Category Archives: Quantum Physics
Findings show impact of mutations on pre-existing antibodies among vaccinated individuals, those who previo… – newsconcerns
While the Omicron variant continues to infect people around the world, researchers at the University of Missouri have identified the highly prevalent, specific mutations that are causing the Omicron variants high rate of infection.
The findings help explain how the new variant can escape pre-existing antibodies present in the human body, either from vaccination or naturally from a recent COVID-19 infection.
We know that viruses evolve over time and acquire mutations, so when we first heard of the new Omicron variant, we wanted to identify the mutations specific to this variant, said Kamlendra Singh, a professor in the MU College of Veterinary Medicine, assistant director of the MU Molecular Interactions Core and Bond Life Sciences Center investigator.
Singh collaborated with Saathvik Kannan, a freshman at Hickman High School in Columbia, Missouri, and Austin Spratt, an undergraduate student at MU, and Sid Byrareddy of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, to analyze protein sequences of Omicron samples from around the world, including South Africa, Botswana and the United States. The team identified 46 highly prevalent mutations specific to Omicron, including several located in the region of the virus spike protein where antibodies bind to the virus in order to prevent infection.
The purpose of antibodies is to recognize the virus and stop the binding, which prevents infection, Singh said. However, we found many of the mutations in the Omicron variant are located right where the antibodies are supposed to bind, so we are showing how the virus continues to evolve in a way that it can potentially escape or evade the existing antibodies, and therefore continue to infect so many people.
As antiviral treatments for individuals infected with COVID-19 continue to be developed, Singh explained that having a better understanding of how the virus is evolving will help ensure future antiviral treatments will be targeted toward the specific parts of the virus to produce the most effective outcomes.
In a recent trip to his native India, Singh met with Manish Sisodia, the deputy chief minister of Delhi, to discuss the launch of CoroQuil-Zn, a supplement that can be taken while infected with COVID-19 to help reduce ones viral load. The supplement, which Singh helped to develop, is now being used by patients in Tamil Nadu, a state in India. The manufacturer will soon seek FDA approval for its distribution in the United States.
The first step toward solving a problem is getting a better understanding of the specific problem in the first place, Singh said. It feels good to be contributing to research that is helping out with the pandemic situation, which has obviously been affecting people all over the world.
Omicron SARS-CoV-2 variant: Unique features and their impact on pre-existing antibodies was recently published in Journal of Autoimmunity. Funding for the study was provided by the Bond Life Sciences Center, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Strategic Research Institute at the University of Nebraska. Siddappa Byrareddy of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Hitendra Chand of Florida International University and Kalicharan Sharma of Delhi Pharmaceutical Sciences and Research University were co-authors on the study.
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Materials provided by University of Missouri-Columbia. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
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‘When We Cease to Understand the World’ By Benjamn Labatut Explores the Abyss in Which Science Becomes Literature – Pajiba
Let me preempt my biases here: Theres a bit of patriotic pride in my review of this book, as Benjamn Labatut was already among the standout figures in contemporary Chilean Literature before When We Cease to Understand the World blew up, being published almost concurrently in English, German and French, being shortlisted for the International Booker Prize of 2021 and being praised by President Obama himself:
When We Cease to Understand the World joins the canon of books deemed unclassifiable, even though that label shouldve been disaggregated decades ago. In four chapters and an epilogue totaling somewhere around 200 pages, the book entangles together history, chronicle, essay, narrative fiction, and character studies into a working theory on the paradoxes of science, history, and a bit of neurodivergence.
The first chapter, Prussian Blue, introduces us to the books exploration of the interwoven relationship between scientific discovery and horror. Some of you might recognize it right away, how the chemical structure of that pigment is in the same family of cyanide and, eventually, the invention of Zyklon B, the gas used during the Holocaust. In a seamless wave, Labatut goes back and forth into the layers of past of modernity, from the use of methamphetamines in WWII to the origins of Prussian Blue and cyanide, completing the cycle with the figure of Fritz Haber, the brilliant chemist who helped discover the process to extract nitrate fertilizers, helped the German Empire chemical warfare efforts in World War I and, almost by accident, discovered the insecticide Zyklon, the same that would be used shortly after by the Nazis to exterminate most of his family. At the same time, Haber ushered in the fertilizer revolution that has fed billions of people over the last century, while also contributing to the two seminal horrors of the 20th Century.
Figures like Haber populate When We Cease, but Labatut crafts a sort of compassionate distancing that makes this book something more than an exploration of the dark side of science, as many blurbs have praised it to be. I dont think this book is about the darkness of science, or at least, not all the scientific discoveries depicted here are as terrible as Habers.
There is the chapter about how Karl Schwarzschild managed to solve Einsteins general relativity equations while serving and dying of an autoimmune disease in the frontlines of World War I. It is also a compact biopic of an obsessive but brilliant man who managed to complete the physics theory and introduce the very concept of a black hole in the singularity he proved. There are also the pure Mathematics theories developed by Shinichi Mochizuki and his predecessor, Alexander Grothendieck, probably one of the greatest and most revolutionary mathematicians of the past century, both of whom were driven to mental breakdowns by developing a new field of mathematics or trying to unearth the heart of the heart of maths. Finally, there is a longer novella about how Werner Heisenberg, Louis De Broglie and Erwin Schrdinger, all discovering parts of the paradoxical universe of the elementary particles, all while spiraling in and out of physical and psychological ailments. Discoveries whose theses would be syncretized in the famous Fifth Solvay Conference of 1927 (Quantumania!), that helped lay the foundations of Quantum Theory (and where the header picture was taken), under the baffled guidance of an Albert Einstein that sees how even the paradigm-shift he brought about wasnt enough to explain the universe.
In each of these stories, Labatut does show us the dark places these actual, unquestionable geniuses have to go through in order to prove conclusions, conclusions that appear to us in brains wired to turn patterns into narratives, as breakthroughs, lights at the end of tunnels. Instead, Labatut uses psychological turmoil and tension as a clever red herring, as he draws a thesis that frustrates any triumph: All these geniuses put their sanity on the line just to discover how inexplicable the foundations of the world can be, while using the very evidence-based methodology that systematically proves and falsifies a theory. At the same time, this book doesnt turn the aforementioned into yet another simplistic warning on the dangers of science.
