Category Archives: Quantum Physics
RIT offers new minor in emerging field of quantum information science and technology | RIT – Rochester Institute of Technology
Rochester Institute of Technology students can soon begin earning a minor in an emerging field that could disrupt the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines. RIT students can now take classes toward a minor in quantum information science and technology.
This is a hot field garnering a lot of attention and we are excited to offer students a chance to gain some technical depth in quantum so they can take this knowledge and go the next step with their careers, said Ben Zwickl, associate professor in RITs School of Physics and Astronomy and advisor for the minor. It will provide a pathway for students from any STEM major to take two core courses that introduce them to quantum and some of its applications, as well as strategically pick some upper-level courses within or outside their program.
Quantum physics seeks to understand the rules and effects of manipulating the smallest amount of energy at the subatomic level. Scientists and engineers are attempting to harness the strange, unintuitive properties of quantum particles to make advances in computing, cryptography, communications, and many other applications. Developers of the minor said there is a growing industry that will need employees knowledgeable about quantum physics and its applications.
Were seeing a lot of giant tech companies like IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Google get involved with quantum, but theres also a lot of venture capital going to startup companies in quantum, said Gregory Howland, assistant professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy. Howland will teach one of the minors two required courses this fallPrinciples and Applications of Quantum Technology. You have both sides of it really blossoming now.
The minor, much like the field itself, is highly interdisciplinary in nature, with faculty from the College of Science, Kate Gleason College of Engineering, College of Engineering Technology, and Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences offering classes that count toward the minor. The minor grew out of RITs Future Photon Initiative and funding from the NSFs Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes program.
Associate Professor Sonia Lopez Alarcon from RITs Department of Computer Engineering will teach the other required courseIntroduction to Quantum Computing and Information Sciencestarting this spring. She said taking these courses will provide valuable life skills in addition to lessons about cutting-edge science and technology.
Theyll learn more than just the skills from the courses, theyll learn how to get familiar with a topic thats not in the textbooks officially yet, said Lopez Alarcon. Thats a very important skill for industry. Companies want to know theyre hiring people with the ability to learn about something that is emerging, especially in science and technology because its such a rapidly changing field.
The faculty involved noted that they hope to attract a diverse group of students to enroll in the minor. They said that although the disciplines feeding into quantum have struggled with inclusion related to gender and race and ethnicity, they will work with affinity groups on campus to try to recruit students to the program and ultimately advance the fields inclusivity.
To learn more about the minor, contact Ben Zwickl.
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The Standard Model of Particle Physics May Be Broken A Physicist at the Large Hadron Collider Explains – SciTechDaily
A recent series of precise measurements of already known, standard particles and processes have threatened to shake up physics.
As a physicist working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, one of the most frequent questions I am asked is When are you going to find something? Resisting the temptation to sarcastically reply Aside from the Higgs boson, which won the Nobel Prize, and a whole slew of new composite particles? I realize that the reason the question is posed so frequently is down to how we have depicted progress in particle physics to the wider world.
We often talk about progress in terms of discovering new particles, and this is frequently true. Studying a new, very heavy particle helps us see underlying physical processes often without annoying background noise. That makes it easy to explain the value of the discovery to the general public and politicians.
Recently, however, a series of precise measurements of ordinary already known, standard particles and processes have threatened to shake up physics. And with the LHC getting ready to run at higher energy and intensity than ever before, it is time to start discussing the implications widely.
The storage-ring magnet for the Muon G-2 experiment at Fermilab. Credit: Reidar Hahn, Fermilab
In truth, particle physics has always proceeded in two ways, of which new particles is one. The other is by making very precise measurements that test the predictions of theories and look for deviations from what is expected.
The early evidence for Einsteins theory of general relativity, for example, came from discovering small deviations in the apparent positions of stars and from the motion of Mercury in its orbit.
Particles obey a counter-intuitive but hugely successful theory called quantum mechanics. This theory shows that particles far too massive to be made directly in a lab collision can still influence what other particles do (through something called quantum fluctuations.) Measurements of such effects are very complex, however, and much harder to explain to the public.
But recent results hinting at unexplained new physics beyond the standard model are of this second type. Detailed studies from the LHCb experiment found that a particle known as a beauty quark (quarks make up the protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus) decays (falls apart) into an electron much more often than into a muon the electrons heavier, but otherwise identical, sibling. According to the standard model, this shouldnt happen hinting that new particles or even forces of nature may influence the process.
The LHCb experiment at CERN. Credit: CERN
Intriguingly, though, measurements of similar processes involving top quarks from the ATLAS experiment at the LHC show this decay does happen at equal rates for electrons and muons.
Meanwhile, the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab in the US has recently made very precise studies of how muons wobble as their spin (a quantum property) interacts with surrounding magnetic fields. It found a small but significant deviation from some theoretical predictions again suggesting that unknown forces or particles may be at work.
The latest surprising result is a measurement of the mass of a fundamental particle called the W boson, which carries the weak nuclear force that governs radioactive decay. After many years of data taking and analysis, the experiment, also at Fermilab, suggests it is significantly heavier than theory predicts deviating by an amount that would not happen by chance in more than a million million experiments. Again, it may be that yet undiscovered particles are adding to its mass.
Interestingly, however, this also disagrees with some lower-precision measurements from the LHC (presented in this study and this one).
While we are not absolutely certain these effects require a novel explanation, the evidence seems to be growing that some new physics is needed.
