Does the enormous computing power of neurons mean consciousness can be explained within a purely neurobiological framework, or is there scope for quantum computation in the brain?
Researchers pin down the contentious notion that ideas from the strange world of quantum mechanics underpin plants’ skill at harvesting sunlight.
A long-standing debate over just how “quantum” photosynthesis is may finally be coming to an end.
Modern construction is a precision endeavor. Builders must use components manufactured to meet specific standards — such as beams of a desired composition or rivets of a specific size. The building industry relies on manufacturers to create these components reliably and reproducibly in order to construct secure bridges and sound skyscrapers.
Now imagine construction at a smaller scale — less than 1/100th the thickness of a piece of paper. This is the nanoscale. It is the scale at which scientists are working to develop potentially groundbreaking technologies in fields like quantum computing. It is also a scale where traditional fabrication methods simply will not work. Our standard tools, even miniaturized, are too bulky and too corrosive to reproducibly manufacture components at the nanoscale.
Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a method that could make reproducible manufacturing at the nanoscale possible. The team adapted a light-based technology employed widely in biology — known as optical traps or optical tweezers — to operate in a water-free liquid environment of carbon-rich organic solvents, thereby enabling new potential applications.
What has been shaping the human mind throughout the history of mankind? What is the difference between mind and consciousness? What links quantum physics to consciousness? What gives rise to our subjective experience? What drives our accelerating evolution?
If you’re eager to familiarize with probably the most advanced ontological framework to date or if you’re already familiar with the Syntellect Hypothesis which, with this series, is now presented to you as the full-fledged Cybernetic Theory of Mind, you should get this book two of the series which corresponds to Part II of The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution. This volume two contains some newly-introduced and updated material if compared with the originally published version and can be read as a stand-alone book. At the same time, it is highly recommended to obtain The Syntellect Hypothesis as the original coherent version of the same theoretical framework instead of waiting for all five books to come out and if you don’t need extra detailing.
Continue reading “TECHNOCULTURE: The Rise of Man | The Cybernetic Theory of Mind” »
Tucked in the back of a laboratory at the IBM Research facility less than an hour north of New York City is a hulking mass of stainless steel and aluminum that looks like a sci-fi teleportation machine.
IBM promises a super-powerful quantum computer by decade’s end as it races against Google, Honeywell, and other rivals.
IBM today, for the first time, published its road map for the future of its quantum computing hardware. There is a lot to digest here, but the most important news in the short term is that the company believes it is on its way to building a quantum processor with more than 1,000 qubits — and somewhere between 10 and 50 logical qubits — by the end of 2023.
Currently, the company’s quantum processors top out at 65 qubits. It plans to launch a 127-qubit processor next year and a 433-qubit machine in 2022. To get to this point, IBM is also building a completely new dilution refrigerator to house these larger chips, as well as the technology to connect multiple of these units to build a system akin to today’s multi-core architectures in classical chips.
Today at TechCrunch Disrupt 2020, leaders from three quantum computing startups joined TechCrunch editor Frederic Lardinois to discuss the future of the technology. IonQ CEO and president Peter Chapman suggested we could be as little as five years away from a desktop quantum computer, but not everyone agreed on that optimistic timeline.
“I think within the next several years, five years or so, you’ll start to see [desktop quantum machines]. Our goal is to get to a rack-mounted quantum computer,” Chapman said.
But that seemed a tad optimistic to Alan Baratz, CEO at D-Wave Systems. He says that when it comes to developing the super-conducting technology that his company is building, it requires a special kind of rather large quantum refrigeration unit called a dilution fridge, and that unit would make a five-year goal of having a desktop quantum PC highly unlikely.
Over the past few decades, researchers have identified a number of superconducting materials with atypical properties, known as unconventional superconductors. Many of these superconductors share the same anomalous charge transport properties and are thus collectively characterized as “strange metals.”
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) and Los Alamos National Laboratory have been investigating the anomalous transport properties of strange metals, along with several other teams worldwide. In a recent paper published in Nature Physics, they showed that in one of these materials, BaFe2(As1− xPx)2, superconductivity and quantum criticality are linked by what is known as the Hall effect.
For decades, physicists have been unable to fully understand T-linear resistivity, a signature of strange metals that has often been observed in many unconventional superconductors. In 2016, the team at UC Berkeley and Los Alamos National Lab observed an unusual scaling relationship between the magnetic field and temperature in superconductor BaFe2(As1− xPx)2.
Rice physicists set far-more-accurate limits on speed of quantum information.
Nature’s speed limits aren’t posted on road signs, but Rice University physicists have discovered a new way to deduce them that is better — infinitely better, in some cases — than previous methods.
“The big question is, ‘How fast can anything — information, mass, energy — move in nature?’” said Kaden Hazzard, a theoretical quantum physicist at Rice. “It turns out that if somebody hands you a material, it is incredibly difficult, in general, to answer the question.”