And thats where Literature comes in. This book is cleverly and devilishly structured, as Philip Pullman described it, as both a wave and a particle. A quantum field of theses, improving on Javier Cercas notion of the blind-spot novel, about how the best literature is structured around an open-ended question. Instead, the stories in When We Cease can collapse into that first thesis when read one way, but this is also a literary character study. Labatuts creative license is supported by tracing the places and experiences the characters actually had, all of which share the 20th century as a trauma, in particular the European Jewish experience, but also the trenches of World War I, the collapse of the German and Austrian Empires and the ancient regime and as it becomes evident in their traits neurodivergence before it had a name and way before we began understanding it as more than a handicap. All these stories seem to show a correlation between scientific progress and a trail of broken men. But that theory is also falsifiable; there can be scientific progress without a trail of disaster.
There is a concerted effort to make these figures something more than the last of the solitary-genius scientist types, as Labatut imbues with Literature their dives into the ultimate abstraction. There is this clich about how language falls short when talking about certain things, like the Holocaust or Quantum theory. Except it doesnt, more so with abstract sciences. This book proves that Literature can and should sing about Science because it has the resources to explain a phenomenon in ways Science cannot, without ever forgetting that Science does have the proof. Maybe thats just me, a pro-Science fanatic that will always place the Natural Sciences above my own discipline. But Literature can be another language to understand the world, or at least the quantum results in which we collapsed a phenomenon. That, I think, its the other way this book can be measured.
Labatuts prose is impeccable, fast-paced, easy to follow by just about everyone. This is also what makes it surprisingly adaptable to screen. It would work amazingly in a mixture of non-fiction and narrative like Raoul Pecks Exterminate All the Brutes.
When We Cease to Understand the World was translated into English by Adrian Nathan West, published by Pushkin Press in the U.K., and by New York Review Books in the USA.This is also the first book Alberto Cox has read in 8 months, make of that what you will
Review: 'Brian and Charles' Is A Lo-Fi Franken-Comedy Bursting With Goofball Charm |Questions 'Yellowjackets' Will Not Answer Next Season
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11 Pivotal Moments In The History Of Timekeeping – Forbes
The US release of my new book, A Brief History of Timekeeping, is tomorrow (Tuesday, Jan 25), and in honor of that, I thought it would be worth a post giving quick summaries of some of the most important developments in the history of the science and technology of measuring time. As discussed in previous posts here, this is a long and deep history, stretching back thousands of years, so lets start at the beginning:
Newgrange Passage Tombs, Boyne Valley, County Meath, Ireland (Photo by Hoberman Collection/Universal ... [+] Images Group via Getty Images)
1) The Invention of Solstice Markers, more than 5,200 years ago: While we often talk about consciousness of time as a modern problem, the actual history of timekeeping is remarkably deep, stretching well back before the invention of language. The oldest functioning clock we have rely on the slow motion of the rising and setting sun along the horizon, tracked by monumental structures aligned to highlight the position corresponding to a particular date, usually one of the solstices. The most famous of these is probably Stonehenge in the UK, but Im more fond of the passage tomb at Newgrange (near Dublin, Ireland), which consists of an artificial hill with a vaulted central chamber reached by a narrow 20-meter passage aligned so that the rising sun on the December solstice (the shortest day of the Northern Hemisphere year) casts a narrow ray all the way to the center. This was constructed around 3200 BCE, and still functions today you can enter a lottery to win one of a handful of spots in the central chamber to see the sunrise (no refunds in the event of cloudy weather, alas).
UNSPECIFIED - CIRCA 1900: Greek civilization - 5th century b.C. - Terracotta clepsydra, water ... [+] clock, realized with a 6 litre vessel. (Photo By DEA / G. NIMATALLAH/De Agostini via Getty Images)
2) The Invention of Constant-Flow Water Clocks, more than 3,500 years ago: Incredibly, we can actually put a name to a person who claims credit for this: an inscription in the tomb of an Egyptian court official named Amenemhet from around 1500 BCE brags that he had presented the pharaoh Amenhotep I with a water clock that could track the hours of the night accurately through all the seasons of the year. We dont have this specific clock, but we have a good idea what it was, thanks to the Karnak Clepsydra from a couple centuries later: a tapered vessel shaped something like a modern flowerpot, with a hole at the bottom and twelve columns of lines on the interior to mark the water level corresponding to different hours for each of the months of the Egyptian civil calendar. Modern studies suggest that the taper corrects for the tendency of the outflow to slow as the water level drops, and this combined with the position of the lines suggests that it could be accurate to within around 15 minutes, which is remarkably good for such a simple device, well worth a mention in your epitaph.
February 29th. Date which repeats on leap year. Calendar (rare days) concept.
3) The Introduction of Leap Years, 8 BCE: We dont necessarily think of calendars and clocks as being the same thing, but they are: theyre both tools for tracking the passage of time by counting ticks, and predicting the repetition of certain natural cycles. In the case of a clock, the tick is the motion of a pendulum or a quartz crystal, and the repeating cycle is the rising and setting of the sun for each new day; in the case of a calendar, the tick is a day, and the repeating cycle is the change of seasons for each new year. A tropical year isnt an integer number of days, though, so we need to do something clever to keep track, and the introduction of the Julian calendar (completed in 8BCE by the Emperor Augustus) provides an elegantly simple method of aligning fixed-length months with the seasons, adding one day to February every four years. Averaged over a full cycle, this comes within 11 minutes of the true length of a tropical year; this did need to be corrected by the Gregorian reform in 1582 (as previously discussed here and here), but is remarkably good for its time.
4) The Tower Clock of Su Song, 1094 CE: This is a bit of a cheat, since its not actually a step in a continuing process (as nothing that follows was directly built on its principles), but it was a sufficiently remarkable achievement that I have to give it a mention. Su Song was an official in the court of the Northern Song dynasty in Kaifeng who, after narrowly avoiding a diplomatic incident caused by a calendrical error, built a monumental public clock powered by a constant-flow water source turning a massive wheel that turned a giant celestial globe and an armillary sphere in time with the stars. Su Songs clock also had elaborate public-facing displays to show the time to the citizens of Kaifeng, and ring bells and beat drums to announce the hours. It was only in operation for around 30 years before the Northern Song collapsed, but as we can see from modern reconstructions, it was an extremely impressive device in its day.
