The Measurement That Would Reveal The Universe As A Computer Simulation If the cosmos is a numerical simulation, there ought to be clues in the spectrum of high energy cosmic rays, say theorists One of modern physics’ most cherished ideas is quantum chromodynamics, the theory that describes the strong nuclear force, how it binds quarks and gluons into protons and neutrons, how these form nuclei that themselves interact. This is the universe at its most fundamental. So an interesting pursuit is to simulate quantum chromodynamics on a computer to see what kind of complexity arises. The promise is that simulating physics on such a fundamental level is more or less equivalent to simulating the universe itself. There are one or two challenges of course. The physics is mind-bogglingly complex and operates on a vanishingly small scale. So even using the world’s most powerful supercomputers, physicists have only managed to simulate tiny corners of the cosmos just a few femtometers across. (A femtometer is 10^-15 metres.) That may not sound like much but the significant point is that the simulation is essentially indistinguishable from the real thing (at least as far as we understand it). It’s not hard to imagine that Moore’s Law-type progress will allow physicists to simulate significantly larger regions of space. A region just a few micrometres across could encapsulate the entire workings of a human cell. Again, the behaviour of this human cell would be indistinguishable from the real thing. It’s this kind of thinking that forces physicists to consider the possibility that our entire cosmos could be running on a vastly powerful computer. If so, is there any way we could ever know? Today, we get an answer of sorts from Silas Beane, at the University of Bonn in Germany, and a few pals. They say there is a way to see evidence that we are being simulated, at least in certain scenarios. First, some background. The problem with all simulations is that the laws of physics, which appear continuous, have to be superimposed onto a discrete three dimensional lattice which advances in steps of time. The question that Beane and co ask is whether the lattice spacing imposes any kind of limitation on the physical processes we see in the universe. They examine, in particular, high energy processes, which probe smaller regions of space as they get more energetic What they find is interesting. They say that the lattice spacing imposes a fundamental limit on the energy that particles can have. That’s because nothing can exist that is smaller than the lattice itself. So if our cosmos is merely a simulation, there ought to be a cut off in the spectrum of high energy particles. It turns out there is exactly this kind of cut off in the energy of cosmic ray particles, a limit known as the Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin or GZK cut off. This cut-off has been well studied and comes about because high energy particles interact with the cosmic microwave background and so lose energy as they travel long distances. But Beane and co calculate that the lattice spacing imposes some additional features on the spectrum. “The most striking feature…is that the angular distribution of the highest energy components would exhibit cubic symmetry in the rest frame of the lattice, deviating significantly from isotropy,” they say. In other words, the cosmic rays would travel preferentially along the axes of the lattice, so we wouldn’t see them equally in all directions. That’s a measurement we could do now with current technology. Finding the effect would be equivalent to being able to to ‘see’ the orientation of lattice on which our universe is simulated. That’s cool, mind-blowing even. But the calculations by Beane and co are not without some important caveats. One problem is that the computer lattice may be constructed in an entirely different way to the one envisaged by these guys. Another is that this effect is only measurable if the lattice cut off is the same as the GZK cut off. This occurs when the lattice spacing is about 10^-12 femtometers. If the spacing is significantly smaller than that, we’ll see nothing. Nevertheless, it’s surely worth looking for, if only to rule out the possibility that we’re part of a simulation of this particular kind but secretly in the hope that we’ll find good evidence of our robotic overlords once and for all. Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1210.1847: Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation SOURCE
Experiment confirms fundamental symmetry in nature Scientists working with ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment), a heavy-ion detector on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ring, have made precise measurements of particle mass and electric charge that confirm the existence of a fundamental symmetry in nature. The investigators include Brazilian researchers affiliated with the University of São Paulo (USP) and the University of Campinas (UNICAMP). The findings, reported in a paper published online in Nature Physics on August 17, led the researchers to confirm a fundamental symmetry between the nuclei of the particles and their antiparticles in terms of charge, parity and time (CPT). These measurements of particles produced in high-energy collisions of heavy ions in the LHC were made possible by the ALICE experiment's high-precision tracking and identification capabilities, as part of an investigation designed to detect subtle differences between the ways in which protons and neutrons join in nuclei while their antiparticles form antinuclei. "After the Big Bang, for every particle of matter an antiparticle was created. In particle physics, a very important question is whether all the laws of physics display a specific kind of symmetry known as CPT, and these measurements suggest that there is indeed a fundamental symmetry between nuclei and antinuclei," said Marcelo Gameiro Munhoz, a professor at USP's Physics Institute (IF) and a member of the Brazilian team