Of course, there will be almost as many new mechanisms proposed to explain these observations as there are theorists. Many will look to various forms of supersymmetry. This is the idea that there are twice as many fundamental particles in the standard model than we thought, with each particle having a super partner. These may involve additional Higgs bosons (associated with the field that gives fundamental particles their mass).
Others will go beyond this, invoking less recently fashionable ideas such as technicolor, which would imply that there are additional forces of nature (in addition to gravity, electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces), and might mean that the Higgs boson is in fact a composite object made of other particles. Only experiments will reveal the truth of the matter which is good news for experimentalists.
The experimental teams behind the new findings are all well respected and have worked on the problems for a long time. That said, it is no disrespect to them to note that these measurements are extremely difficult to make. Whats more, predictions of the standard model usually require calculations where approximations have to be made. This means different theorists can predict slightly different masses and rates of decay depending on the assumptions and level of approximation made. So, it may be that when we do more accurate calculations, some of the new findings will fit with the standard model.
Equally, it may be the researchers are using subtly different interpretations and so finding inconsistent results. Comparing two experimental results requires careful checking that the same level of approximation has been used in both cases.
These are both examples of sources of systematic uncertainty, and while all concerned do their best to quantify them, there can be unforeseen complications that under- or over-estimate them.
None of this makes the current results any less interesting or important. What the results illustrate is that there are multiple pathways to a deeper understanding of the new physics, and they all need to be explored.
With the restart of the LHC, there are still prospects of new particles being made through rarer processes or found hidden under backgrounds that we have yet to unearth.
Written by Roger Jones, Professor of Physics, Head of Department, Lancaster University.
This article was first published in The Conversation.
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Femi Fadugba Talks Netflix Grabbing His Debut Novel, Writing And Meeting Black Boys Where They Are – Essence
Theres a new sci-fi book series thats taking the young adult genre by stormthe first book,The Upper World, written by Femi Fadugba has already caught the eye of studioexecutives, and Netflix has acquired the film rights[and] Queen & Slims Daniel Kaluuya [is] attached to produce and star.
Fadugbas debut novel was alsorecentlyshortlisted for the Waterstones Childrens Book Prizein the Older Readers category in addition to being longlisted for the 2022 Branford Boase Award which is given annually to the author of an outstanding debut novel for children.
One review attributed thenovelsunusual credibility to the fact that Fadugba is a real-lifephysicistand has based his ideas about time travel on real science, including Einsteins theories(even if you dont grasp it at all). Fadugba wrote the novel after many conversations about with people who would ask him to explain quantum physics. Theyd always be super fascinated and wanted me to recommend a book, but I couldnt find one that I could put my hand on my heart and say: Youll dig this, he toldThe Guardian.
Fadugba, 35, who splits time between the UK and the US, sat down with ESSENCE to discuss his inspiration for writing the book, his career path and meteoric rise to fame, as well as his upcoming projects.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
ESSENCE: What inspired you to writeThe Upper World?
Its a complicated one because it has a few different angles. I went to university, and I ended up doing quantum physics, quantum computing, specifically and I thought I was going to be an academic physicist at that point. I published an article at PRL, which is the same publication that Einstein published a lot of his stuff in, so that was kind of like the peak of my career. I was looking for whats next, but the academic route just felt a little bit abstract.
As a Black African boy in the UK, there are lot more serious problems faced by people than partial differential equations. So, I decided, let me go into working world and see what impact I can have, and I went into business, I did solar energy. But it just wasnt quite cutting it. I felt like I hadnt found my voice and didnt have a platform. I started digging into things that excited me when I was younger, and I rediscovered my love for physics, and especially about time travel. In many ways the genesis of the book was after reading pretty much 100 books on relativity to thinking, how do I explain this in a way that 16-year-old me would have not only understood it, but also have a reason to give a st.
Thats why I ended up putting it into a narrative, because people like stories, thats how we learn things. Look at the book of Genesis, thats a story about nature. Its a story about physics in many ways and how the universe came to be, it told a story because thats how we absorb things, and I think the other side of my motivation was because of the actual story part, the specific characters I chose, the location, the theme I explored. Again, I think for me it was about writing the kind of book that teenage me would have fked with basically. A big part of that was, I dont want to lecture the kids. How do I meet young Black boys where theyre at and then give them a story that combines philosophy, physics, real-life st and elevate the conversation and never at any point underestimate their curiosity?
ESSENCE: How many drafts were there? How long, and what was the process like?
I would say that theres only four words that matter in your first draft: good enough and the end. When I started writing, I assumed that the world consisted of people were born good writers and people who were essentially not so good, and I thought I was in the second category. I had this moment, and I think it was partly from speaking with a couple of people who said, Oh, no everybody starts off rubbish, and then you practice and then you end up good. So I accepted that I was a rubbish writer and as long as I made improvement every day and I came to the page every day, I was gonna get a little bit better every day. It actually kind of worked, I mean, if you see the difference between different drafts, youd be amazed honestly. It came along, and I think there was something about that sort of amateur mindset where I was a nobody. I didnt have the weight of being a somebody, with the expectations of being a good writer. I was in a writing group with a bunch of people who were much better writers than me, and I found that most of them struggled to write a lot because they get to the end of just a couple of sentences or a chapter, or a paragraph and they will decide that its not good enough, there was that perfectionist kind of thing that made them just keep revising the first paragraph. Whereas I knew that my paragraphs were rubbish, so I just finished the draft and then went back and started again.
