A train traveling from west to east is lighter than traveling from east to west thanks to the Eötvös effect.
Wow! There’s Mounting Evidence for Anyons, a Third Kingdom of Particles.
For a long time (but not in a galaxy far far away) physicists believed there were only two types of particles in the universe – fermions and bosons.
Now, though, they’re finding the first examples of a theorized third particle kingdom – the anyon.
Anyons don’t behave like fermions or bosons, but fall somewhere in between, and the recently published paper in Science explains the evidence they’ve uncovered.
Image Credit: iStock
“We had bosons and fermions, and now we’ve got this third kingdom. It’s absolutely a milestone.”
Understanding quantum kingdoms can be complicated, but the bottom line is that even though there is only a small difference between the final states of fermions and bosons, there are profound physical differences in how they affect the world around them.
Fermions are the basis of all chemistry and the variety of the periodic table, while the more social bosons give us things like photons (and light rays).
Anyons exist in two dimensions, and are sort of everything that the other two families of particles are not. They’re in between, and make up “everything else,” which can make them hard to pin down (for physicists).
Image Credit: 5W INFOGRAPHICS
Frank Wilczek, a Nobel prize-winning physicist from MIT, explains the experiment that has physicists everywhere so excited.
“The topological argument was the first indication that these anyons could exist. What was left to find was physical systems.”
In 1984, Wilczek and two of his cohorts, Daniel Arovas and John Robert Schrieffer, cooled a bunch of electrons (fermions) to absolute zero and then put them next to a strong magnetic field. That they observed was a “fractional quantum Hall effect,” and believed the resulting quasiparticles were anyons.
They were not, however, able to observe the behavior of these particles, or to document what made them unique.
Image Credit: iStock
This new study, though, allowed those same three physicists to set up a tiny particle collider in two dimensions and smash anyons together to observe what happened – which turned out to be exactly what they theorized, confirms uninvolved physicist Dmitri Feldman.
“Everything fits with the theory so uniquely, there are no questions. That’s very unusual for this field, in my experience.”
As for Wilczek and his friends, they couldn’t be more thrilled.
“There’s been a lot of evidence for a long time. But if you ask: Is there a specific phenomenon you can point to and say the anyons are responsible for that phenomenon and you can’t explain it in any other way? I think is pretty clearly at a different level.”
Which is all to say, congrats to everyone involved. It sounds like a pretty big deal.
And listen – any time absolutely everything goes your way in the disordered world of science, it’s clearly time to celebrate.
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The Flat Particle That Could Be The Key to Unlocking Quantum Computing
We don’t hear much on the news or in our daily lives about quantum computing per se, but the majority of the technological advances that have changed our lives over the past several decades are thanks to increased computer power.
Now, physicists have confirmed the existence of a particle they’re calling an anyon, and it could be the key to unlocking many more computing possibilities in the future, says Discover.
“These particle-like objects only arise in realms confined to two dimensions, and then only under certain circumstances – like at temperatures near absolute zero and in the presence of a strong magnetic field.”
Physicists have theorized that these anyons exist since the 1980s, but their nature has made them hard to pin down.
Those same qualities would make them very valuable to quantum research and computers, though, so scientists haven’t stopped trying to prove they exist.
Image Credit: YouTube
Purdue University talked about their many potential uses in a recent press release.
“Anyons have characteristics not seen in other subatomic particles, including exhibiting fractional charge and fractional statistics that maintain a ‘memory’ of their interactions with other quasiparticles by inducing quantum mechanical phase changes.
Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek, professor of physics at MIT, gave these quasiparticles the tongue-in-cheek name ‘anyon’” due to their strange behavior because unlike other types of particles, they can adopt ‘any’ quantum phase when their positions are exchanged.”
Researchers were able to train a miniature particle accelerator to “sort” particles and notice anyons, then came up with a maze that would phase out all of the other particles in order to end up with only the mysterious particles they were searching for at the start.
Image Credit: Cornell Chronicle
What they found was that it worked so well because, like electrons and photons, anyons “braid” – and this is good news for quantum computing, says researcher Mikael Rechtsman.
