PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. The 17th hole at TPC Sawgrass is among the most wind-dependent holes in professional golf. When its calm, its a stock pitching wedge at the fat part of the green. When its pumping 30-plus miles per hour in and off the left, well, where to begin?

Jacksonville metro-area meteorologists deserve some credit. If were going to hammer them when theyre wrong, its only fair to acknowledge when theyre spot on. Theyve been on the money this week at the Players Championship, correctly predicting when it will rain, how hard and what the wind will be like. They forecasted a borderline gale-force out of the northwest on Saturday afternoon. It arrived right on schedule. On the north-facing 17 thats the worst possible wind for the 140 righties in the field. Anything high in the airs gonna miss short and right. Try and cover it a bit too much and its a pull, which is tough, because theres water there, too. If theres a gust mid-backswing, its not getting there. If the wind dies down mid-backswing, airmail.

Scottie Scheffler has the unfortunate honor of hitting his first shot of the day on the 17th tee at high noon. He is five under for the tournament and coming off two wins in his last three starts, so he must be feeling pretty, pretty good. He pulls 7-iron, his 185 club, from 146 yards. Takes a half swing. Flushes it.

It one-hops off the back of the green and skips into the water. He turns to his caddie Ted Scott, a veteran looper but a relative newcomer to Scotties bag, with a dumbfounded look.

That was a good shot, man," Scheffler says.

Xander Schauffele, clearly spooked by Schefflers 7-iron, pulls an 8 and fans it out right. Not even close. Brooks Koepka figures Xander mishit his, so he feels good about his 8-iron. It balloons. It splashes. Only two of the first 123 tee shots hit at 17 failed to find land. The first three on Saturday, all from top-20 players in the world, all go swimming.

Nine minutes later, after Koepka taps in for double bogey, Collin Morikawa enters the ring. He is the greatest iron player on the planet. Arguably the best since Tiger Woods. He pulls 7-iron but isnt married to it. His caddie senses it.

I love what were doing, J.J. Jakovac says to his boss. Commit to it.

It looks great on the rack, but its the wrong size. His ball runs headfirst into a brick wall of wind, banks off the wooden foundation holding the island green in place, and splashes. Four players, four in the water. One threesome later, Joe Greiner gives Max Homa a version of the same advice: Dont hit it until youre committed, Max. Take your time. He hits quickly, pouncing on a lull in the wind. Safely aboard.

Longtime Golf Channel spotter Jeff Young cant believe how many 7-irons hes seeing. Ive been working this hole for 20 years, and Ive never seen more than two 7-irons in one day. And those were from guys like, you know, Fred Funk.

May I interest you in a 6-iron? Matt Kuchar, fully aware of his physical limitations, grabs his confidently and begins rehearsing a cute little cut move. When its go time, his lower body stops turning but his arms do not. Left of left. It somehow manages to carry the water and land on a narrow slip of turf just in front of those two big grandstands. He makes bogey. Not bad, all things considered.

Club selection becomes quantum physics. Billy Horschel wants to hit 8, but his caddie Mark Fulcher doesnt think its enough. No one trusts or asks more of their bagman than Horschel. He goes with 7. As the ball begins to fall over the putting surface, Horschel begins to panic.

Thats over the green, Fooch.

I knew it! I told you I flight it better than anyone else! I said it. I said it before I hit. I knew it! And that was the PG version.

Horschel three-jacks for triple. He wouldnt be the only one. You couldve sold a 25-foot birdie look for $20,000. Marc Leishman isnt asking for muchhe just wants to see his ball land. It does, barely, and he unleashes a Tiger-esque uppercut.

Not everyone finds it so amusing. Players want good shots to be rewarded and bad ones punished. Collins was a good shot; Denny McCarthys is bad. Really bad. Like, borderline-hozzle bad. But those kind of mishits dont spin, so it cuts through the wind and plops down on the very right corner of the green.

The crowd steadily builds as the afternoon wears on, which only amplifies the anxiety. Those on the hillside left of the hole have a better vantage point for depth perception. They can see if a balls destined for a bath. If they begin to groan, no matter how perfect you think your shot is, its not going to end well. Granted, sometimes its not a mystery. Michael Thompson comes out of one and starts walking to the drop zone in one continuous motion. He doesnt care to see, but it kerplunks halfway between the famous island and that other one back toward 16 green. There is no grass there, unfortunately. Double.