It took two and a half years from first words to pressing send to publishers. I think thats probably another thing that I did right in the first the first go-round when I was writing the first book, because I didnt have too much of an ego back then, so I just told people, Hey, Im not a writer, just read this. What do you think? I gave it to a lot of people, my wife read pretty much all eight drafts, whatever I produced. I probably sent it to like 10 other people, just friends, and I think the key thing for me was basically making it safe for them to tell me that my baby was ugly. Instead of just saying What do you think, which they probably would have said Its great, I asked, Did you care about the character? At what page were you hooked? What questions do you have in your mind? Does it make sense? Just basically digging for a no, rather than digging for a yes.
ESSENCE:The Upper Worldis being adapted by Netflixhow did that happen?
This all happened during June of 2020. The book went out to publishers, and out of nowhere, theres like essentially a bidding war, which was fking mental to be honest. Im just doing all these Zoom calls, with different publishers, and then maybe two weeks later the book leaked to Hollywood, I dont even know what that means. It leaked to a bunch of film studios, both in the UK and the US. And so, literally two, three weeks after the publishing thing closed, I was having calls with a bunch of the big studios and production houses. Then, Netflix came along, Daniel Kaluuyas agent got a hold of the script and then he read itI think pretty much in a dayand he said Yeah, Im keen to be involved. Its so sick, it just came together perfectly to be honest.
ESSENCE: You mentioned that you hoped for this book to be something that your teenage self would have wanted to read. Are there any other things that you hope the legacy of your book to be?
Im writing the sequel right now, literally just before I hopped on the call, burning through it. I had so many ideas, but I was surprised by how different my headspace was writing the second one versus the first one. I want the book to be a two-part booka duology. I think one of my inspirations isThe Godfather: Part II. Its a prequel sequel, and we essentially take the events in book one and then we go back in time, and we look at where Esso comes from, which takes us back to Africa, to Benin specifically, and we look at the mythology and the history of that country, and how it interweaves with the upper world. We also go forward, and we pick up from where we left off Rhia. Esso left off in the 2030s where Rhia is now going to uni and is facing a whole new host of challenges, both personally and with upper world and a maniac on the loose, whos trying to kill her and has ambitions on conquering the multiverses himself.
I mean, I think its part of a bigger story. Im really excited for you to have a look at the second book once its out and see, and we can have a discussion then on how it compares. My background, my life has been kind of strewn all over the place, and Ive seen a lot of different environments. One big contrast that I had growing up was going back and forth between Oxford and Peckham and then my parents were in Rwanda. One of the big things is showing people different worlds, just letting people imagine beyond what they see. Theres a practical aspect of that, which is literally showing different environments. In book two, youll definitely get that, in terms of going back to Africa and Rhia going to Cambridge. I think the other aspect of the legacy I hope for by the time Ive wrapped up, is that people who are religious will see just how similar they are to people who are atheists and scientists, and people who are just interested in how the world works, and what storytelling and metaphors mean and have a unified vision. I know thats a very abstract way to describe it. In book one, you saw a glimpse, where I combined physics with a concrete story in Peckham, and in book two I want to take it a bit further and incorporate Africa and religion into that.
I think for me, the biggest joy of writing is just the opportunity it gives me to like find my own joy, and also just share that with other people.
TOPICS: afrofuturism black authors
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3 Tech Trends That Are Poised to Transform Business in the Next Decade – SPONSOR CONTENT FROM DELOITTE – HBR.org Daily
3 Tech Trends That Are Poised to Transform Business in the Next Decade
By Mike Bechtel and Scott Buchholz
Covid-19, while profoundly disruptive, didnt create new enterprise technology trends so much as catalyze those already underway.
Organizations fast-tracked multi-year technology roadmaps for major investments like artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and cloud, completing them in months or even weeks. The result? Many organizations have arrived at their desired futures ahead of schedule.
But the future is still coming. Todays innovations will be our successors legacy. So executives must be mindful of meaningful advances and capabilities forecast for the decade aheadto ride tailwinds, dodge headwinds, and forestall, or at least minimize, the interest payments due on their eventual technical debt.
But the signal-to-noise ratio in most projections of future tech is abysmal, introducing an anxiety-inducing blizzard of buzzwords every year. Thats why our futures research gets right down to identifying the subset of emerging technology innovations that can create better customer experiences, modernize operations, and drive competitive advantage.
Three classes of emerging tech are poised to transform every aspect of business in the next decade: quantum technologies, exponential intelligence, and ambient computing. These field notes from the future can give business leaders a strategic view of the decade ahead to help them engineer a technology-forward future.
Quantum Technologies
I think I can safely say that nobody really understands quantum mechanics, Nobel laureate Richard Feynman once said.
To eschew the physics lesson: quantum-powered solutions exploit the quirky properties of subatomic particles to allow us to solve seemingly intractable problems using physics instead of mathematics. Quantum represents as big a leap over digital as digital was over analog.
As quantum R&D turns the corner from R to D, the race among technology giants, governments, and early-stage startups will quickly find commercial applications.
Three areas to watch:
Quantums appeal to techies is clear, but business leaders must consider its potential to deliver specific competitive advantages against discrete business needs. Its spoils will first accrue to those who figure out in advance which problems they need quantum to solve.
Exponential Intelligence
Traditionally, the most widely adopted business intelligence solutions were descriptive: discovering and surfacing hidden correlations in data sets. The last 15 years saw the rise of predictive analytics: algorithms that could further extrapolate whats likely to happen next.
Most recently, AI-fueled organizations have used machine intelligence to make decisions that augment or automate human thinking.
This escalation of next-generation intelligencefrom analyst to predictor to actorwill increasingly access human behavioral data at scale, so that it better understands and emulates human emotion and intent. Enter the age of affective or emotional AI.