“Braiding is a topological phenomenon that has been traditionally associated with electronic devices.
We hope to show that a whole class of topological phenomena can be useful not only for electronic devices, but also photonic devices, such as lasers, medical imaging, telecommunications, and others.
We also expect that this new type of topological physics could be applied to quantum information systems, particularly those based on photons.”
With more particles in their toolkit, physicists are sure advances are to come – and we have the anyons to thank.
Who knew?
The post The Flat Particle That Could Be The Key to Unlocking Quantum Computing appeared first on UberFacts.
The Flat Particle That Could Be The Key to Unlocking Quantum Computing
We don’t hear much on the news or in our daily lives about quantum computing per se, but the majority of the technological advances that have changed our lives over the past several decades are thanks to increased computer power.
Now, physicists have confirmed the existence of a particle they’re calling an anyon, and it could be the key to unlocking many more computing possibilities in the future, says Discover.
“These particle-like objects only arise in realms confined to two dimensions, and then only under certain circumstances – like at temperatures near absolute zero and in the presence of a strong magnetic field.”
Physicists have theorized that these anyons exist since the 1980s, but their nature has made them hard to pin down.
Those same qualities would make them very valuable to quantum research and computers, though, so scientists haven’t stopped trying to prove they exist.
Image Credit: YouTube
Purdue University talked about their many potential uses in a recent press release.
“Anyons have characteristics not seen in other subatomic particles, including exhibiting fractional charge and fractional statistics that maintain a ‘memory’ of their interactions with other quasiparticles by inducing quantum mechanical phase changes.
Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek, professor of physics at MIT, gave these quasiparticles the tongue-in-cheek name ‘anyon’” due to their strange behavior because unlike other types of particles, they can adopt ‘any’ quantum phase when their positions are exchanged.”
Researchers were able to train a miniature particle accelerator to “sort” particles and notice anyons, then came up with a maze that would phase out all of the other particles in order to end up with only the mysterious particles they were searching for at the start.
Image Credit: Cornell Chronicle
What they found was that it worked so well because, like electrons and photons, anyons “braid” – and this is good news for quantum computing, says researcher Mikael Rechtsman.
“Braiding is a topological phenomenon that has been traditionally associated with electronic devices.
We hope to show that a whole class of topological phenomena can be useful not only for electronic devices, but also photonic devices, such as lasers, medical imaging, telecommunications, and others.
We also expect that this new type of topological physics could be applied to quantum information systems, particularly those based on photons.”
With more particles in their toolkit, physicists are sure advances are to come – and we have the anyons to thank.
Who knew?
The post The Flat Particle That Could Be The Key to Unlocking Quantum Computing appeared first on UberFacts.
According to the new study, there’s a 50-50 chance we’re living in a simulation…
According to the new study, there’s a 50-50 chance we’re living in a simulation. And the probability will increase as we develop technology enabling the creation of a simulation containing conscious beings. “The day we invent that technology, it flips the odds from a little bit better than 50–50 that we are real to almost […]
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In 1937, a funnel was fille…
In 1937, a funnel was filled with hot pitch, a highly viscous material. In April 2014, the ninth drop from the funnel fell, almost thirteen and a half years after the eighth.
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J.J. Thomson won the Nobel in Physics…
J.J. Thomson won the Nobel in Physics in 1906 when he showed electrons were particles. His son G. P. Thomson won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1937 for showing that electrons are waves.
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“Cheerios effect” is an interesting…
“Cheerios effect” is an interesting fluid dynamics phenomenon that happens in cereal bowls. When there are just a few bits of cereal left floating on top of the milk, they tend to cluster together in the middle or around the edges of the bowl, rather than dispersing across the surface.
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Learn About the Most (In)Famous Failed Scientific Experiment in History
Scientists usually assume that if they ever get famous it will be for doing something right – but in the case of the Michelson-Morley experiment, those involved are forever going to be remembered for conducting the worst (best?) failed experiment in history.
Then again, if you end up changing literally everything in your field, was your experiment really a failure at all?
Here’s what happened.
