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Articles tagged with: quantum physics

Written By: grant on May 14, 2013 No Comment

Science Daily isn’t talking about fiberoptics. They’re looking at the latest breakthroughs that take the “electrons” out of “electronics” by using photons to process information:

Scientists from the Group of Philip Walther from the Faculty of Physics, University of Vienna succeeded in prototyping a new and highly resource efficient model of a quantum computer — the boson sampling computer.

The huge [...]

Written By: grant on April 1, 2013 No Comment

NPR asks the biggest question of all – the original question. Look around. Why is there something instead of nothing?:

The best answer we have at this point is that the Universe emerged spontaneously from a random quantum fluctuation in some sort of primordial quantum vacuum, the scientific equivalent of “nothing.” However, this quantum vacuum is a very loaded [...]

Written By: grant on March 27, 2013 No Comment

Scientific American crunches the numbers that show how the mass of the Higgs boson spells the end of the universe… eventually:

“If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it is bad news,” says Joseph Lykken, a theorist who works at the Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory in [...]

Written By: grant on March 25, 2013 No Comment

New York Times has a pretty good profile of what could be the next big breakthrough in computing – the chips that understand “maybe”:

[A] powerful new type of computer that is about to be commercially deployed by a major American military contractor is taking computing into the strange, subatomic realm of quantum mechanics. In that infinitesimal neighborhood, common [...]

Written By: grant on February 20, 2013 No Comment

The Economist is gazing into the pretty colors…not of quantum computers, but quantum television screens:

An LCD screen works with a backlight shining through red, blue or green filters to produce the pixels which make up an image. Many televisions use light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as the backlight because they are brighter and use less power than fluorescent bulbs. Sony’s new [...]

Written By: grant on November 29, 2012 No Comment

Laboratory Equipment points the way for the next big breakthrough in thinking machines:

Many quantum algorithms require that particles’ spins be “entangled,” meaning that they’re all dependent on each other. The more entanglement a physical system offers, the greater its computational power. Until now, theoreticians have demonstrated the possibility of high entanglement only in a very complex spin chain, [...]

Written By: grant on November 14, 2012 No Comment

BBC reports that the Large Hadron Collider is messing up a perfectly neat theory about how the universe fits together:

Supersymmetry, or SUSY, has gained popularity as a way to explain some of the inconsistencies in the traditional theory of subatomic physics known as the Standard Model.

The new observation, reported at the Hadron Collider Physics conference in Kyoto, is [...]

Written By: grant on October 14, 2012 No Comment
Science Art: <i>Fig. 2 – Slit Mechanism</i> from “The Scattering of Hydrogen Positive Rays, and the Existence of a Powerful Field of Force in the Hydrogen Molecule” by G. Thompson in <i>Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London</i>


Click to embiggen

I looked for molecules in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Containing Papers of a Mathematical and Physical Character (1905-1934), and this is what I found. It’s a device designed by Mr. William S. Farren, M.A., for observing “the positive rays” as they scatter through a chamber filled with hydrogen gas.

And that’s [...]

Written By: grant on July 4, 2012 No Comment

If you’re the kind of person who reads these updates here, you already know that CERN has come out and said they’ve found the Higgs boson.

What does that mean?

Simplest version: http://havewefoundthehiggsbosonyet.org/

Slightly more sophisticated version: Professor Matt Strassler explains what a “boson” is.

Even more sophisticated version (but still for non-physics-majors): Quantum Diaries explains how the [...]

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