful attempts to revive steady-state theory. But this shouldnt cast a pall over his legacy.

Hoyles investment in the theory raises important philosophical and sociological questions about when we should consider an idea proven. Its also the sort of quandary that threads its away through contemporary debates among physicists: about dark matter versus modified gravity theories; about what dark energy is and how the universes inflation happened moments after the Big Bang; and about a persistent discrepancy in measurements of the universes expansion rate, known as the Hubble tension. Halpern unfortunately gives only brief mention to these active areas of research, which owe a lot to Gamow and Hoyle.

At one point in the book, Halpern relates a conversation he had with Geoff Burbidge, a colleague of Hoyles who also continued to support a steady-state model. Cosmology needed alternatives, he argued, not lemmings following their leader over a cliff.

Read more:

When the Big Bang Was Just a Theory - The New York Times

Imagine an intact diamond whose innards move with no friction, or a formed ice cube whose tightly-packed contents effortlessly flow. These might sound strange, or even impossible. But to physicists, theyre not too far removed from something theyve recently created: a strange state of matter called a supersolid.

For the past several years, scientists have been creating supersolids at very tiny scales in the lab. Now, a group of physicists have made the most sophisticated supersolid yet: one that exists in two-dimensions, like a sheet of paper. They published their results in Nature last Wednesday.

Its always been a sort of outstanding goal to bring [supersolids] into two dimensions, says Matthew Norcia, a physicist at Innsbruck University in Austria, and lead author of the Nature paper.

So what exactly is a supersolid? At its base, it contains properties of two different states of matter, one mundane and another quite esoteric.

The first of those states is a solid, which is among the most mundane forms of matter. Chances are that youre touching one at this very moment. Importantly, To physicists, a solid is interesting because the atoms inside are held in a rigid structure. Its why you dont, normally, see solid objects flowing like water.

But the second is a state of matter youve probably seen somewhat less: a superfluid. A quirk of quantum mechanics, a superfluid is a substance that acts like a fluid with zero viscosity. Scientists have caught glimpses of superfluids by cooling helium to temperatures barely above absolute zero. They can, and will, effortlessly crawl up walls or slide across surfaces.

A supersolid combines both a solid and a superfluid into one package: a solid that flows like a fluid with no friction, no resistance. If that sounds strange, its all perfectly natural. Its simply a product of quantum mechanics, the peculiar sort of physics that governs the cosmos at the very smallest scales.

To picture a supersolid, consider an ice cube immersed in liquid water, with frictionless flow of the water through the cube, wrote Bruno Labruthe-Tolra, a physicist at Sorbonne Paris North University in France who was not involved with the latest paper, in Nature News & Views that accompanied the new study.

It isnt an entirely new idea; physicists have been proposing it since the 1960s. But for many decades, it wasnt clear if we could make a supersolid on Earth. Only in the 2010s did scientists start making concrete progress towards creating a supersolid in the laboratory.

[Related: What the heck is a time crystal, and why are physicists obsessed with them?]

At first, scientists tried looking for supersolids in supercooled helium. Superfluids occur in helium, whose atomic properties make it ideal, so it seemed logical that you might find supersolids in them, too. But that effort has yet to bear fruit.

Later in the decade, physicists began turning to other elements such as rubidium and lanthanum. When you trap a small number of gaseous atoms and chill them down to fractions of a degree above absolute zero (the very coldest possible temperature, at around -460 degrees Fahrenheit), they condense into a whole suite of quantum weirdness. Thats called a Bose-Einstein condensate.

So, to create a supersolid, you first trap some atoms, then cool them, then play with their interactions. If you tune those correctly, and you tune the shape of the trap correctly, you can get a supersolid, says Norcia, the lead author.

Using this method, in 2019, researchers began to create a basic, one-dimensional supersolid: essentially, a thin supersolid tube in a straight line.

Thats what Norcia and his colleagues at Innsbruck University and the Austrian Academy of Sciences have now done. By tinkering with the device they used to trap atoms and the process they used to condense the atoms, they were able to extend their supersolid from one dimension into two: from a tiny tube into a small sheet.

This demonstration is a key advance because one direct way to prove that a system exhibits superfluidity is to study its properties under rotation, writes Labruthe-Tolra, and this analysis cannot be achieved if the system has only one dimension.

Now that researchers have created a supersolid in two dimensions, can they make one in three dimensions? Can they make a proper supersolid that you can touch?

Probably not soon, according to Norcia, though he says its a question that has crossed physicists minds. Currently, hes uncertain how they would do that with the technology they have.

Instead, for now, the researchers want to study the supersolid theyve created. Even though theyve successfully created a supersolid, physicists still know so little about it.

Link:

We finally have a working supersolid. Here's why that matters. - Popular Science