To a machine, a smile, a thoughtful pause, or a choice of words is all data that can, in aggregate, help an organization develop a more holistic understanding of customers, employees, citizens, and students. Its data organizations can further use it to develop classes of automated systems that better connect the dots among their financial, social, and ethical objectives.
For customer service representatives, caregivers, sales agents, and even stage actors, the business cases for these creative machines are compelling. But its imperative that leaders recognize the importance of committing to trustworthy AI practices to reduce any risk of bias, both tacit and explicit, in the training data, models, and resulting systems. As the authors of Technology Futures, a recent report from Deloitte and the World Economic Forum, put it: We must teach our digital children well, training them to do as we say, not necessarily as weve done.
Ambient Experience
The past 20 years of human-computer interaction might be summed up as an ever-bigger number of ever-smaller screens. With powerful mobile devices and advanced networks now ubiquitous in our workplaces and homes, were literally surrounded by digital information.
Ambient experience envisions a future beyond the glass when our interaction with the digital world takes place less through screens than through intuitive, out-of-the-way affordances that more naturally cater to our needs.
Recent advances in digital assistants and smart speakers light the way. These language interfaces generally speak only when spoken to and dutifully respond. Increasingly, devices will anticipate our intentions and offer help based on their understanding of content and context.
The other side of the coin: an unlimited reality. Virtual reality (VR) is not new, but enterprises increasingly turn to VR as a tool instead of a toy to support functions as varied as training, team building, and remote operations truck driving.
These ambient experiences could drive simplicity, reducing friction in the user experience. As technology develops, a voice, gesture, or glance could signal intent and initiate an exchange of business-critical information. Tomorrows digital concierges could handle increasingly complex routines in smart homes and citieswithout any logins or other traditional steps for activation.
Foresight is 80/20
These three field notes from the future are not an admonition to drop todays plans in favor of whats next. Rather, they are an encouragement to keep going.
Todays investments in cloud, data, and digital experiences lay the groundwork for opportunities in quantum technologies, exponential intelligence, and ambient experience.
Research indicates that leading organizations put 80 percent of their technology budgets toward existing investments and 20 percent toward emerging tech.1 By keeping their eyes on the future and their feet in the present, organizations can start creating tech-forward strategies todayso they can compete, lead, and advance their businesses tomorrow.
Read Field Notes from the Future in the Deloitte Tech Trends 2022 report and contact our subject matter experts for further discussion.
Mike Bechtel, Chief Futurist, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Scott Buchholz, Emerging Technology Research Director and Government & Public Services Chief Technology Officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP
1Mike Bechtel, Nishita Henry and Khalid Kark, Innovation Study 2021: Beyond the buzzword, September 30, 2021
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Whiz kid from Indonesia earns master’s at University of Waterloo in physics at 17 – Waterloo Region Record
WATERLOO Cendikiawan Suryaatmadja of Indonesia is taking a break this summer before starting his PhD.
The 17-year-old is the third-youngest person in University of Waterloos history to graduate with a masters degree in physics, and he dreams about using the fundamental building blocks of the physical world to make it better.
I still have a long way to go, said Suryaatmadja during an interview at the Dana Porter Library on campus.
His research will focus on quantum information theory using quantum physics to manage the flow of information.
I think it is a very important field of physics, said Suryaatmadja. Its new, its emerging.
UW is a leading centre of research on quantum information theory, and the next generation of supercomputers that will use that research quantum computers.
You are essentially looking at things from the most fundamental and simplest level, and you just start to build a whole structure out of it, said Suryaatmadja.
After almost six years in Canada, Suryaatmadja is still not used to the changing weather and the need for so many clothes. He misses the warm, consistent weather of his home and the flavourful food of Indonesia.
Even a simple meal can have 12 to 14 spices, oh man, said Suryaatmadja. Im not saying the food in Canada is bad, but you guys use a lot of butter.
He also misses his family, and tries to speak with them every week. But he likes the diversity of Canada, especially around the UW campus.
You meet people with different ideas, different cultures, different perspectives, said Suryaatmadja. It really helps you think more critically, it really helps you get exposed to thoughts that are different from your own. I think Canada excels at that.
He grew up in Bogor, a city south of Jakarta on the Indonesian Island of Java. His first language is Indonesian, and Suryaatmadja taught himself English.
When Suryaatmadja started elementary school he was placed in Grade 3. After Grade 4 he studied on his own, and was recruited by UW when he was 12. Four years later he had completed a bachelors degree in mathematical physics with a minor in pure mathematics. It took more than a year to complete the masters and his PhD will also be done at UW.
Jeff Casello, UWs associate vice-president of graduate studies and post-doctoral affairs, calls Suryaatmadjas academic accomplishments remarkable.
Having the academic skills and personal drive to earn a masters degree at age 17 reflects a level of accomplishment that is incredibly rare, said Casello.
Suryaatmadja laughs at how it came about. He pressed the wrong button in the elevator at the institute in Bogor where he studied and prepared for math competitions. He walked off the elevator and into the arms of two UW recruiters Jean Lowry and Ken Seng Tan.
I just talked to them actually, said Suryaatmadja. This was before I graduated from high school.
At this point, he looks forward to a life of research that breaks new ground in physics and quantum information theory.
I just want to be a researcher. I dont know where. Lets see where things go. I still have a lot of time to make plans.
During the past six years hes joined many clubs on campus, and enjoys doing improv. He likes watching TV shows and movies that are comedies, or Sci-Fi blockbusters such as Dune and Blade Runner 2049. He enjoys Manga, DC Comics and books by Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett and graphic novels by Grant Morrison.