・・・ The #DoubleSlitExperiment is an experiment in #QuantumPhysics in which the effects were shown by #ThomasYoung way back in 1803, but since has been proven even more strange by many others. It's power truly reveals a mind-altering view of the world and how we affect it. To explain this experiment, we first must truly grasp the difference between a #particle and a #wave. A particle is what we perceive as #matter of some sort – something with mass. A wave is a disturbance in some type of substance – like ripples through water. Ok, that's easy enough. Now, what if I told you that a subatomic particle isn't a particle until a consciousness observes it. What is it then? Its a wave. Huh? For some unknown reason that haunts scientists, everything we perceive as having mass is just a wave of information (or possibilities) until we observe it in some way. I'm not talking in the philosophical way like if a tree falls in the woods and no one's there to hear it, does it make a sound. The Double Slit Experiment seems to answer that question as you'll see. Until we observe the soon to be particle, its a wave that's actually doing every possibility it could do at the same time. Huh?!?! It doesn't make any sense, yet this is one experiment that appears to somewhat prove this. The Double Slit Experiment shows us that we create reality just by observing it. WHOA, create reality?! Yes we do. Your consciousness collapses wave functions into digitized bits of matter that we then perceive as reality. You are not creating reality, but you are creating your own #RealityTunnel and most people aren't aware of it. #4biddenknowledge reporting live from #TheMatrix. Clip above of from the famous documentary named: #WhatTheBleepDoWeKnow #YouCreateYourOwnReality 
At the beginning of the 19th century, scientists weren’t sure whether light was a wave or a particle. In 1801, Thomas Young (thought he) settled the debate with his double-slit experiment, in which he shined a light through two slits cut into a notecard aimed at a wall. Since he produced a pattern of dark and light bars as opposed to just two slit-shaped patterns, he concluded that light could not be a simple particle.
That said, no one could figure out what medium the wave was traveling through – the substance that made up the universe. Some physicists called it “ether” – matter that could be found everywhere but that wouldn’t interact with its physical counterpart at all.
In 1887, physicists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley set out to prove that “ether” only existed to carry light waves.
Let’s start here – with ether “wind.”
Just like when you’re driving a car and stick your hand out the window, the “ether” should be flowing over the planet’s surface at rate similar to the speed of Earth traveling through space.
Michelson and Morley built a device called an interferometer, which uses what amounts to a one-way mirror to split a beam of light, reflecting half of it at a 90-degree angle down one tunnel and allowing the other half to pass through down another tunnel.
Then, both light beams are reflected against mirrors again, placed at the end of each tunnel, and at the end, the beams are measured by a detector.
Fun fact: advanced versions of their devices were used to detect gravitational waves for the first time back in 2015.
If Michelson and Morley were correct about ether, then they would have traveled at slightly different rates, striking the detector at slightly different times. In reality, though, they arrived together.
With the benefit of hindsight, we know that the experiment failed because there is no ether – and that light is both a wave and a particle that always travels at the same speed no matter the direction.
In their failure, Michelson and Morley laid the groundwork for basically all of the 20th century’s most influential scientific thinkers. Their failure to detect ether presented a new and exciting problem for physicists and other scientists to tackle – and solve – in the years to come.
So the next time something doesn’t work out the way you thought, take heart – this is solid proof that we can always learn at least as much from our failures as our successes.
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12 Mindbenders That Might Just Mess With Your Sense of Reality
The simple definition of a paradox is this: a statement that contradicts itself or a situation which seems to defy logic.
These are all around us every day, and range from something mundane like saying “I always lie” and the complexities surrounding the idea of time travel.
If you’re into reading things that really bend your brain, I present these 12 paradoxes, designed to do just that.
12. When did it cease to be?
The Ship of Theseus always kind of fucked me. So, there’s this Greek dude called Theseus, and he’s on a very long boat trip home. His ship needs repair, they stop, replace a few rotten boards, and continue. Due to the particularily strenuous nature of this very long trip, several more of these stops for repairs are made, until, by the very end, not a single board from the original vessel remains.
Is this still the same vessel? If not, when did it cease to be?
11. Simple but not.
Pinocchio says “My nose will grow after I finish this sentence”
Does it?