working on ALICE. Munhoz is the principal investigator for the research project "High-energy nuclear physics at RHIC and LHC", supported by São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). The project—a collaboration between the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the United States and ALICE at the LHC, operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland—consists of experimental activities relating to the study of relativistic heavy-ion collisions. Among other objectives, the Brazilian researchers involved with ALICE seek to understand the production of heavy quarks (charm and bottom quarks) based on the measurement of electrons using an electromagnetic calorimeter and, more recently, Sampa, a microchip developed in Brazil to study rarer phenomena arising from heavy-ion collisions in the LHC. The experiment According to Munhoz, the measurements of mass and charge performed in the symmetry experiment, combined with other studies, will help physicists to determine which of the many theories on the fundamental laws of the universe is most plausible. "These laws describe the nature of all matter interactions," he said, "so it's important to know that physical interactions aren't changed by particle charge reversal, parity transformation, reflections of spatial coordinates and time inversion. The key question is whether the laws of physics remain the same under such conditions." In particular, the researchers measured the mass-over-charge ratio differences for deuterons, consisting of a proton and a neutron, and antideuterons, as well as for nuclei of helium-3, comprising two protons and one neutron, and antihelium-3. Recent measurements at CERN compared the same properties of protons and antiprotons at high resolution. The ALICE experiment records high-energy collisions of lead ions at the LHC, enabling the study of matter at extremely high temperatures and densities. The lead-ion collisions provide an abundant source of particles and antiparticles, producing nuclei and the corresponding antinuclei at nearly equal rates. This allows ALICE to make a detailed comparison of the properties of the nuclei and antinuclei that are most copiously produced. The experiment makes precise measurements of both the curvature of particle tracks in the detector's magnetic field and the particles' time of flight and uses this information to determine the mass-to-charge ratios for nuclei and antinuclei. The high precision of the time-of-flight detector, which determines the arrival time of particles and antiparticles with a resolution of 80 picoseconds and is associated with the energy-loss measurement provided by the time-projection chamber, allows the scientists involved to measure a clear signal for deuterons/antideuterons and helium-3/antihelium-3, the particles studied in the similarity experiment Source
How We Shape What We Call Reality Trailblazing Physicist David Bohm and Buddhist Monk Matthieu Ricard on How We Shape What We Call Reality “Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe… What we believe determines what we take to be true.” We never see the world exactly as it is — our entire experience of it is filtered through the screen of our longings and our fears, onto which project the interpretation we call reality. The nature of that flickering projection has captivated the human imagination at least since Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave. Philip K. Dick was both right and wrong when, in contemplating how to build a universe, he wrote that “reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Reality, after all, is constructed through our very beliefs — not because we have a magical-thinking way of willing events and phenomena into manifesting, but because cognitive science has shown us that the way we direct our attention shapes our perception of what we call “reality.” That’s what molecular biologist turned Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard and Buddhist-raised astrophysicist Trinh Thuan explore in The Quantum and the Lotus: A Journey to the Frontiers Where Science and Buddhism Meet (public library) — an infinitely mind-bending conversation at the intersection of science and philosophy. The contemporary counterpart to Einstein’s conversation with Tagore, it takes apart our most elemental assumptions about time, space, the origin of the universe and, above all, the nature of reality. In considering the constructed nature of reality, Ricard quotes from a 1977 Berkeley lecture by David Bohm (December 20, 1917–October 27, 1992), in which the trailblazing theoretical physicist offered an exquisite formulation of the interplay between our beliefs and what we experience as reality:Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends on what we look for. What we look for depends on what we think. What we think depends on what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality. No matter how complex our instruments may be, no matter how sophisticated and subtle our theories and calculations, it’s still our consciousness that finally interprets our observations. And it does so according to its knowledge and conception of the event under consideration. It’s impossible to separate the way consciousness works from the conclusions it makes about an observation. The various aspects that we make out in a phenomenon are determined not only by how we observe, but also by the concepts that we project onto the phenomenon in question. Complement this fragment of the wholly fantastic The Quantum and the Lotus with Alan Watts on what reality really means and Simone Weil on science and our spiritual values, then revisit Ricard’s conversation with his father, the great French philosopher Jean-François Revel, about the nature of the self. Source
For a low price of $9.95, You can buy the CD, complete with videos showing how to duplicate the "hot water experiments" Yourself. In our next series... Eggs. They can be cooked and eaten, using this amazing "Hot Water" discovery!