Henrik Stenson leans forward immediately after impact. Hes not sure if he gave it enough. Neither is his caddie, Gareth Lord. It does indeed get there. As the rest of the group trudges toward the green, Lord stays behind to light a cigarette.

Matewere on the green, he says. Im looking forward to this one. You wonder how hell keep it lit in the breeze, but thats his problem.

Scheffler, Schauffele and Koepka are most certainly not looking forward to playing this damned hole for the second time in four hours. But thats how the day shaped up. Players who finished off their first rounds on the back nine in the early afternoon were whisked back out to start Round 2, on the back nine. The strongest gust of the day knocks Brooks hat off. Xanders stays on, but he decides to take it off in an abundance of caution. The tees have been moved up 10 yards but Schauffele goes up a club from the morning and it just barely clears the water. His caddie, Austin Kaiser, grabs a water and shakes his head: This is stupid, man. Scheffler probably agrees. He goes with 7 again. He switches to 8. He switches back to 7. He hits an absolutely horrific shot, a genuine slice that finds the water again.

At four over par Brooks tournament is slipping away quickly; he needs a par in the worst way. This hole is his nemesis. Saturdays first water ball was his ninth on 17 since 2015. He still gets the warmest welcome in the group. Fans love hatless Koepka; it gives them an unobstructed view of the slim-shady do. (His natural hair is creeping up his head and the blonde part is dangerously close to frosted-tips territory). Hes got 8-iron again, but this one has absolutely zero chance. It might actually be moving backwards as it expires a good 30 yards short of the green. He turns around, drops his club and laughs hysterically. The only other option is to cry.

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Players 2022: We eavesdropped on the player-caddie chatter at the 17th, and it was A+ listening - GolfDigest.com

An international team of physicists from RIKEN, Cornell University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, has used a new spacetime geometry with a wormhole-like structure to show that information is not necessarily irretrievably lost from evaporating black holes.

A traversable wormhole in four space-time dimensions. Image credit: NASA / G. Bacon, STScI.

Einsteins theory of general relativity predicted that once an object falls inside a black holes event horizon, it ends up at the center of the black hole called a singularity where it is completely crushed.

In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking calculated that black holes should emit radiation when quantum mechanics is considered.

This is called black hole evaporation because the black hole shrinks, just like an evaporating water droplet, said Dr. Kanato Goto, a researcher with the RIKEN Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences and the Department of Physics at Cornell University.

This, however, led to a paradox. Eventually, the black hole will evaporate entirely and so too will any information about its swallowed contents.

But this contradicts a fundamental dictum of quantum physics: that information cannot vanish from the Universe.

This suggests that general relativity and quantum mechanics as they currently stand are inconsistent with each other. We have to find a unified framework for quantum gravity, Dr. Goto said.

Many physicists suspect that the information that escapes is encoded somehow in the radiation.

To investigate, they compute the entropy of the radiation, which measures how much information is lost from the perspective of someone outside the black hole.

In 1993, physicist Don Page calculated that if no information is lost, the entropy will initially grow, but will drop to zero as the black hole disappears.

When physicists simply combine quantum mechanics with the standard description of a black hole in general relativity, Page appears to be wrong the entropy continually grows as the black hole shrinks, indicating information is lost.

But recently, physicists have explored how black holes mimic wormholes providing an escape route for information.

This is not a wormhole in the real world, but a way of mathematically computing the entropy of the radiation, Dr. Goto said.

A wormhole connects the interior of the black hole and the radiation outside, like a bridge.

When Dr. Goto and his colleagues performed a detailed analysis combining both the standard description and a wormhole picture, their result matched Pages prediction, suggesting that physicists are right to suspect that information is preserved even after the black holes demise.

We discovered a new spacetime geometry with a wormhole-like structure that had been overlooked in conventional computations, Dr. Goto said.

Entropy computed using this new geometry gives a completely different result.

But this raises new questions. We still dont know the basic mechanism of how information is carried away by the radiation. We need a theory of quantum gravity.

The teams paper appears in the Journal of High Energy Physics.