And I like walking a lot, especially in this weather, said Suryaatmadja.
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Are you a spectator to reality? Or are you its creator? – Big Think
This years World Chess qualifying tournament brought a new twist: the heart rates of the players were broadcast live, with the help of AI software, so viewers could (supposedly) gain insight into the players emotions during a match. But can emotions be detected from mere heartbeats? When your own heart pounds wildly in your chest like a sledgehammer, does it necessarily mean youre frightened? Angry? Excited? Full of joy? What if youve just finished a strenuous workout or knocked back a bit too much espresso?
When it comes to the question of what your heart rate means, psychologically speaking, the scientifically correct answer is: it depends. Thats because physical signals from within your body have no inherent psychological meaning. A particular heart rate does not indicate any particular emotional state. Its not the case, say, that 100 beats per minute is happiness and 150 beats per minute is anger. The pounding in your chest during instances of both emotions can be physically identical. More specifically, your heart rate may vary just as much among different instances of anger as it does between instances of anger and happiness. Ditto for every spurt of cortisol, every trickle of dopamine, and every other electrical or chemical change in your body. What differs is the meaning that your brain makes of the physical signals in a particular context.
The same is true of physical signals from the outside world. When a tree falls in the forest and slams into the ground but no one is present, it does not make a sound. It does produce a change in air pressure. That change becomes meaningful to you as a sound only when it reaches sensory surfaces inside your ear (your cochlea), producing a different physical signal that travels to your brain, where it meets an ensemble of other signals that represent your knowledge of falling trees and what they sound like. You dont hear with your ears; you hear with your brain. If that same change in air pressure encounters your rib cage rather than your cochlea, you may feel a thudding in your chest rather than hear a sound.
Light waves similarly exist in the physical world, whether or not a human is present. But color is a feature constructed as your brain weaves those signals together with others of its own creation. So a statement like, The rose is red, is more precisely stated as, I experience the wavelengths of light reflecting from the rose as red. The redness isnt in the rose. The light waves detected by the sensory surface in your eye (your retina) modulate signals along the optic nerve that encounter other signals in your brain that reassemble past experiences and give those incoming signals psychological meaning and voila, you experience the rose as scarlet, ruby, or some other variety of red.
Your brain constantly runs a model of your body as it moves through the world. You come to know that world only through your cochlea, retina, and the other sensory surfaces of your body. Their signals, along with those streaming from within your body, continuously confirm or correct the ongoing signals in your brain. The implication is a bit startling: You cannot experience the world, or even your own body, objectively. Your experience is always from a particular perspective, and no perspective is universal.
Your brains internal model is formed from ensembles of sensory signals from your past, sourced from the body it is attached to, the world that surrounded it, and the other people who curated and inhabited that world. Their words and actions wired your brain with the concepts of your culture, empowering your brain to see red in a rose, hear trees fall, and understand your racing heart as joy in one situation and sorrow in another.
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This idea, called relational meaning, is familiar in quantum physics. As Carlo Rovelli beautifully explains in his latest book Helgoland, nature is not filled with permanent objects but with relations between quantities. When an electron is not interacting with anything, it has no physical properties. An electron only has a position or velocity relative to something else. The same is true for signals that arrive at the sensory surfaces of your body, whether the signals originate within your body or outside it. They become psychologically meaningful only in relation to the electrical and chemical activity in your brain a brain that continually creates a culturally-infused internal model of your body as it moves through the world.
Some experiences, like imagining the future and reliving events from the past, are constructed completely by the signals within your brain. Even some sensations are entirely your brains constructions. An example is the feeling of wetness. Your skin has no sensors for moisture, so how is it that you feel wet when you take a swim or get caught in the rain? Your brain constructs this sensation by combining physical signals from sensory surfaces for temperature and touch, and entwining them with other signals that reassemble your knowledge of what wetness feels like.
Everything you see, hear, smell, or taste; every touch you feel; and every action you take arises from a complex web of interwoven signals, and some of the most important signals are found only in your brain. Your brain does not detect features in the world and body; it constructs features to create meaning. Some constructed features are closer in detail to raw sensory data, such as lines and edges and color. Scientists call them physical features. Mental features are more abstract. When you appreciate a beautiful painting, the beauty is not in the painting; its created in your brain. When you eat a delicious dinner, the deliciousness is not in the meal but constructed in your head. The same goes for the last jerk who cut you off in traffic: You did not detect the drivers jerkiness; your brain constructed it as an ensemble of signals.
Relational meaning also holds a key to understanding how emotions work. If you watch a World Chess match and see a player scowl, it may seem that you are detecting anger in their face, but really you are experiencing that chess player as angry. That experience is constructed in your brain by giving meaning to sensory signals that have no objective emotional meaning of their own. Pursed lips, flushing skin, and of course, a rapid heart rate are not inherently emotional. These physical signals take on emotional meaning only in relation to other signals, some of which are your past experiences that have been wired into your brain by other people in your culture. In this complex web of context, a grandmasters scowl might mean anger (about 30% of the time, studies show), but the same scowl can also mean that they are concentrating hard or even that they have bad gas.
Magnus Carlsen. (Credit: Dean Mouhtaropoulos / Getty Images)
If you find some of these ideas unintuitive, Im right there with you. Relational meaning the idea that your experience of the world says as much about you as it does about the world is not extreme relativism. It is a realism that differs from the usual dichotomy drawn between materialism (reality exists in the world and you are just a spectator) and idealism (reality exists only in your head). It is an acknowledgment that the reality you inhabit is partly created by you. You are an architect of your own experience. Meaning is not infinitely malleable, but its much more malleable than people may think.
