Lifeboat Foundation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UT07QaPDxos

So-called relativistic jets of energetic particles are stunning, destructive spectacles, and this one was “unprecedented.”

Time travel makes great science fiction, but can it really be done? Travel into the future is already a reality, but visiting the past is a much tougher proposition, and may require fantastic resources such as a wormhole in space. Nevertheless, if going back in time is allowed, even in principle, then what about all those paradoxes that make time travel stories so intriguing?

Paul Davies is a physicist, cosmologist and astrobiologist at Arizona State University, where he is Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science. He is the author of many books, including “How to Build a Time Machine” and, most recently, “The Eerie Silence: are we alone in the universe?”

An unusual teleportation experiment uses ordinary quantum physics, but was inspired by tunnels in an exotic ‘toy universe’.

Quantum experiment conducted on Google’s Sycamore 2 computer transferred data across two simulated black holes, adding weight to the holographic principle of the universe.

Swipe right to uncover the mysteries of dark energy.

A group of more than 10,000 amateur astronomers spread out over 85 countries has identified roughly 240,000 galaxies over the last two years. Now, the Dark Energy Explorers group aims to recruit even more volunteers and take its work to the next level with a project that could shed new light on the mysterious nature of dark energy, a press statement reveals.

To do so, they must help build the most extensive 3D map of the cosmos by using an app that functions surprisingly like the popular dating app Tinder.

Continue reading “Volunteers are using a Tinder-like app to help build the world’s largest 3D map of the cosmos” »

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In science fiction – think films and TV like “Interstellar” and “Star Trek” – wormholes in the cosmos serve as portals through space and time for spacecraft to traverse unimaginable distances with ease. If only it were that simple.

Scientists have long pursued a deeper understanding of wormholes and now appear to be making progress. Researchers announced on Wednesday that they forged two minuscule simulated black holes – those extraordinarily dense celestial objects with gravity so powerful that not even light can escape – in a quantum computer and transmitted a message between them through what amounted to a tunnel in space-time.

It’s an “extremely rare phenomenon” that sheds light on black hole mysteries.

Scientists have, for the first time, developed a quantum experiment that allows them to study the dynamics, or behavior, of a special kind of theoretical wormhole. The experiment has not created an actual wormhole (a rupture in space and time), rather it allows researchers to probe connections between theoretical wormholes and quantum physics, a prediction of so-called quantum gravity. Quantum gravity refers to a set of theories that seek to connect gravity with quantum physics, two fundamental and well-studied descriptions of nature that appear inherently incompatible with each other.

“We found a quantum system that exhibits key properties of a gravitational wormhole yet is sufficiently small to implement on today’s quantum hardware,” says Maria Spiropulu, the principal investigator of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science research program Quantum Communication Channels for Fundamental Physics (QCCFP) and the Shang-Yi Ch’en Professor of Physics at Caltech. “This work constitutes a step toward a larger program of testing quantum gravity physics using a quantum computer. It does not substitute for direct probes of quantum gravity in the same way as other planned experiments that might probe quantum gravity effects in the future using quantum sensing, but it does offer a powerful testbed to exercise ideas of quantum gravity.”

The research will be published December 1 in the journal Nature. The study’s first authors are Daniel Jafferis of Harvard University and Alexander Zlokapa (BS ‘21), a former undergraduate student at Caltech who started on this project for his bachelor’s thesis with Spiropulu and has since moved on to graduate school at MIT.