_____

K. Goto et al. 2021. Replica wormholes for an evaporating 2D black hole. J. High Energ. Phys 289; doi: 10.1007/JHEP04(2021)289

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New Theoretical Study Sheds Light on How Information Escapes from Evaporating Black Hole - Sci-News.com

Image credit:Gerd Altmann viaPixabay.

Recently, online magazineBig Thinkchallenged two astrophysicists,Ethan Siegel(Yes) andAdam Frank(No), todebate the question.

From Ethan Siegels argument for the multiverse:

If cosmic inflation and quantum field theory are both correct, then the Multiverse arises as an inevitable consequence of the two, combined

Those regions of space where inflation end and the hot Big Bang begins are each their own, independent Universe, and together, they make up a Multiverse. We may not be able to measure these other Universes, at least not just yet, but theres every reason to expect that if inflation and quantum field theory are both correct, then the Multiverse inevitably exists.

From Adam Frankss argument against the multiverse:

It is important, from my viewpoint, to understand what is happening with inflation theory because it is not really a theory the way, say, electromagnetism or quantum mechanics is Instead, it is a class of theories with lots of wiggle room for individual instantiations

It is possible that the only way the inflation extrapolation works is to accept an infinite number of Universes that you may never ever be able to observe. But that is not good. And it is not like anything else thats happened in the history of physics. Sure, we cannot observe what is inside a black hole; and yes, we have dark matter that we cannot see; and yes, there are the parts of our Universe beyond the light horizon. But in the case of dark matter (if it exists), then we can at least learn a lot about it in bulk based on the detailed influences it exerts on the luminous matter we can see. And as for the insides of event horizons, I am not forced to accept infinite numbers of Universes as the price for accepting General Relativity. Same goes for what lies beyond the observable Universe.

To summarize, I would argue that inflation has some attractive features, but it simply does not stand as the kind of scientific edifice (in terms of having many, many points of contact with observation) that should force us to accept the Multiverse.

Siegel was allowed a rebuttal:

Adams response contains some interesting food-for-thought, but there is a dubious logical gambit in there at the core of his argument, which can be paraphrased this way: We dont know everything, therefore how can we trust anything? In any scientific endeavor, you absolutely must be careful about what assumptions you are making that go beyond the limit of what you can observe and/or verify, but you must also not ignore the very generic predictions that show up independently of the assumptions that you make

In other words, yes, inflation gives you some wiggle room in many ways, but you cannot wiggle out of the Multiverse. The only way out, as Adam says, is to postulate a Rumsfeldian unknown unknown to save you. And while that is always possible in any endeavor, I think it is far preferable to draw your best conclusions based on what is known to the limits of our best knowledge at the time. To retort with a quote from the late Macho Man Randy Savage, You may not like it, but accept it.

Mustwe accept it, despite problems with cosmic inflation as a theory, as Siegel insists? Have a look at some other approaches.

Read the rest at Mind Matters News, published by Discovery Institutes Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.

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Astrophysicists Battle over the Multiverse - Discovery Institute

There are few thought experiments in science as famous as Schrdinger's Cat, even though most people couldn't explain it to you if they tried.

It's not that the implications of the thought experiment are opaque. In fact, the implications of the thought experiment are the one thing that almost everyone knows: that Schrdinger's Cat is both alive and dead at the same time.

But what does that even mean? What chain of logic could possibly lead to that kind of result?

Fortunately, you don't need a degree in physics to understand what Schrdinger was getting at with his thought experiment, and even Albert Einstein praisedSchrdinger for devising such a simple illustration of some of the more confusing parts of quantum mechanics.

So, in short, don't worry. The Schrdinger's Cat thought experiment isn't nearly as complicated as many seem to believe, and properly understandingSchrdinger's Cat is an essential part of grasping the fundamental features of the bizarre quantum realm of physics.

ErwinSchrdinger was a Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist who was instrumental in developing many of the fundamental aspects of quantum theory.

Other than his well-known thought experiment,Schrdinger is most famous for his wave equation, which is used to calculate the wave function of a quantum system at different points in time.

Even though he played such a large role in its formation,Schrdinger didn't always agree with his fellow quantum theorists. In fact, many of the ideas that they proposed for quantum mechanics sounded preposterous toSchrdinger, especially one of quantum mechanics' most famous features: superposition.

Quantum superposition is a feature of quantum mechanics where a particle can exist in more than one quantum state, and it is only when a particle is measured that its definite state can be determined.