5) The Invention of Mechanical Clocks, 1200 CE (give or take): The exact origin of mechanical clocks is a little obscure, but clocks based on a verge and foliot system, marking time by counting the swings of a weight twisting back and forth, powered by falling weights, spread across Europe during the 1500s. The early examples werent terribly accurate they didnt have minute hands for the first few centuries but offered significant advantages over both sundials (which dont work when its cloudy) and water clocks (which can freeze up in the winter). This is the point where the tick-tock sound of gear teeth colliding with each other enters the world of timekeeping.
Kepler's illustration to explain his discovery of the elliptical orbit of Mars, 1609. Working with ... [+] data collected by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) determined that planetary orbits were elliptical rather than spherical. He formulated three laws of planetary motion, known as Kepler's laws, using them to accurately predict the Transit of Venus which occurred in 1631. From Astronomia Nova...de Motibus Stellae Martis by Johannes Kepler, 1609. (Photo by Oxford Science Archive/Print Collector/Getty Images)
6) Keplers Laws of Planetary Motion, 1609: This might not seem like it fits with the others, but Johannes Keplers introduction of his Laws of Planetary Motion, based on the data collected by Tycho Brahe over the preceding decades, allowed the rigorous prediction of the motion of the planets, the moons of Jupiter, and eventually the Moon, all of which were to prove incredibly useful for the determination and tracking of time in years to come. His work also helped inspire the work of Newton and other natural philosophers that set physics on the path to the modern ultra-precise science that it has become.
7) The Invention of Pendulum Clocks, 1657: Using a pendulum to make a more reliable version of a mechanical clock was first proposed by Galileo Galilei in the 1630s, but he was more or less completely blind by then, so never built a working model. The first working pendulum clock was made by Christiaan Huygens and Salomon Coster in the Netherlands in 1657 (Robert Hooke in England had some priority disputes with Huygens over early clocks, because thats what Robert Hooke did, but historians agree Huygens and Coster were first). Within a decade, pendulum-based clocks accurate to seconds per day, and became an indispensable tool for astronomy.
Vintage photograph of celestial navigation instruments including a sextant, a nautical almanac, ... [+] parallel rules, a compass, a map, binoculars, magnifying glass, a nautical star chart, and a captains hat. 1920s. (Photo by Found Image Holdings/Corbis via Getty Images)
8) The Longitude Problem, 1700s: As European empires expanded across the globe, navigation became a critically important problem, one with a close connection to timekeeping. Knowing your longitude requires knowing the difference between the time (as measured by the position of the sun) at two different places on the rotating Earth, but keeping accurate time on board a ship in the age of sail was a formidable challenge. This eventually prompted a number of offers of royal prizes, most famously the UKs Longitude Prize in 1714, which in turn inspired scientists and engineers to work toward two solutions: the more celebrated in modern times is the marine chronometer invented by John Harrison, but the Method of Lunar Distances made possible by the measurements of Tobias Mayer and turned into the Nautical Almanac by the astronomer Nevil Maskelyne was just as important at the time.
UNITED KINGDOM - JUNE 01: A New Quartz Chrystal Oscillmator Clock Is Installed At The Royal ... [+] Observatory Of Greenwich On June 01St 1939. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)
9) The Invention of Quartz Clocks, 1927: These days, we take high-quality timekeeping for granted: you can walk into a supermarket in the US and buy a clock for a few dollars that will keep time better than the best mechanical watch produced by John Harrison and his contemporaries. These are powered by the exceptionally regular motion of vibrating crystals of quartz, which was first used to power a clock in 1927 by Warren Marrison and Joseph Horton. These became commercial products over the next few decades, with the first quartz watches arriving in the late 1960s, and are now essentially ubiquitous. Almost any electrically powered clock you can find nowadays has a quartz oscillator inside, shaking back and forth at exactly 32,768 oscillations per second.
UNITED KINGDOM - JANUARY 12: This was the first atomic clock and when it was developed in 1955, it ... [+] was the most accurate timekeeper in the world. The timekeeping depends on the vibration of caesium stones - a natural phenomenon. It consists of an airless tube, which allows caesium atoms to pass along it while simultaneously exposing them to very high frequency radio waves. Isidor Rabi was the first to suggest using the stable vibration of caesium as a time, or frequency, standard in his Richtmeyer Lecture to the American Physical Society in 1945. In 1953, Louis Essen and Jack Parry developed the idea at the National Physical Laboratory in the UK, and their work yielded this clock which is accurate to one second in 300 years. Now, international time is defined by atomic, not solar seconds. (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)
10) The Invention of Cesium Clocks, 1955: The modern definition of the second, central to the SI system of units, is 9,192,631,770 oscillations of the light produced when cesium-133 atoms move between two particular energy states. This frequency is determined by the laws of quantum mechanics, discovered in the 1920s, and makes every cesium atom in the universe a potential reference for a clock based on light, with no physical moving parts. The first cesium atomic clock was made by Louis Essen and Jack Parry in the UKs National Physical Laboratory in 1955, and there are now hundreds of cesium clocks in operation in standard labs all around the world, and orbiting the Earth as part of the Global Positioning System. The best of these are so accurate they would need to be run for something like a billion years before theyd drift off by one full second.
Stockholm, SWEDEN: Nobel Prize winner in Physics, US Roy J. Glauber (L), US John L. Hall (C) and ... [+] German Theodor W. Hansch (R), give a joint press conference in Stockholm, Sweden, 07 December 2005. They will be awarded 10 December with The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2005 : Glauber "for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence", Hall and Hansch, "for their contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique". AFP PHOTO - SVEN NACKSTRAND (Photo credit should read SVEN NACKSTRAND/AFP via Getty Images)
11) The Optical Frequency Comb, 1990s: Incredibly, those one-second-in-a-billion-years cesium clocks arent the best clocks in the world today not even close. There are experimental clocks in development that are a hundred times more accurate than the best cesium clock, based on the oscillation frequency of light in the visible or even ultraviolet range. The key enabling technology for this is the optical frequency comb, which was recognized with half of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics for John Hall and Theodor W. Hnsch. These combs use ultrafast lasers to make a system allowing the determination and comparison of frequencies at the 18-decimal-place kind of level. Theyre not used for time standards yet, but if cesium is ever supplanted by another element as the definition of the second, you can bet that a frequency comb system will be at the heart of the clock.