New global data suggests air pollution kills 10 million people per year New global data suggests air pollution kills 10 million people per year
Feds say your hard drives are for the government’s keeping The Justice Department is set to argue Wednesday before a federal appeals court that it may prosecute people for crimes based on evidence obtained from their computers—evidence that was outside the scope of an original probable-cause search warrant... more
New memory chips use light to store and transmit data 100 times faster than SSD Computers are only as fast as their components, and one key component is about to get a serious shot of adrenaline. Solid-state drives marked a huge step forward in device memory, capable of reading and writing data at speeds far greater than any disc-based hard drive. SSD technology still uses electronic chips to move data though, which introduces a number of factors that limit the speeds at which data can be transferred. A revolutionary new type of memory chip being developed by researchers at Oxford University and Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology has completely eliminated those speed-limiting issues, and it could lead to storage solutions that outperform SSD drives by a staggering margin... more
http://www.veoh.com/watch/v17126300... Nightmares: The Rise Of The Politics Of Fear [video]http://www.veoh.com/watch/v17126300jr43bR2Q?h1=The+Power+of+Nightmares%3A+The+Rise+Of+The+Politics+Of+Fear[/video]
Top boffin Freeman Dyson on climate change, interstellar travel, fusion, and more Top boffin Freeman Dyson on climate change, interstellar travel, fusion, and more
Einstein was wrong The universe really is weird, which is bad news for Albert Einstein and would-be hackers hoping to break into quantum encryption systems. Eighty years after Einstein dismissed the idea of quantum entanglement as "spooky", Dutch scientists say they have proved the effect is real, and that simply observing one particle can instantly change another far-away object. Researchers detailed an experiment in the journalNature this week that showed how two electrons at separate locations 1.3 km apart on the Delft University of Technology campus demonstrated a clear, invisible and instantaneous connection. Importantly, the new study closed loopholes in earlier tests that had left some doubt as to whether the eerie connection predicted by quantum theory was real or not. Einstein famously insisted, in a 1935 scientific paper, that what he called "spooky action at a distance" had to be wrong, and that there must be undiscovered properties of particles to explain such counter-intuitive behaviour. The idea certainly confounds our day-to-day experience of the world, where change only appears to occur through local interactions. But in recent decades, scientific evidence has been building that particles can indeed become "entangled" so that no matter how far apart they are, they will always be connected. The Delft experiment is conclusive because, for the first time, scientists have closed two potential loopholes at once. The first suggested that particles could somehow synchronise behaviour ahead of time, while the second implied that testing might detect only a subset of prepared entangled pairs. To prove their case, the team led by Delft professor Dr Ronald Hanson used two diamonds containing tiny traps for electrons with a magnetic property called 'spin' and measured all entangled pairs across the 1.3 km separating two laboratories. The experiment effectively closes a chapter in an 80-year scientific debate, but Dr Hanson said it also had important implications for the future, since sophisticated cryptography is already using quantum properties to guarantee data security. Such quantum encryption systems will only be 100 per cent secure, however, if all loopholes are closed, as in the Delft system. "Loopholes can be backdoors into systems," Dr Hanson said. "When you go loophole-free then you add an extra layer of security and you can be absolutely certain there is no way for hackers to get in." Reuters SOURCE
Hot Electrons Could Double Solar Cell Power Efficiency Hot Electrons Could Double Solar Cell Power Efficiency
How to build a totally open computer from the CPU to the desktop How does one build a completely open-source computer from scratch? Answer: slowly. This week, the pair developing the Novena open laptop have provided an update on their work. The idea is to develop a usable system that is completely open to customization and scrutiny – from the electronics to the firmware to the operating system to the applications. This is ideal for people paranoid there is malicious code hidden in closed-source drivers and firmware in their motherboards and hardware, or just fed up with insecure and broken closed-source software from manufacturers. Andrew Huang and Sean Cross, two self-employed engineers living in Singapore, built their computer around a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9-powered Freescale system-on-chip and a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) – the specs are here. (The pair trust the system-on-chip and the FPGA behave as documented.) Even the display bezel is hackable, with Huang explaining: "Anyone with access to an entry-level machine shop can fabricate a custom bezel to accommodate a different LCD, as well as mount additional sensors (such as a camera or a microphone) or additional buttons and knobs." A crowdfunding round via Crowd Supply 18 months ago far exceeded its goals, even though prices ranged from $1,195 to a $5,000 wooden model. The pair were obliged to reject RedHat and Ubuntu because they required black-box drivers for GPU acceleration to draw the pointless desktop eye candy, and opted for a fully free Debian on GNU/Linux with the Xfce4 window manager. "We hope eventually to figure out enough of the GPU to let us do 3D graphics with acceleration sufficient to produce a user experience much like that of any mainstream laptop," the guys said. The pair want you to think of it as a piece of lab equipment. A software-defined radio board was developed for the Novena by Myriad RF to avoid using more black-box radio hardware and firmware. As an exercise in producing an open system from scratch, it's fascinating. The Novena board has already been used as the basis for a crypto key signing box, Cryptech. You can read the duo's adventures at the IEEE's Spectrum, here. For what it's worth, a startup calledPurism is doing similar with an x86-based laptop, but it relies on Intel's closed-source processor initialization firmware, which gives some people the heebie-jeebies. ® SOURCE
Cancer-killing viruses have finally arrived FDA approved first viral cancer therapy that treats advanced melanoma... more info
Oscillating chemical reaction: Briggs-Rauscher reaction. I did this together with my trainees in our lab to demonstrate that if a reaction is far away from its thermodynamic balance it can be able to oscillate through intermediate states. When the states have different colours it looks impressing. Here is the video I have recorded a few days ago. Here some literature (We have modified the mixture. We have used HClO4 instead of H2SO4 and more starch to get a deeper blue colour) http://www1.chem.leeds.ac.uk/delights/texts/expt_11.html
Google Says It Has Proved Its Controversial Quantum Computer Really Works Researchers from Google’s AI Lab say a controversial quantum machine that it and NASA bought in 2013 resoundingly beat a conventional computer in a series of tests... more