This blog does and does not exist

A blog about physics, computers, and nature. The pattern of posting on this blog mimics the electron quantum tunneling process.

[kny111]

Ancient Quasar Pulses With The Light Of A Million Billion Suns

Astronomers have discovered a monster black hole at the cosmic dawn of our Universe powering an ultraluminous, high-energy quasar.

The huge black hole has a mass 12 billion times that of the Sun and its associated quasar pumps out energy a million billion times that of the Sun.

Quasars are formed as the central supermassive black hole sucks in surrounding materials and gases, which heats up and emits a tremendous amount of light, so much that it actually push away the material getting sucked in behind it. It is quasars that limit the growth of black holes, which is one of the reasons why this ultraluminous quasar around this gigantic black hole is so puzzling.

The other reason is how ancient they are. The quasar is in the high redshift of light, which is a measure of how much the wavelength of the light has been stretched by the expansion of the Universe before it reaches us here on Earth. Using this measure, scientists are able to date quasars and they’ve put this one in the early cosmic dawn, just 900 million years after the Big Bang.

[kny111]

Cornell University Teaches Robots How To Hallucinate

A team of robotics engineers working in the Personal Robotics Lab at Cornell University (led by Ashutosh Saxena) has developed a new way to give robots a context-sensitive way to organize a room. Instead of providing the robots with a map, the researchers instead cause the robot to “imagine" how a human being would use objects in a room and then to place them accordingly.

Traditional programming for robots has relied on providing clear instructions on what they are supposed to do—pick something up from one place and put it down in another, for example. To get a robot to engage in activities that require some degree of intuition, however, would mean giving them some means for doing so. One example would be to ask a robot to enter a room, note objects on a table, and ask that they be arranged on a desk for use by a person. To arrange objects in a way that makes sense to a human being requires some understanding of how people operate. To do that, the Cornell team gave a test robot a means for imagining what a person would look like in the room while using a set of objects.

As an example, the researchers programmed a robot to pick up a coffee mug and computer mouse from a table and place them on a desk in what would seem the most logical positions based on human behavior. To do that, they gave the robot what they call “an ability to hallucinate" humans into the room—the robot “brain" overlays images of stick figure humans onto images of the room. Various poses are considered while the robot “imagines" how a human might make the best use of the mouse and mug. Based on this process, the robot then placed the mouse just to the right of the keyboard (because the average person is right handed) and the mug a little ways back—within reach, but not so close it might get knocked over unintentionally. The approach mimics what a human would likely do given the same instructions, of course, and that is exactly the point.

Journal Ref: Hallucinated Humans as the Hidden Context for Labeling 3D Scenes

[thequantumlife]

A snap of a finger, a handful of scattered microphones and a computer algorithm are all it takes to create an accurate three-dimensional map of a room

[thequantumlife]

Linux running on a toaster

[crookedindifference-deactivated]

Click to enlarge

[anticapitalist]

Mutant Cockroaches have learned to evade sugar traps

According to a new study in Science, some roaches’ tastes are evolving to the point where they’re refusing to gobble down glucose, a form of sugar commonly found in plants. “They now perceive glucose as bitter,” says Coby Schal, an entomologist at North Carolina State University and one of the report’s authors. And while that might sound like good news for the roach-infested, it’s not: sucrose is the key attractant used in roach traps — and many of the nasty little creatures are no longer interested.

How did this happen? Turns out it may be our fault.

When prehistoric roaches lived in the wild, experts have theorized, it made sense to be glucose-averse—that mutation helped them avoid glucosides, or toxic glucose-containing molecules found in certain plants. “They’re nasty substances,” says Schal.

But when cockroaches joined us in caves, and ultimately in homes—away from the threat of glucosides—“they would have lost this trait, because it became maladaptive,” says Schal. Regular sugar, after all, is a highly concentrated source of energy, and if roaches were wired to avoid it, their odds of survival would drop. “If you brought them a Krispy Kreme donut,” Schal explains, “they couldn’t eat it.”