And there you have it, a timeline of timekeeping. All of these topics, plus more are discussed in much more detail in A Brief History of Timekeeping, available tomorrow wherever books are sold.
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Centuries-old ‘impossible’ math problem cracked using the strange physics of Schrdinger’s cat – Livescience.com
A math problem developed 243 years ago can be solved only by using quantum entanglement, new research finds.
The mathematics problem is a bit like Sudoku on steroids. It's called Euler's officer problem, after Leonhard Euler, the mathematician who first proposed it in 1779. Here's the puzzle: You're commanding an army with six regiments. Each regiment contains six different officers of six different ranks. Can you arrange them in a 6-by-6 square without repeating a rank or regiment in any given row or column?
Euler couldn't find such an arrangement, and later computations proved that there was no solution. In fact, a paper published in 1960 in the Canadian Journal of Mathematics used the newfound power of computers to show that 6 was the one number over 2 where no such arrangement existed.
Now, though, researchers have found a new solution to Euler's problem. As Quanta Magazine's Daniel Garisto reported, a new study posted to the preprint database arXiv finds that you can arrange six regiments of six officers of six different ranks in a grid without repeating any rank or regiment more than once in any row or column if the officers are in a state of quantum entanglement.
The paper, which has been submitted for peer review at the journal Physical Review Letters, takes advantage of the fact that quantum objects can be in multiple possible states until they are measured. (Quantum entanglement was famously demonstrated by the Schrdinger's cat thought experiment, in which a cat is trapped in a box with radioactive poison; the cat is both dead and alive until you open the box.)
In Euler's classic problem, each officer has a static regiment and rank. They might be a first lieutenant in the Red Regiment, for example, or a captain in the Blue Regiment. (Colors are sometimes used in visualizing the grids, to make it easier to identify the regiments.)
But a quantum officer might occupy more than one regiment or rank at once. A single officer could be either a Red Regiment first lieutenant or a Blue Regiment captain; a Green Regiment major or Purple Regiment colonel. (Or, theoretically, any other combination.)
The key to solving Euler's problem with this identity switcheroo is that the officers on the grid can be in a state of quantum entanglement. In entanglement, the state of one object informs the state of another. If Officer No. 1 is, in fact, a Red Regiment first lieutenant, Officer No. 2 must be a major in the Green Regiment, and vice versa.
Using brute-force computer power, the authors of the new paper, led by Adam Burchardt, a postdoctoral researcher at Jagiellonian University in Poland, proved that filling the grid with quantum officers made the solution possible. Surprisingly, the entanglement has its own pattern, study co-author Suhail Rather, a physicist at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, told Quanta Magazine. Officers are only entangled with officers of ranks one step below or above them, while regiments are also only entangled with adjacent regiments.
The results could have real impacts on quantum data storage, according to Quanta Magazine. Entangled states can be used in quantum computing to ensure that data is safe even in the case of an error a process called quantum error correction. By entangling 36 quantum officers in a state of interdependent relationships, the researchers found what is called an absolutely maximally entangled state. Such states can be important for resilient data storage in quantum computing.
You can read all about the impossible problem's solution in Quanta Magazine.
Originally published on Live Science.
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Ginsburgs Give to Create New Quantum Center and Building at Caltech – Caltech
In the Dr. Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg Center for Quantum Precision Measurement, Caltech researchers will develop tools and concepts with the potential to influence all areas of science and technology through unprecedented sensing, measurement, and engineering capabilities.
The fulcrum of a major initiative in quantum science and technology, the center will unite a diverse community of theorists and experimentalists devoted to understanding quantum systems and their potential uses (see a video about the new center). It will bring together researchers in three fields that progress hand in hand: quantum sensing, quantum information, and gravitational-wave detectionthe direct observation of ripples in spacetime.
The center will be housed in a six-story building to be constructed thanks in part to a generous donation by Dr. Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg to name the facility. The new building, fully funded by philanthropy, will bring architectural innovation to a historic campus entrance on California Boulevard.
"Lady Charlotte and I are enchanted with beautiful minds found at institutions of higher learning, especially Caltech," Dr. Ginsburg says. "Our quest early on is to enlist these mind-gifted students into the lifetime of excitement awaiting them in contributing to making our planet, oceans, and universe into the ennoblement of humanity."
"Allen and Charlotte are inspired by the potential the future holds and how they can realize the promise of coming technologies," says Caltech president Thomas F. Rosenbaum, the Sonja and William Davidow Presidential Chair and professor of physics. "Through their generous philanthropy, the Ginsburgs are investing in the young people and the cross-disciplinary collaborations that will help jump start the next era of quantum discoveries."
The building will feature four floors of airy interaction spaces and offices, amounting to more than 47,000 gross square feet, built atop two floors of state-of-the-art underground laboratories that were recently made possible by a major grant from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation. The building concept includes a glass design and attractive external elements evoking quantum discovery.
"I think the researchers will love it," says Charlotte Ginsburg, who has honed her eye for design over years of involvement with performing arts organizations. "It will be light. There will be open areas for labs and a lot of spaces where the students and professors can get together."
A potential design for the new center. With preliminary studies complete, the detailed design and construction process launched in January 2022.
To maximize collaboration, the center also will feature passageways to three adjacent buildings: the Ronald and Maxine Linde Hall of Mathematics and Physics, the W. K. Kellogg Laboratory, and the Downs and Lauritsen laboratories of physics, home to the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics.
"It will be a trifecta where you have buildings that are very deeply connected to this new one," Allen Ginsburg says. "You have the various disciplines together in a small space, sharing common auditoriums, communicating with each other. You can glean tremendous things from other fields that you wouldn't otherwise get by remaining in one discipline. I think this is the thing of the future."
To illustrate, Allen, a retired ophthalmologist, describes the surprising gains he and colleagues made by taking time to exchange visits with other specialists: orthopedic surgeons and neurosurgeons.
"We saw tools and techniques that they were using that were second nature to them but that we didn't realize existed," he says. "And we were able to amalgamate them into our repertoire. Wherever you have interdisciplinary communication, it is very, very exciting. Because great things come out of it when people share."