So, what does all this mean for everyday life? If physical signals from your body and the world only become meaningful to you in relation to signals created in your brain, this means you have a bit more responsibility than you might realize for how you experience and act in the world. For the most part, meaning-making is automatic and outside your awareness. When you were a child, other people curated the environment that wired experiences into your brain, seeding your brains internal model. Youre not responsible for this early wiring or the meanings it engenders, of course, but as an adult, you have the capacity to challenge those meanings and even change them. That is because your brain is always tweaking its internal model, creating the opportunity for new meanings with every new ensemble of signals it encounters.
To influence your internal model, you can effortfully seek out new meanings. You can expose yourself to people who think and act differently than you do, even if its uncomfortable (and it will be). The new experiences that you cultivate will manifest as signals in your brain and become raw material for your future experiences. In this way, you have some choice in how your brain gives meaning to a racing heart, whether its a chess champions or your own.
You dont have unlimited choice in this regard, but everyone has a bit more choice than they might realize. By embracing this responsibility, you grant yourself more agency in how you automatically make meaning and therefore over your reality and your life.
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Are you a spectator to reality? Or are you its creator? - Big Think
Class of 2020 On-Campus Commencement Address by President Eisgruber ‘Entangled with Princeton’ – Princeton University
This address was given by President Christopher L. Eisgruber during the Class of 2020's Commencement ceremony in Princeton Stadium on Wednesday, May 18, 2022.
Remarks as delivered
As you know from prior experience, Princeton tradition allows the University president to say a few words to each graduating class at its Commencement exercises. Giving that address is a special privilege, and one that I cherish.
That privilege today feels even more extraordinary than usual, since this ceremony is unprecedented in the Universitys history. No class since World War II has had to wait two years for an in-person graduation. No previous class has shown your unique combination of persistence, achievement, and patience. The undergraduate and graduate alumni who make up the Great Class of 2020 will always have a special place in Princetons history.
This graduation speech is also different from others that I have given for another reason, which is that I have already had an opportunity to address the Class of 2020 at your virtual ceremony two years ago. I am honored, but also slightly daunted, by the opportunity to speak to you for a second time. What wisdom can I hope to offer to a class that has already heard one round of graduation speeches?
After considering this challenge for some time, I decided to share with you a quirky Princeton story that may perhaps, with some imagination, provide insight into what you have experienced over the last two years, and what you will experience in the years ahead.
The story begins in 1935, when Albert Einstein and two post-doctoral researchers named Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen published one of the most famous papers in the history of physics. All three were appointed at the Institute for Advanced Study, temporarily housed in what is now Jones Hall on the Princeton campus.
The paper was about quantum science, and it discussed a phenomenon that Einstein would later mock as spooky action at a distance. Quantum mechanics, the authors pointed out, rests on an other-worldly idea called superposition, which says that physical systems can be in a combination of two inconsistent states at once. A particle can be, for example, in a combination of an up state and a down stateit is both and neither, but if someone observes it, it immediately becomes either up or down, but not both.
In their paper, Einstein and his co-authors argued that these strange concepts led to the bizarre conclusion that observing a particle in one placefor example, right here on the Commencement stagecould instantly affect the state of another particle somewhere elsefor example, at the opposite end of this stadium, or in Hawaii, or, for that matter, out by some distant star.
Podolsky annoyed Einstein by leaking the paper to theNew York Times.Lots of professors, I can assure you, would love to leak their papers to theNew York Times. In general, theTimesdoes not care. But a paper by Einstein was a different matter.
TheTimesran the story on page 11 under the headline Einstein Attacks Quantum Theory. Podolsky told theTimesthat Einstein and his co-authors had proven that, even if quantum mechanics made plenty of correct predictions, its consequences were too strange to provide a complete description of the physical world.
Everything in that bold and controversial 1935 paper has proven correctexcept for its conclusion. What Einstein derided as spooky action at a distance, and what scientists now call quantum entanglement, is a feature of the physical worldone with increasingly important practical applications. When people talk about quantum computing, for example, they are talking about devices that use spooky action at a distance.
There is something marvelous in the fact that one of the most exciting and practically important fields of 21stcentury science depends on something that Albert Einstein, perhaps the greatest scientist of the 20thcentury, got emphatically wrong in one of his most famous papers.
That insight should give us all a dose of humility when we are tempted to declare, as Einstein did, that some novel idea is too bizarre to be true. And, conversely, we can perhaps all draw inspiration from the fact that new and genuinely strange ideas, beyond the ken of the greatest thinkers the world has known, sometimes contain profound truths.
Quantum mechanical properties apply at the microscopic level; we do not see them in our ordinary lives. But I sometimes thinkand here is where I need to call upon your imaginationsthat the strange metaphysics of the quantum world can provide an alternative perspective on the paradoxes and ambiguities that color our lives.
Take, for example, the idea of superposition, which says that a physical system can be a combination of two inconsistent states: up and down at the same time. Could one say that about what you have experienced over the past two years? In your senior spring, you were both at Princeton and not at Princeton. You graduated, and yet you did not. You were together, still Princetons Great Class of 2020, and yet you were apart.
And though it does not technically count as what Einstein would call spooky action at a distance, were you not throughout this period, are you not now, sublimely entangled with one another and with Princeton? You dispersed throughout the country and the world, yet you were also connected by shared challenges, memories, and your identity as a class. What happened here, and what happened to each of you, affected all of you.