The mutation remained in the genome, though. And when humans began putting glucose in roach poison, we reactivated it—so much so that when some roaches now taste sugar, Schal says, “they jump back as though you’ve given them an electric shock.”

Read More

[thequantumlife]

If you look at a cylindrical block from the bottom, you see a circle. If you look at it from the side you see a square.

Imagine a cylindrical block that is spinning around amazingly fast. When you look at it, it stops spinning and snaps into either a circle or a square.

This is similar to how a qubit will behave. Whereas a normal bit has a value of either one or zero. A qubit is both. A qubit has some amount of one and some amount of zero, however when you measure it the qubit will always snap into a one or zero. These measurements are probabilistic and will not be the same each time.

[thequantumlife]

USB Drives have a quantum spin of 1/2 and exist in the fourth dimension

[emergentfutures]

Temporary tattoos could make electronic telepathy and telekinesis possible

Temporary electronic tattoos could soon help people fly drones with only thought and talk seemingly telepathically without speech over smartphones, researchers say. Electrical engineer Todd Coleman at the University of California at San Diego is devising noninvasive means of controlling machines via the mind, techniques virtually everyone might be able to use.

  Full Story: Io9

[we-are-star-stuff]

This is the world’s smallest snowman - at 10 micrometres across, it’s only 1/5th the width of a human hair. The tiny guy was made from two tin beads used to calibrate electron microscope astigmatism. The eyes and smile were milled using a focused ion beam, and the nose, which is under 1 µm wide (or 0.001 mm), is ion beam deposited platinum.

Read More

[thequantumlife]

How do blackholes affect light?

Assuming we could get close enough to a blackhole without dying, how would it affect what the surroundings look like? How will the bending of light impact what we see?

The reddit user, entropyjump, synthesized what a blackhole would look like (before it sucked up a bunch of stuff). Watch the video and read the below description:

The youtube movie shows a simulated view of a small black hole, if it were suspended in the air about a meter away from the camera. I wrote the simulation in Python, and used a spherical panorama image available online. In the movie clip, the camera is orbiting the black hole to show what the environment looks like as light is traveling through strongly curved spacetime close to the black hole. In some movie frames, a so-called 'Einstein ring' can be seen: this feature appears when there is an object exactly behind the black hole as seen by the camera. Light from this object passes around all sides of the black hole on its way toward us, forming a ring around its shadow.

Although this black hole is tiny (it has a Schwarzschild radius of about 1.8 centimeters), its mass is about twice that of Earth. Such a black hole would wreak havoc on our planet if it were to come in the vicinity of Earth. So, this is just a visualization of how light would behave close to it, and not a full physical simulation of the other effects the black hole might have on its environment.

[sciencecenter]

All of this hurricane talk has put me in the mood to talk about global warming…

(Source)

[thequantumlife]

Question:

Lets just say I had practically inifinte energy. How do I go about turning this into a stream of protons? Dont hold back on the quantum field theory. Smashing existing particles together & filtering out what we want(protons) is not a good enough answer.

Answer:

The first practical complication is that you cannot (as far as we know) create matter without also creating an equal amount of anti matter. Of course the fact that the observable universe is mostly regular matter indicates that there is some lopsidedness to this summitry and so it may be possible to find conditions that at least create slightly more matter then antimatter. Still, this is a problem that you would need to be overcome to get your pure stream of regular matter protons.

Another problem is the fact that to create particles we simply amass a very large amount of energy in a very small space and see what pops out. We have no way to command that only certain particles be created. For example, even if I amass enough energy to allow for the spontaneous creation of a pair of protons (the proton and its anti matter partner) i have no way to know if the protons are what is going to be created, or other particles whose combined mass and energy add up to the mass of the proton pair. We can only predict the frequency that certain particles will be created.

Finally, although the transformation of energy into matter and matter into energy is a common occurrence in nature, and an entire industry (the nuclear power industry) has been made possible by our understanding of the transition we still aren't anywhere close to having a mass-energy conversion machine.