The Ginsburgs, who live near Long Beach, began exploring a partnership with Caltech in spring 2020. This is their first gift to the Institute. The causes they support range widely, encompassing the performing arts, science, medicine, and conservation. They have supported cutting-edge research efforts at several local universities. Whether giving to the ballet, the Aquarium of the Pacific, the Long Beach Symphony, or a research institution, the Ginsburgs applaud people striving for excellence.
"We are so grateful to Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg. Their lead gift allows us to realize our goal to unite the community pursuing new quantum strategies," says Fiona Harrison, Caltech's Harold A. Rosen Professor of Physics and the Kent and Joyce Kresa Leadership Chair of the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy. "The new building will be the home of extraordinary ideas that provide pathbreaking new directions for scientific discovery."
Initially intrigued by Caltech's integration with JPL, the Ginsburgs recently began visiting campus to tour laboratories and meet with faculty, students and campus leadership.
"We love the campus, the architecture, the trees, the surrounding neighborhoods," Charlotte says. "It's beautiful. We love the history, too."
Allen Ginsburg often thinks about how the future will unfold, and he foresees the promise of quantum devices. One day, he speculates, quantum instruments will image the tiniest components of cells in detail, quantum computers will expand our knowledge, and novel instruments for telescopes and gravitational-wave detectors will reveal the secrets of Earth-like exoplanets, black holes, and other galaxies.
"I think there are a lot of things that Caltech and JPL are doing that are in the interest of the planet, and it's very exciting to be involved," Allen says. "We're enchanted with Caltech. I was able to talk to people who do research at Caltech, and we made a fantastic connection."
The new building will physically connect to multiple recently renovated spaces for physics and mathematics.
Credit: Chris Flynn/Max S. Gerber
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Ginsburgs Give to Create New Quantum Center and Building at Caltech - Caltech
Space Caf WebTalk with Peter Hulsroj: How to get philosophy and physics talking – SpaceWatch.Global
By Luisa Low
During this weeks Space Caf, SpaceWatch.Global Publisher Torsten Kriening sat down with Peter Hulsroj, a legal consultant for intergovernmental organisations, attorney, specialist in nuclear disarmament, space and international law, and now, author and blogger.
With a career spanning four decades which commenced after studying law at the University of Copenhagen and Harvard Law School Peter was previously Director of the European Space and Policy Centre based in Vienna, a legal adviser for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation, Head of Contracts and Legal Affairs at Contracts Officer at The European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites, a contract officer at the European Space Agency and legal attorney in Copenhagen.
Fast forward to 2022 and Peter has published three books and is the author of an online blog What if we dont die? in which he analyses various topics ranging from American elections, boomers and poetry all the way through to climate change, corruption and policy.
Late last year, with his co-author, European Space Policy Institute researcher Marco Aliberti, Peter published The Optional Society, a modern philosophical enquiry into our seemingly limitless world and the challenges it brings.
This week, he and Torsten discuss what the science world and space industry can gain from the philosophical analysis of the modern world, and from someone who has broken the mould and branched out.
Navigating a brave new world a universe of options
The modern world with its proliferation of options and seemingly limitless possibilities is presenting new challenges for humanity, according to Peter Hulsroj and Marco Aliberti.
One area that The Optional Society explores is how growing areas like quantum mechanics, genetics and AI are intersecting with human rights, economics, religion and lifestyle, and how as a global society and individuals we might go about addressing these areas.
According to Peter, one way to even begin to make sense of this enormous shift and ensure it aligns with the positive progression of society is to examine growing issues through a multidisciplinary, collaborative approach. This could be through philosophers working with physicists so that science can better inform philosophy, and conversely, how philosophy and thought can better advise the creation of new technology so it can better serve humankind.
I know people get nervous when you use the word philosophy there is no reason to be nervous about it. This is just a question of looking at the fundamental equations, and particularly space science has so much to tell us and we need to have a structured approach to how we can reap the benefits.
Quantum mechanics is a topic which is raising an enormous number of interesting philosophical problems. But, generally speaking, it is the physicist who is explaining the philosophical issues, not the philosopher we need it in both directions.
And really, for space, there are so many issues for example, can we establish whether we have parallel universes. And that is very interesting from a space physics and science perspective whether we have extraterrestrial life. But this is, of course, is also fundamentally important for philosophy.
A balancing act of art and science
Last week, NASA announced that the James Webb Space Telescope had reached a major milestone with the unfolding of its mirror the final stage of the spacecrafts deployments rendering it ready for scientific operations.
Collaborating with the ESA and the Canadian Space Agency, the purpose of the James Webb mission is to better observe and ultimately understand the cosmoss ancient history and birth.
The telescopes final unfurling was a historic milestone for NASA, but it is far more monumental to the understanding of our very existence.
At the programs core, Peter says, is philosophical questioning that should be used to inform scientists to more carefully navigate the programs mission and findings.
There are many philosophical issues, [for example] how something comes from nothing. James Webb might tell us something about that. It requires that people other than physicists also looking at this.
Exploration itself, according to Peter, is interesting because in many instances what is eventually found was not even searched for.
You also people who deal with the existential questions to say, Hey, this is an interesting finding not only for the space physicist this is an existential finding and we need to translate this.
To listen to Peter Hulsrojs insights and thoughts on the intersection of science and philosophy and the world of options, you can watch the full program here:
Luisa Low is a freelance journalist and media adviser from Sydney, Australia. She currently manages Media and Public Relations for the University of Sydneys Faculty of Engineering.
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The absolutely amazing theory of almost everything – Asia Times
The Standard Model. What a dull name for the most accurate scientific theory known to human beings.
More than a quarter of the Nobel Prizes in physics of the last century are direct inputs to or direct results of the Standard Model. Yet its name suggests that if you can afford a few extra dollars a month you should buy the upgrade. As a theoretical physicist, Id prefer The Absolutely Amazing Theory of Almost Everything. Thats what the Standard Model really is.
Many recall the excitement among scientists and media over the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson. But that much-ballyhooed event didnt come out of the blue it capped a five-decade undefeated streak for the Standard Model. Every fundamental force but gravity is included in it. Every attempt to overturn it or to demonstrate in the laboratory that it must be substantially reworked and there have been many over the past 50 years has failed.
In short, the Standard Model answers this question: What is everything made of, and how does it hold together?
You know, of course, that the world around us is made of molecules, and molecules are made of atoms. Chemist Dmitri Mendeleev figured out in the 1860s how to organize all atoms that is, the elements into the periodic table that you probably studied in middle school. But there are 118 different chemical elements. Theres antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium and 114 more.
