But this strangeness may limit its own extent in quantum mechanics, the theory describing the behavior of matter at an infinitesimal level, according to a new study by an ex-hacker and a physicist.

“We’re interested in this question of why quantum theory is as weird as it is, but not weirder,” said physicist Jonathan Oppenheim of the University of Cambridge. “It was an unnatural question for people to have asked even 20 years ago. The reason we’re able to get these results is that we’re thinking of things in the way a hacker might think of things.”

A lot of eerie things happen in the quantum world. According to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, for instance, it’s impossible to know everything about a quantum particle. The more precisely you know an electron’s position, the less precisely you know its momentum. Stranger still, the electron doesn’t even have properties like position and momentum until an observer measures them. It’s as if the particle exists in a plurality of worlds, and only by making a measurement can we force it to choose one.

In another weirdness, two particles can be bound together such that observing one causes changes in the other, even when they’re physically far apart. This quantum embrace, called entanglement (or more generally, nonlocality), made Einstein nervous. He famously called the phenomenon “spooky action at a distance.”

But there’s a limit to how useful nonlocality can be. Two separated people can’t send messages faster than the speed of light.

Read complete article here. {via wired.com}

The Matter Of Everything is a feature documentary that challenges us to see beyond our everyday sense of experience into the unseen universe. From the quantum to the cosmos, The Matter Of Everything journeys deep out of the foundations of nature to reveal what we are, at billionths of the human scale. At that level, physicists at Fermilab, one of the largest particle research facilities in the world, describe a universe that is more unified than ever imagined. {source: RiverchoirFeed}

Milky Way Galaxy. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

(PhysOrg.com) — 95%. That is the percentage of the known Universe that is missing. As in it is not there. Or at least if it is there, we can’t see it. We call this unseen stuff “dark matter”. That has been well known for sometime. What is trickier in answering is why? Why is it that 95% of the universe is made up of this so-named “dark matter?” An even trickier question is where? As in where is this dark matter? It is those two questions that have plagued physicists for decades. Dark matter, by its own definition cannot be seen, hence its name. So how do we “see” it, how do we know “where” to look?

Physicists have been trying to think of various “indirect” ways to “see” dark matter for decades. Now physicists at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ and the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich are ready to test their methods, The Economist reports.

Read complete article here. {via physorg.com}

Quantum

In this extract from Quantum, shortlisted for the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction, Manjit Kumar delves into one of the greatest controversies in the history of physics

Paul Ehrenfest was in tears. He had made his decision. Soon he would attend the week-long gathering where many of those responsible for the quantum revolution would try to understand the meaning of what they had wrought. There he would have to tell his old friend Albert Einstein that he had chosen to side with Niels Bohr. Ehrenfest, the 34-year-old Austrian professor of theoretical physics at Leiden University in Holland, was convinced that the atomic realm was as strange and ethereal as Bohr argued.

In a note to Einstein as they sat around the conference table, Ehrenfest scribbled: ‘Don’t laugh! There is a special section in purgatory for professors of quantum theory, where they will be obliged to listen to lectures on classical physics ten hours every day.’ ‘I laugh only at their naivete,’ Einstein replied. ‘Who knows who would have the [last] laugh in a few years?’ For him it was no laughing matter, for at stake was the very nature of reality and the soul of physics.

Read the complete article here. {via Telegraph}

Okay, here’s a kind of freaky Friday quantum strangeness post. Now try to wrap your skull around this state of matter which isn’t a solid, liquid, or gas. I’m not even going to attempt to explain it. What I will do is give you the Wikipedia link to the Bose-Einstein Condensate, where you can try and get the concept this weekend. But if it was up to me I wouldn’t waste the time, and just let Professor Daniel Kleppner of the MIT Physics department sort it all out for ya.

Down the Wormhole

More mysterious quantum forces.

Quantum particles entering a wormhole may experience an entirely new class of force

There is a gangrenous rot at the heart of modern physics. The two most successful pillars of modern physics, quantum theory and general relativity, are at loggerheads and something has to give.

There is no clearer demonstration of this than in the study of quantum mechanics in curved spaces. Quantum mechanics works well in the flat Euclidian space in which we appear to live but nobody knows how it fares in the curved space that general relativity predicts. And surprisingly, physicists have spent little time bothering to find out.

But today, Rossen Dandolo from the Universite de Cergy-Pontoise in France, takes a stab at nailing the behaviour of quantum particles in the highly curved geometry of a wormhole.

His starting point is the Heisenburg Uncertainty principle which states that you cannot know a particle’s location in space and its momentum at the same time. It is only possible to measure one or the other with any degree of certainty.

Read the complete article here. {via MIT Technology Review}

Some of the physicists who made early contributions to quantum mechanics (left to right, top row first): Neils Bohr, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg [Credit: Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive), Bild183-R57262

In a recent paper published in the European Journal of Physics, Marin has written a short history, based on a longer analysis, of the mysticism controversy in the early quantum physics community. As Marin emphasizes, the controversy began in Germany in the 1920s among physicists in reaction to the new theory of quantum mechanics, but was much different than debates on similar issues today. At the turn of the last century, science and religion were not divided as they are today, and some scientists of the time were particularly inspired by Eastern mysticism. In his analysis, Marin lays out each player’s role and perspective in the controversy, and argues that studying the original interpretations of quantum mechanics can help scientists better understand the theory, and could also be important for the public in general.

“Becoming aware of this subject would help general audiences realize that there are many other alternatives besides the ones offered by the disjunction between science and religion,” Marin told PhysOrg.com. “Science vs. religion is a very recent forced choice that the founders of quantum mechanics would have never recognized, much less accepted.”

Read complete article here. {via physorg.com}

Punk Science

The paradigm of science has come to a grinding halt. Some are complaining that there are no big discoveries to find. Although technology advances at a rapid pace, these are simply improvements on previous discoveries. There have been no radical changes in the way we see the universe for decades…until now!

Punk Science charts the current revolution in science that is arising from rebels around the world and gaining ground. This brave new world is not one devoid of meaning or thought, but one alive with consciousness, where we dance in a field of light imbued with the mind of God.

This is not a book of dogmatic religion. Punk Science stays firmly in the domain of logic and of science to demonstrate how the separate fields of science and spirituality are starting to look incredibly similar. Could it be that there are fundamental truths to the universe, we just have to know how to look for them?

Read the complete article here. {via punkscience.com}

Global Consciousness

 Join host Alex Tsakiris when he interviews Brain Dunning of Skeptoid for a 30-minute skeptic versus believer debate on the Global Consciousness Project. The interview can be heard at: www.skeptiko.com/73-skeptoid-brian-dunning/. During the interview Dunning and Tsakiris spare over the science behind The Global Consciousness started by Dr. Roger Nelson of Princeton, and Dr. Dean Radin of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. They also discuss whether the project’s results show proof an interconnectedness among people around the planet:

Read complete article here. {via pr.com}

Senior Scientist, Institute of Noetic Sciences. Professor Sonoma State University and Saybrook Graduate School. Author and co-author of over 200 journal articles and technical reports. Author of The Conscious Universe.