Though I recognize that not every member of your class can be with us today, I hope that this day and this week nevertheless help to resolve the pandemics strange superposition of states so that we can now say emphatically: yes, the Great Class of 2020 is not only connected but together! Yes, the Great Class of 2020 has graduated in every sense of the word! And yes, the Great Class of 2020 is here, observed and observable, roaring like Tigers on this campus once again!
I hope, too, that you remain entangled with Princeton and with each other. All Princeton classes are, in my thoroughly biased opinion, great classes, but they are also distinct. They acquire their own identities and personalities. Some people speculate that the events of the last two years might weaken the bonds that tie you together. I predict the opposite: that your resilience and your creativity will make your connections to each other and your entanglement with Old Nassau ever stronger.
We shall see. For now, just let me say, on behalf of the faculty and administration, we are so glad that you are here! Welcome back! And to everyone in the Great Class of 2020, undergraduate and graduate alumni, I say congratulations, and I hope to see you back on this campus many times in the years to come. 2020: Congratulations!
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In Einsteins Footsteps and Beyond: New Insights Into the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics – SciTechDaily
By Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied SciencesMay 3, 2022
An illustration of a near-zero index metamaterial shows that when light travels through, it moves in a constant phase. Credit: Second Bay Studios/Harvard SEAS
Zero-index metamaterials offer new insights into the foundations of quantum mechanics.
In physics, as in life, its always good to look at things from different perspectives.
Since the dawn of quantum physics, how light moves and interacts with matter around it has been primarily described and understood mathematically through the lens of its energy. Max Planck used energy to explain how light is emitted by heated objects in 1900, a seminal study in the foundation of quantum mechanics. Albert Einstein used energy when he introduced the concept of the photon in 1905.
But light has another, equally important quality known as momentum. And, as it turns out, when you take momentum away, light starts behaving in really interesting ways.
An international team of physicists is re-examining the foundations of quantum physics from the perspective of momentum and exploring what happens when the momentum of light is reduced to zero. The researchers are led by Michal Lobet, a research associate at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Eric Mazur, the Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at SEAS,
The research was published in the journal Nature Light Science & Applications on April 25, 2022.
Any object with mass and velocity has momentum from atoms to bullets to asteroids and momentum can be transferred from one object to another. A gun recoils when a bullet is fired because the momentum of the bullet is transferred to the gun. At the microscopic scale, an atom recoils when it emits light because of the acquired momentum of the photon. Atomic recoil, first described by Einstein when he was writing the quantum theory of radiation, is a fundamental phenomenon that governs light emission.
But a century after Planck and Einstein, a new class of metamaterials is raising questions regarding these fundamental phenomena. These metamaterials have a refractive index close to zero, meaning that when light travels through them, it doesnt travel like a wave in phases of crests and troughs. Instead, the wave is stretched out to infinity, creating a constant phase. When that happens, many of the typical processes of quantum mechanics disappear, including atomic recoil.
Why? It all goes back to momentum. In these so-called near-zero index materials, the wave momentum of light becomes zero and when the wave momentum is zero, odd things happen.
As physicists, its a dream to follow in the footsteps of giants like Einstein and push their ideas further. We hope that we can provide a new tool that physicists can use and a new perspective, which might help us understand these fundamental processes and develop new applications.
Michal Lobet, Research Associate, SEAS
Fundamental radiative processes are inhibited in three dimensional near-zero index materials, says Lobet, who is currently a lecturer at the University of Namur in Belgium. We realized that the momentum recoil of an atom is forbidden in near-zero index materials and that no momentum transfer is allowed between the electromagnetic field and the atom.
If breaking one of Einsteins rules wasnt enough, the researchers also broke perhaps the most well-known experiment in quantum physics Youngs double-slit experiment. This experiment is used in classrooms across the globe to demonstrate the particle-wave duality in quantum physics showing that light can display characteristics of both waves and particles.
In a typical material, light passing through two slits produces two coherent sources of waves that interfere to form a bright spot in the center of the screen with a pattern of light and dark fringes on either side, known as diffraction fringes.
In the double slit experiment, light passing through two slits produces two coherent sources of waves that interfere to form a bright spot in the center of the screen with a pattern of light and dark fringes on either side, known as diffraction fringes. Credit: Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
When we modeled and numerically computed Youngs double-slit experiment, it turned out that the diffraction fringes vanished when the refractive index was lowered, said co-author Larissa Vertchenko, of the Technical University of Denmark.
As it can be seen, this work interrogates fundamental laws of quantum mechanics and probes the limits of wave-corpuscle duality, said co-author Iigo Liberal, of the Public University of Navarre in Pamplona, Spain.
While some fundamental processes are inhibited in near-zero refractive index materials, others are enhanced. Take another famous quantum phenomenon Heisenbergs uncertainty principle, more accurately known in physics as the Heisenberg inequality. This principle states that you cannot know both the position and speed of a particle with perfect accuracy and the more you know about one, the less you know about the other. But, in near-zero index materials, you know with 100% certainty that the momentum of a particle is zero, which means you have absolutely no idea where in the material the particle is at any given moment.
This material would make a really poor microscope, but it does enable to cloak objects quite perfectly, Lobet said. In some way, objects become invisible.
These new theoretical results shed new light on near-zero refractive index photonics from a momentum perspective, said Mazur. It provides insights into the understanding of light-matter interactions in systems with a low- refraction index, which can be useful for lasing and quantum optics applications.
The research could also shed light on other applications, including quantum computing, light sources that emit a single photon at a time, the lossless propagation of light through a waveguide, and more.