Physicists like things simple. We want to boil things down to their essence, a few basic building blocks. Over a hundred chemical elements is not simple. The ancients believed that everything is made of just five elements earth, water, fire, air and aether. Five is much simpler than 118. Its also wrong.
By 1932, scientists knew that all those atoms are made of just three particles neutrons, protons and electrons. The neutrons and protons are bound together tightly into the nucleus. The electrons, thousands of times lighter, whirl around the nucleus at speeds approaching that of light. Physicists Planck, Bohr, Schroedinger, Heisenberg and friends had invented a new science quantum mechanics to explain this motion.
That would have been a satisfying place to stop. Just three particles. Three is even simpler than five. But held together how? The negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons are bound together by electromagnetism. But the protons are all huddled together in the nucleus and their positive charges should be pushing them powerfully apart. The neutral neutrons cant help.
What binds these protons and neutrons together? Divine intervention, a man on a Toronto street corner told me; he had a pamphlet, I could read all about it. But this scenario seemed like a lot of trouble even for a divine being keeping tabs on every single one of the universes 10 protons and neutrons and bending them to its will.
Meanwhile, nature cruelly declined to keep its zoo of particles to just three. Really four, because we should count the photon, the particle of light that Einstein described. Four grew to five when Anderson measured electrons with positive charge positrons striking the Earth from outer space. At least Dirac had predicted these first anti-matter particles. Five became six when the pion, which Yukawa predicted would hold the nucleus together, was found.
Then came the muon 200 times heavier than the electron, but otherwise a twin. Who ordered that? I.I. Rabi quipped. That sums it up. Number seven. Not only not simple, redundant.
By the 1960s there were hundreds of fundamental particles. In place of the well-organized periodic table, there were just long lists of baryons (heavy particles like protons and neutrons), mesons (like Yukawas pions) and leptons (light particles like the electron, and the elusive neutrinos) with no organization and no guiding principles.
Into this breach sidled the Standard Model. It was not an overnight flash of brilliance. No Archimedes leapt out of a bathtub shouting Eureka! Instead, there was a series of crucial insights by a few key individuals in the mid-1960s that transformed this quagmire into a simple theory, and then five decades of experimental verification and theoretical elaboration.
Quarks. They come in six varieties we call flavors. Like ice cream, except not as tasty. Instead of vanilla, chocolate and so on, we have up, down, strange, charm, bottom and top. In 1964, Gell-Mann and Zweig taught us the recipes: Mix and match any three quarks to get a baryon. Protons are two ups and a down quark bound together; neutrons are two downs and an up. Choose one quark and one antiquark to get a meson. A pion is an up or a down quark bound to an anti-up or an anti-down. All the material of our daily lives is made of just up and down quarks and anti-quarks and electrons.
Simple. Well, simple-ish, because keeping those quarks bound is a feat. They are tied to one another so tightly that you never ever find a quark or anti-quark on its own. The theory of that binding, and of the particles called gluons (chuckle) that are responsible, is called quantum chromodynamics. Its a vital piece of the Standard Model, but mathematically difficult, even posing an unsolved problem of basic mathematics. We physicists do our best to calculate with it, but were still learning how.
The other aspect of the Standard Model is A Model of Leptons. Thats the name of the landmark 1967 paper by Steven Weinberg that pulled together quantum mechanics with the vital pieces of knowledge of how particles interact and organized the two into a single theory. It incorporated the familiar electromagnetism, joined it with what physicists called the weak force that causes certain radioactive decays, and explained that they were different aspects of the same force. It incorporated the Higgs mechanism for giving mass to fundamental particles.
Since then, the Standard Model has predicted the results of experiment after experiment, including the discovery of several varieties of quarks and of the W and Z bosons heavy particles that are for weak interactions what the photon is for electromagnetism. The possibility that neutrinos arent massless was overlooked in the 1960s, but slipped easily into the Standard Model in the 1990s, a few decades late to the party.
Discovering the Higgs boson in 2012, long predicted by the Standard Model and long sought after, was a thrill but not a surprise. It was yet another crucial victory for the Standard Model over the dark forces that particle physicists have repeatedly warned loomed over the horizon. Concerned that the Standard Model didnt adequately embody their expectations of simplicity, worried about its mathematical self-consistency or looking ahead to the eventual necessity to bring the force of gravity into the fold, physicists have made numerous proposals for theories beyond the Standard Model. These bear exciting names like Grand Unified Theories, Supersymmetry, Technicolor, and String Theory.
Sadly, at least for their proponents, beyond-the-Standard-Model theories have not yet successfully predicted any new experimental phenomenon or any experimental discrepancy with the Standard Model.
After five decades, far from requiring an upgrade, the Standard Model is worthy of celebration as the Absolutely Amazing Theory of Almost Everything.
Glenn Starkman is distinguished university professor of physics at Case Western Reserve University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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The absolutely amazing theory of almost everything - Asia Times
Flawed diamonds may be the key to quantum internet – MINING.COM – MINING.com
Imagine trying to connect an Altair, an early personal computer developed in 1974, to the internet via WiFi. Its a difficult, but not impossible task. The two technologies speak different languages, so the first step is to help translate, the researchers said in a media statement.
Having noticed this issue, they decided to develop an interface approach to control the diamond nitrogen-vacancy centers in a way that allows direct translation to quantum devices.
To realize the quantum internet, a quantum interface is required to generate remote quantum entanglement by photons, which are a quantum communication medium, Hideo Kosaka, one of the studys authors, said.
According to Kosaka, the promised quantum internet is rooted in more than a centurys worth of work in which researchers determined that photons are both particles and waves of light simultaneouslyand that their wave state can reveal information about their particle state and vice versa.
More than that, the two states could influence each other: pinching the wave could bruise the particle, so to speak. Their very nature is entangled, even across vast distances. The aim is to control the entanglement to communicate discrete data instantaneously and securely, he said.
The scientist pointed out that previous research has demonstrated this controlled entanglement can be achieved by applying a magnetic field to the nitrogen-vacancy centers, but a non-magnetic field approach is needed to move closer to realizing the quantum internet.