Understandably, this adds a layer beneath physical reality that strikes many people as either counterintuitive or painfully obvious.

On the one hand, it hardly seems revolutionary to say that you can't determine a particle's state until you measure it. You can't determine your height until you measure it either, so what's the big deal?

The difference between the two is that you are a certain height, whether you measure it or not. If your height had the quantum property of superposition, you would not have a definite height at all prior to measurement.

Generally speaking, you would have an entirely even chance of being in any given measurable state, so if we restricted that to just the five-foot range, you would have a 1-in-12 chance of being five feet and one inch tall,five feet and two inches tall, and so on, but you wouldn't be any of those heights until we measured you.

This latter part cuts against our own lived experience since we never encounter something in our day-to-day lives that exist in such a superposition. When you descend in scale enough to be dealing with individual atoms and even smaller particles, not only is superposition possible, it's been verified time and again over the decades.

The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics isn't one thing specifically, but an assortment of ideas about quantum theory that are closely associated with two major founders of quantum mechanics, Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.

What matters for us is the idea that Bohr postulated in the 1930s that a quantum particle and the instrument used to measure that particle do not act independently of each other, but rather become inextricably linked in the process of taking the measurement.

This has led to the common generalization that a particle "knows" that it is being watched and responds to the presence of an observer by defining its state so it can be measured.

This directly contradicts very basic principles of classical physics and logic, and it's what so flummoxedSchrdinger that he developed his famous thought experiment to show just how absurd that idea is.

In order to show that a particle can't be linked to the observer on a quantum level,Schrdinger devised the idea of a diabolical device in a box. Inside the box, there isSchrdinger's Cat, as we now know it, but there is also a Geiger counter wired to a hammer.

There is also a sealed glass bottle containing poison gas and a tiny amount of a radioactive substance. Quantumly, that substance can either decay or not decay at any given moment.

If the substance decays, the Geiger counter detects the radiation and triggers the hammer to break the glass bottle, releasing the gas into the box, which would in turn kill the cat.If the substance does not decay, nothing happens and the cat remains alive.

But, because of the principle of superposition, the substance can both decay and not decay, so the Geiger counter is both smashing the bottle and not smashing the bottle, andSchrdinger's cat is both alive and dead, all at the same time.

The Copenhagen interpretation would therefore imply that it isn't until the experiment is observed by opening the box that the quantum state of decay or not decay is decided, so it is only after opening the box that the true fate of the cat inside is settled.

This question is exactly whatSchrdinger was getting at with his thought experiment. The implications of the Copenhagen interpretation simply aren't logical when applied to his cat in a box.

The proposed outcome does not match our reality, and so Schrdinger and other opponents of the Copenhagen interpretation argued that it was straying away from science and entering the world of philosophy and metaphysics.

An important distinction that needs to be made is thatSchrdinger was not saying that quantum superposition isn't real.

He was trying to illustrate that the human observers of the experiment are not the deciding factor, since any interaction with a particle in superposition by just about anything can count as an observation in the quantum sense.

Long before a human ever opens the box, the fate ofSchrdinger's cat had already been decided by the Geiger counter.

Of the Copenhagen interpretation, Einstein, writing toSchrdinger in 1950, said;

this interpretation is, however, refuted, most elegantly by your system of radioactiveatom + Geiger counter + amplifier + charge of gun powder + cat in a box, in which the[quantum wave-function] of the system contains the cat both alive and blown to bits. Is the state of thecat to be created only when a physicist investigates the situation at some definite time?Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independentof the act of observation.

As Dr. Christopher Baird, an assistant professor of physics at West Texas A&M University writes: 'quantum state collapse is not driven just by conscious observers, and 'Schrodinger's Cat' was just a teaching tool invented to try to make this fact more obvious by reducing the observer-driven notion to absurdity. Unfortunately, many popular science writers in our day continue to propagate the misconception that a quantum state (and therefore reality itself) is determined by conscious observers."

So now you know the real story behindSchrdinger's cat, but don't worry, quantum mechanics is weird enough without having to resort to a feline multiverse.

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What is Schrdinger's Cat and why is everyone trying to kill it? - Interesting Engineering

Star Trek: Picard is back with Season 2 on Paramount+, which means we get to revisit the best captain in the history of the federation don't @ me back at work. Before we go any further, there will be spoilers for the Season 2 premiere after this sentence, you've been warned.