The team next aims to revisit other foundational quantum experiments in these materials from a momentum perspective. After all, even though Einstein didnt predict near-zero refractive index materials, he did stress the importance of momentum. In his seminal 1916 paper on fundamental radiative processes, Einstein insisted that, from a theoretical point of view, energy and momentum should be considered on a completely equal footing since energy and momentum are linked in the closest possible way.
As physicists, its a dream to follow in the footsteps of giants like Einstein and push their ideas further, said Lobet. We hope that we can provide a new tool that physicists can use and a new perspective, which might help us understand these fundamental processes and develop new applications.
Reference: Momentum considerations inside near-zero index materials by Michal Lobet, Iigo Liberal, Larissa Vertchenko, Andrei V. Lavrinenko, Nader Engheta and Eric Mazur, 25 April 2022, Light: Science & Applications.DOI: 10.1038/s41377-022-00790-z
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Searching for What Connects Us, Carlo Rovelli Explores Beyond Physics – The New York Times
Perhaps its Rovellis writing style, along with his facility with ideas, that sets him apart from other popular science writers. For some readers, he said, the writing in my books is what matters to them. And the truth is I use analogies, some poetical, but its not coloring or embellishment. Its actually where Im trying to go, trying to transmit some emotion, some sense of marvel, some sense of the core.
Simon Carnell, along with his late wife, Erica Segre, translated five of Rovellis books, including his new one. He said in an email that he sees Rovellis style as highly compressed without ever becoming dry or airless. He added that Rovelli has the scientific instinct to avoid and pare away every superfluous word (including of the translations of his work), but more importantly, a writerly ability to do so in the service of a style that is elegant, lively and above all engaging.
Beyond offering Rovellis heady but lean synthesis of science and the humanities, his new book also features pieces dealing with politics, climate change and justice. Dean Rickles, a professor of history and philosophy of modern physics at the University of Sydney, said in an interview over Zoom that this larger project of Rovellis, with its theme of interdependence, is particularly compelling.
Hes concerned now with justice and with peace and with climate. He has become a sort of very political scientist, he said. I think you can boil it all down, actually, to sort of a quality, like a democracy in all things Were all interdependent.
Maybe the best way to think of Rovellis worldview is through the work of Ngrjuna, a second-century Indian Buddhist philosopher he admires. Author of The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, Ngrjuna taught that there is no unchanging, underlying, stable reality that nothing is self-contained, that all is variable, interdependent. Reality, in short, is always something other than what it just was, or seemed to be, he argues. To define it is to misunderstand it.
In Emptiness is Empty: Ngrjuna, another piece from his new book, Rovelli writes about how the philosophers conception of reality provokes a sense of awe, a sense of serenity, but without consolation: To understand that we do not exist is something that may free us from attachments and from suffering; it is precisely on account of lifes impermanence, the absence from it of every absolute, that life has meaning.
Before leaving Rovellis home that day, I took another look at the concealing snow outside. Reality seemed at once more compelling and more mysterious. Hesitating, I asked him if he thought there was any grand, capital T truth. He indulged me, then paused for a moment.
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Searching for What Connects Us, Carlo Rovelli Explores Beyond Physics - The New York Times
2 Berkeley Lab Physicists Elected into the National Academy of Sciences – Lawrence Berkeley Lab (.gov)
Joel Moore, left, and Joseph W. Orenstein (Credit: UC Berkeley; courtesy of Joseph W. Orenstein)
Two Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) physicists have been elected into the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Joel Moore and Joseph W. Orenstein join 120 scientists and engineers from the U.S. and 30 from across the world as new lifelong members and foreign associates.
Joel Moore is a senior faculty scientist in the Materials Sciences Division, professor of physics at UC Berkeley, and the director of the Center for Novel Pathways to Quantum Coherence in Materials. His theoretical work studies the properties of quantum materials, in which interactions between electrons yield new states of matter. He also investigates how quantum physics can lead to new devices for spin-based electronics and quantum sensing.
Before joining Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley in 2002, Moore was a postdoc in the theoretical physics research group at Bell Labs. Moore received his bachelors degree in physics from Princeton University in 1995 and spent a Fulbright year abroad before graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a Hertz fellowship.
He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a Simons Investigator, and Chern-Simons Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley.
Joseph W. Orenstein is a senior faculty scientist in the Materials Sciences Division and a professor of physics at UC Berkeley. He has led the development of advanced experimental techniques to investigate how new materials, such as high-temperature superconductors, multiferroics, topological materials, and frustrated magnets, interact with light.
Orenstein earned his Ph.D. in solid state physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980. Before joining Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley in 1990, he was an IBM postdoctoral fellow and a distinguished member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories.
He received the American Physical Society Isaakson Prize for Optical Effects in Solids in 2008.
In 2020, he was honored by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation with an Experimental Investigators in Quantum Materials (EPIQs) award. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society.
In addition to Moore and Orenstein, Berkeley Lab Advisory Board members Young-Kee Kim and France Crdova were also elected into the 2022 class.
The NAS was founded in 1863 to provide the country with a non-partisan council of scientific and technological leaders who could lend expertise and advice to the government. Every year, a new class of 120-150 members are elected by existing members in recognition of distinguished achievement in their respective fields. There is now a total of 2,512 active American members and 517 international members.
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Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest scientific challenges are best addressed by teams, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and its scientists have been recognized with 14 Nobel Prizes. Today, Berkeley Lab researchers develop sustainable energy and environmental solutions, create useful new materials, advance the frontiers of computing, and probe the mysteries of life, matter, and the universe. Scientists from around the world rely on the Labs facilities for their own discovery science. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory,managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energys Office of Science.
DOEs Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
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