His team successfully used microwave and light polarized waves to entangle an emitted photon and left spin qubits, the quantum equivalent of information bits in classical systems. These polarizations are waves that move perpendicular to the originating source, like seismic waves radiating out horizontally from a vertical fault shift.
In quantum mechanics, the spin propertyeither right-or left-handedof the photon determines how the polarization moves, meaning it is predictable and controllable. Critically, according to Kosaka, when inducing entanglement via this property under a non-magnetic field, the connection appears steadfast against other variables.
The geometric nature of polarization allows us to generate remote quantum entanglement that is resilient to noise and timing errors, Kosaka said.
The researcher and his team now plan to combine this approach with a previously demonstrated quantum information transfer via teleportation to generate quantum entanglement, and the resulting exchange of information, between remote locations. The eventual goal is to facilitate a connected network of quantum computers to establish a quantum internet.
The realization of a quantum internet will enable quantum cryptography, distributed quantum computation and quantum sensing over long distances of more than 1,000 kilometers, the expert said.
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Flawed diamonds may be the key to quantum internet - MINING.COM - MINING.com
Israeli physicists create thought-provoking model for material that never melts – Haaretz
The accepted science is that the more (almost) any given matter is heated, the more disrupted its internal order becomes. It melts, or evaporates. Now a model developed by researchers from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the University of Kentucky contradicts that notion, and may have implications for the development of superconductors that will help to create green energy
Take an iceberg. Anywhere in the world, if the temperature rises beyond zero (Celsius), it will melt, no matter how big it is. Melting is not limited to ice. If its hot enough, the crystalline order of the materials atoms is disrupted and the molecules start to move randomly, which means: its melting or evaporating. But this may not be universal. Possibly, not all substances melt in the heat.
For almost 50 years scientists have been trying to develop theoretical models describing substances that can be heated without changing the internal order of the atoms comprising them. So far the equations all led to the conclusion that every matter will ulitimately melt or evaporate. But researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Kentucky have created just such a model, which was published last week in the journal Physical Review Letters.
The article contains an impressive and thought-provoking achievement, because it demonstrates that there are models of matter that break symmetry even at high temperatures, said Prof. Amos Yarom of the physics department of the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the study.
The assumption is that the more matter is heated, the more its internal order disappears. But order and disorder are expressions that are difficult to quantify universally. For that reason, the researchers focused on a specific symmetry that is easier to quantify.
Symmetry is defined according to the number of points of view from which the system looks the same in other words, from all of them, its physical features are identical. The more such points there are, the more symmetrical the system.
Dr. Michael Smolkin of Hebrew Universitys Racah Institute of Physics developed the model with doctoral candidate Noam Chai and Prof. Anatoly Dymarsky of the University of Kentucky.
If you look at any crystal, on the microscopic level it has an organized structure. If we draw the structure as a two-dimensional network, like graph paper, symmetry tells us which activities can be carried out on the grid without it being possible to realize that something was done, explains Smolkin. In a crystalline structure, symmetrical activities are very limited. Graph paper can be moved like that only in a very specific way, for example it can be turned at a 90-degree angle. But if you take water rather than a crystalline substance, at any angle that we turn a bucket of water we see no change. So if we heat ice, we obtain more freedom to do things to the matter without creating a change, and the symmetry increases.
In other words, according to the accepted thinking, the more a system is heated, the more its order declines and its symmetry increases. This claim applies to all the known physical systems, but the researchers wanted to examine whether there could be a system in which this doesnt happen. For this they tapped the theory of quantum fields, which combines quantum theory with the theory of special relativity. Physicists use it in order to create models of substances, which means, to describe their characteristics, behavior and interactions.
Creating a model of matter means writing the substance in mathematical language writing the fundamental laws dictating the behavior of the particles composing the substance and how they create interactions with one another, explains Chai. In effect, finding a model is the greatest challenge in physics.
Over the years physicists have developed several dozen models. Many of them describe familiar substances, but there are also models that are purely hypothetical.
Physics is based on laboratory experiments from which the laws of nature are derived, says Chai. But in theoretical physics the experiments are only in the mind we play mathematically with examples that cant necessarily be measured in the laboratory, in order to discover the limits of the possible in the context of the laws of nature. By means of such experiments researchers can estimate the possibility of the existence of unfamiliar substances, and later try to develop them in the laboratory.
The enigma of Rochelle salt
In the present study the researchers asked whether it is possible in the context of the known laws of physics that a substance wont melt. In other words, if its possible that the crystalline order wont disappear, even at extremely high temperatures. There are countless examples demonstrating that order declines with a rise in temperature, and therefore that seems to be a law of nature.
But Russian Jewish physicist Lev Landau, a Nobel Prize laureate, found an opposite example already over 50 years ago: The chemical Rochelle salt (potassium sodium tartrate) is a crystal whose structure changes when heated: the order increases and the symmetry declines.
In the case of Rochelle salt this is a temporary process, which takes place only within a limited temperature range, beyond which the crystal melts. In the present study the researchers demonstrated that theoretically there is a possibility of the existence of a material in which heating does not lead to an increase in its symmetry, at any temperature range.
In terms of physics, matter is particles with specific characteristics. In the model they created, the researchers examined which characteristics and interactions, which can be introduced into equations of the known laws of nature, would lead to a result indicating a substance that doesnt melt.
We ask ourselves what we want to find and then we try to find the way in equations, is how Chai describes the work method of theoretical physicists. Usually we look for more than one way in order to ascertain that the calculation that was done is correct. Its like doing two independent experiments and getting the same result.
He said that in spite of the image of theoretical physicists as scientists who work alone all day long, the process is quite interactive: We meet once every few days and discuss the results, look for inaccuracies and failures and raise questions. Usually these discussions lead to ideas that in most cases would not have come up had we worked individually. The idea for the present study also began like that.
Chai noted that in the present study all the equations were developed with pen and paper, although they also made some use of sophisticated computerized tools that helped to solve complex differential and integral equations. Using this method the researchers were able to develop equations that reflected non-melting matter.
We found a very concrete example in which that happens, says Smolkin. Its not clear whether it can be implemented in the laboratory, but its not very far from the laboratory, because in order to build it we started with an existing and known system of a substance in a certain state, to which we added a new structure. The phenomenon was obtained based on the equations.