Picard leaned pretty heavily into the nostalgia factor during the first season, bringing back a number of characters from previous Trek series, and the season two premiere is no different. The episode is a bit of a slow burn but by the end the action hits warp factor 10.

Jean-Luc finds himself aboard a ship, adjacent the rest of the fleet, staring down an enormous Borg craft. When all of a sudden, the Borg queen, decked out in a flashy new aesthetic, transports through the shields and onto the bridge. It's the worst sort of family reunion and things go downhill very quickly. Jean-Luc is faced with an impossible decision, to initiate the self-destruct sequence before the queen can infiltrate the ship's computers and gain access to the rest of the fleet.

Obviously, Picard makes the right decision and destroys the ship, killing himself and everyone else onboard. Except moments later he wakes in his home, in a wholly different version of reality. Which leaves Picard, his crew, and the viewers to wonder what the Vulcan's going on?

Perhaps the most realistic, but least fun, explanation of what's going on is that Picard has lost his grip on reality. After initiating self-destruct, Jean-Luc emerges in a version of the world which is very different from the one he left. Suddenly, he's looking at the world and feeling as though it has been altered or falsified in some way. The world around him isn't the one he's supposed to be a part of.

This is actually a fairly common circumstance, experienced by people all over the world. According to studies, between one and two percent of the world's population experiences the sensation that either they or the world around them has been made wrong in some way, at least once in their lifetime.

These symptoms are a sign of depersonalization-derealization disorder. Depersonalization refers to a sensation of detachment from your own body or self, while derealization refers to a similar sensation about the world around you. People experiencing derealization might have the feeling that they are living in a movie or a dream, or that the world around them has been distorted or twisted out of true.

Some people have reported feeling as though they've been transported to an alternate version of reality and desperately need to find their way back to their true reality. That sounds an awful lot like the experience Picard is likely to have throughout the rest of the season. Although, he appears to be sharing the experience with the rest of his crew, which lends some support to the idea that it's actually happening. It also doesn't hurt that Q shows up and straight up tells him that he's been moved to another reality to continue the test which began in the first episode of TNG.

So, if Picard isn't suffering a mental health crisis, what is happening?

The name of this thought experiment is unfortunate, but it's interesting to consider, and might serve as an explanation for how Picard and the rest of his crew found their way to an alternate reality following events which should have killed them.

You're likely already familiar with Schrdinger's Cat, but in case you're not, here's a brief primer. The thought experiment was first cooked up by Erwin Schrdinger as a way of exploring what he saw as a problem with the Copenhagen explanation of quantum physics. The central idea we need to consider is that quantum particles exist as probabilities until such time as they are observed. Meaning a particle can exist in two opposing states until looked upon by an observer. Schrdinger took this idea and set up a thought experiment in the following way. First, we have a cat locked in a box. Inside the box is a device which is capable of smashing a container holding a deadly poison. The poison container is opened only if a particle achieves one state or the other.

Because quantum states exist in superposition, meaning all possible states at once until observed, the cat inside the box must be both alive and dead until we open the box.

The idea of quantum suicide takes this same thought experiment but adds one additional twist. Instead of a cat inside a box, we have a human observer. Because a quantum state must exist in superposition until it is observed, the only possible outcome is that the poison is never activated. If it were, there would be no one alive in the box to observe it.

Essentially, a deadly scenario necessarily favors a shift toward realities in which the observer in this case Picard and his entire crew isn't dead. This thought experiment is considered perhaps one of the only ways to confirm the validity of the many worlds multiverse hypothesis. Although it would only prove the existence of the multiverse to the person, or people, inside the experiment. To everyone else, they'd just be living in the world they always lived in.

On paper, it appears to work, but the risk is immense. We don't recommend it. If you're dealing with thoughts of suicide, depersonalization, derealization, or other mental health stresses, please reach out for help. Whether other realities exist or not, we want you here, safe and healthy, so we can fix the future together.

If you or a loved one is experiencing a mental health crisis, call the suicide hotline:1-800-273-8255or text the Crisis Text Line: 741-741.

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So, you're in an alternate reality, what gives? The science behind 'Picard' - Syfy