I can try and explain the conversion machine and our current methods of conversion if you want, but I think its off the topic of your question, and it looks like I've mad an ugly wall of text already.

If any of you reading this see something that I've got wrong, or want to explain in more detail please do! This is a topic I've been curious about for years.

Edit: I saw your post in r/physics. No, we can't do better then smash particles together and see what comes out. Think of it this way. We don't create matter, we simply create the conditions that allow matter to be created. The conditions that are needed are a very high concentration of energy, and the only way we have to achieve those conditions are particle collides. Unfortunately if we have enough energy to allow for the creation of a proton, then we have also allowed for the creation of many smaller particles that will need to be filtered out. So I'm sorry if smashing existing particles together & filtering out what we want is not a good enough answer, because right now its the only answer.

[thenextweb]

(via Now You Can Explore the Oceans as Google Maps Goes Underwater)

[thequantumlife]

How to make an "energy efficient' warp drive

Our everyday experience of interstellar travel usually comes in the shape of the U.S.S. Enterprise zooming around the galaxy at warp speed. Unfortunately, the warp drive is primarily used as a tool by scriptwriters to condense the extreme interstellar distances into hour-long episodes. But there's a growing field of study that actually attaches some physics -- albeit rather "exotic" physics -- to superluminal (a.k.a. faster-than-light) travel.

Earlier this month, scientists and engineers were able to discuss their warp drive concepts at the 100 Year Starship Symposium in Houston, Texas, and there was some good news for sci-fi fans everywhere: the warp drive might not be as energy hungry as previous studies suggested.

Sonny White of NASA's Johnson Space Center presented his calculations on the energies required to travel faster than Einstein's famous speed limit: the speed of light. By White's reckoning, his design of starship -- that is "adjusted into more of a rounded doughnut, as opposed to a flat ring" and oscillates the warp intensity -- could be powered by the approximate mass-energy of the Voyager 1 space probe.

Although "the mass-energy of the Voyager 1 space probe" may not sound like much, if you convert the 722 kilogram Voyager mass into raw energy (using Einstein's famous mass-energy equivalence equation: E=mc2), White's warp drive would require 6.5x1019Joules (65 exajoules) to create a warp bubble. That's nearly theentire annual energy consumption of the United States.

Clearly, this monstrous energy requirement isn't practical, but it's one heck of an improvement over previous estimates.

Holy hell

[kny111]

Eternal Clock Could Keep Time After Universe Dies

The idea for an eternal clock that would continue to keep time even after the universe ceased to exist has intrigued physicists. However, no one has figured out how one might be built, until now.

Researchers have now proposed an experimental design for a “space-time crystal” that would be able to keep time forever. This four-dimensional crystal would be similar to conventional 3D crystals, which are structures, like snowflakes and diamonds, whose atoms are arranged in repeating patterns. Whereas a diamond has a periodic structure in three dimensions, the space-time crystal would be periodic in time as well as space.

The idea of a 4D space-time crystal was first proposed earlier this year by MIT physicist Frank Wilczek, though the concept was purely theoretical. Now a team of researchers led by Xiang Zhang of California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has conceived of how to make one a reality.

“The idea of creating a crystal with dimensions higher than that of conventional 3D crystals is an important conceptual breakthrough in physics, and it is very exciting for us to be the first to devise a way to realize a space-time crystal,” Berkeley Lab physicist Tongcang Li, a member of the research group, said in a statement.

Zhang and his colleagues suggest that a space-time crystal could be constructed using an electric field to trap charged atoms (called ions), and taking advantage of the natural repulsion between two like-charged particles (positive and positive, or negative and negative), which is called Coulomb repulsion.

Image: This proposed space-time crystal shows (a) periodic structures in both space and time with (b) ultracold ions rotating in one direction even at the lowest energy state. Credit: Courtesy of Xiang Zhang group

Full Article

[thequantumlife]