Chai says that the matter they received in the equations is quite similar to substances that are familiar to science from the family of super materials. Examples of such materials are super liquids, liquids that flow without friction, and superconductors: materials in which the electrons move around without any resistance. At present we know of several super-liquids and superconductors, which exist only at very low temperatures.
Research groups the world over are trying to increase the critical temperature of these materials so that they will work at room temperature. Such a development would enable tremendous savings in the global energy economy, due to the possibility of delivering electric current without losing energy along the way.
Chai stresses that the purpose of the new study was not to promote a solution for global energy problems, but to reach a more profound understanding of the laws of nature. By means of our model we have broken a consensus that was accepted for years in the scientific community, he says. In addition, he noted that the new study also gives hope for finding materials whose order is maintained at high temperatures. These materials are likely to be superconductors, which would preserve the characteristics of superconductors under any conditions. That could be a green solution for the energy crisis, because well be able to create less electricity and to burn far less fuel along the way, says Chai.
Smolkin adds: If in the end its possible to create such a material, that would be a big revolution. But at the moment its only a dream. At this stage weve discovered an interesting phenomenon: that the laws [of nature] dont forbid the existence of such a material. The next question is how far it is from reality.
However, Yarom says: Along with the achievement in the article, there may be a problem with the model that the researchers are proposing. The model is based on quantum mechanics, which is a theory that doesnt provide precise forecasts but only probabilities for existence in various states. A physical theory is expected to be unitary, in other words, that the sum of probabilities of being in all the possible states will be one. If Smolkin and his partners prove that their theory is unitary, that would strengthen the model theyve built. The researchers noted that they are currently working on such proof.
Aside from the consensus regarding the connection between symmetry and temperature, the new study is likely to undermine another basic idea, regarding the existence of a unifying force in nature. Existing physical theory describes four fundamental forces in nature: the strong force (which is responsible for binding subatomic quarks together in clusters to make more familiar subatomic particles, such as protons and neutrons), the weak force (which is responsible for radioactive decay), the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force.
Each force is of different intensity and each has its own method of operation. The strong force operates with greater intensity the farther it is from the source that activates it (a bit like rubber, which the more it is stretched, the more force it activates), and the other forces lose their power the farther they are from the source activating them.
In the 20th century, physicists Steven Weinberg, Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam who were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 for their work demonstrated that beginning with sufficiently high energy, the electromagnetic force and the weak force behave identically and in effect become a single force: the electroweak force. In that state the symmetry of all the natural forces is greater, because there are more identical points of view of the system in which the forces operate.
The unification identified theoretically by Weinberg and his partners was later confirmed empirically, and theoretical unifications between the four forces were added, which are predicted by mathematical models under certain conditions. These conditions could be the ones that prevailed at the time the universe was created.
For example, the usual assumption among physicists is that in the early universe, which was extremely hot, all the forces of nature behaved identically and symmetrically. In other words, the young universe operated based on a single force. Understanding this force is likely to be the key to a unified theory of everything, the holy grail for physicists.
To date no additional unifications have been confirmed by experimentation, with the exception of the unification predicted by Weinberg and his partners, because that requires huge particle accelerators that could imitate the conditions of the early universe, which was very hot. But physicists continue to seek ways to confirm them. Because the new study suggests that the laws of quantum mechanics and special relativity do not require nature to increase symmetry with an increase in temperature, even if it is extreme temperature of the kind that existed in the early universe, a unification of forces is not essential.
In other words, in addition to shattering the consensus that heat reduces order, the new study undermines the perception that a single force operated in the early universe.
The unification of forces means that theres more symmetry, says Smolkin, and therefore if nature has chosen not to prevent the possibility of breaking the symmetry even when energy increases, the dream of the unification of forces may be incorrect. However, Smolkin notes that all the existing observations are described well by the standard model, which is the accepted system of laws for describing the behavior of basic particles. According to this model, symmetry increases as energy is increased. Thats why many scientists believe that at a high temperature the universe is more symmetrical. But the standard model doesnt tell the whole story, he adds. For example, it lacks an explanation for dark matter and dark energy. Thats why there is a chance that if we discover the model beyond the standard model, maybe well find something surprising about the behavior of symmetry at a very high temperature. But its a mystery.
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Israeli physicists create thought-provoking model for material that never melts - Haaretz
Scientists Say the Universe Itself May Be "Pixelated" – Futurism
Heres a brain teaser for you: scientists are suggesting spacetime may be made out of individual spacetime pixels, instead of being smooth and continuous like it seems.
Rana Adhikari, a professor of physics at Caltech, suggested in a new press blurb that these pixels would be so small that if you were to enlarge things so that it becomes the size of a grain of sand, then atoms would be as large as galaxies.
Adhikaris goal is to reconcile the conventional laws of physics, as determined by general relativity, with the more mysterious world of quantum physics.
Its a seriously mind-bending theory that attempts to explain whether gravity can actually be split up into its individual components, a question that has been keeping quantum physicists up at night for a long time.
Sometimes there is a misinterpretation in science communication that implies quantum mechanics and gravity are irreconcilable, said Cliff Cheung, a Caltech professor of theoretical physics whos working with Adhikari, in the statement. But we know from experiments that we can do quantum mechanics on this planet, which has gravity, so clearly they are consistent.
The devil, as always, is in the detail.
The problems come up when you ask subtle questions about black holes or try to merge the theories at very short distance scales, Cheung added.
In other words, if you were to zoom in on spacetime, would you also find individual photons, which make up light, according to the laws of quantum mechanics? Or would it be a continuous spectrum?
Some scientists suggest individual hypothetical gravitons could make up gravity on the smallest scale. Gravitons are a component of string theory that would resonate at a particular frequency.
But on an even smaller scale than that, scientists are still scratching their heads as to how to unify the laws of general relativity and quantum physics.
If I drop my coffee mug and it falls, Id like to think thats gravity, Adhikari quipped. But, in the same way that temperature is not real but describes how a bunch of molecules are vibrating, spacetime might not be a real thing.
The same may go for spacetime.
It may be that something that arises out of the pixelation of spacetime has just been given the name gravity because we dont yet understand what the guts of spacetime are, he added.
READ MORE: Is Space Pixelated? The Quest for Quantum Gravity [California Institute of Technology]
More on quantum physics: Scientist Claims That Aliens May Be Communicating via Starlight
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Scientists Say the Universe Itself May Be "Pixelated" - Futurism