10. The more traffic, the more traffic. Or something.
Braess’ paradox.
From wiki “the observation that adding one or more roads to a road network can end up impeding overall traffic flow through it. The paradox was postulated in 1968 by German mathematician Dietrich Braess, who noticed that adding a road to a particular congested road traffic network would increase overall journey time.”
9. Just stop it, people.
That “this page is intentionally left blank” page.
The page isn’t even blank anymore!
8. Triple make you crazy.
The UK ‘triple lock’ that people moving to the UK experience:
Need proof of address and photographic ID to open a bank account
Need a bank account and photographic ID to rent a place
Need a bank account and an address to get sent your photographic ID
7. The Legend of Zelda.
What about the song of storms from the legend of Zelda?
In the legend of Zelda ocarina of Time, you travel though time between child and adult by using the master sword, and doing so you can come back to certain areas to get different items from both times.
Well one song the you learn is called the song of storms and you learn it by going to the adult time and talk to a guy in a windmill. He tells you about a kid that came in 7 years ago and played a strange song and messed up the windmill and teaches it to you. After learning the song you can now go back to being a child and go to the guy in the windmill and play the song to him, despite not knowing it before as a child.
So questions are where did the song come from and who taught who the song? Did the windmill guy teach it to link or did link teach it to the windmill guy?
6. And around and around forever.
Jim is my enemy.
But it turns out that Jim is also his own worst enemy.
And the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
So, Jim is actually my friend.
But…because he is his own worst enemy, the enemy of my friend is my enemy.
So, actually Jim is my enemy.
But…
5. Where to put the hooks?
So i know this is just a silly thing but…..
At my old work, my department was food service. In our prep room, you had to always wear an apron. Always, no exceptions.
When leaving the preproom, you had to take your apron off to prevent cross contamination.
The bosses were trying to figure out where to put the hooks. Inside in the back of the door, or outside on the wall.
4. Definitely hard to explain.
The Banach Tarski paradox is one hell of a mind fuck.
Its basically taking something, and rearranging it to form another exact copy of itself while still having the complete original. Like taking a sphere, which has infinite points on it and drawing line from every “point” on its surface to the center, or the core of the sphere. Then you seperate the lines from the sphere, but because there is infinite points you now have an exact copy of the original sphere.
Its kind of hard to explain here so just watch the Vsauce video on it for a more in depth explanation.
3. The coastline is always growing…or something.
The coastline paradox.
The more accurately you measure a coastline, the longer it gets… to infinity.
2. But you do, in fact, reach the door.
One of my favorites is Xeno’s Paradox.
In order to leave my apartment, just for example, I have to walk half way to my front door. Then I have to walk half the remaining distance. Then half that distance, ad infinitum. In theory, I should never be able to reach the door.
Now I love this paradox, because we’ve actually solved it. It was a lively, well-discussed debate for millennia. At least a few early thinkers were convinced that motion was an illusion because of it!
It was so persuasive an argument that people doubted their senses!
Then Leibniz (and/or Newton) developed calculus and we realized that infinite sums can have finite solutions.
Paradox resolved.
It makes me wonder what “calculus” we are missing to resolve some of these others.
EDIT: A lot more people have strong opinions about Zeno’s Paradox than I thought. To address common comments:
1.) Yes, it’s Zeno, not ‘Xeno’. Blame autocorrect and my own fraught relationship with homophones.
2.) Yes there are three of them.
3.) If you’re getting hung up on the walking example, think of an arrow being shot at a fleeing target. First the arrow has to get to where the target was. But at that point, the target has moved. So the arrow has to cover that new distance. But by then, the target has moved again, etc. So the arrow gets infinitesimally closer to the target, but doesn’t ever reach it.
4.) Okay, you think you could have solved it if you were living in ancient Greece. I profoundly regret that you weren’t born back then to catapult our understanding two millenia into the future.
5.) Yes, I agree Diogenes was a badass.
I hope this covers everything.
1. Just take a shot and pick a box.
Newcomb’s Paradox:
There are two boxes, A and B. A contains either $1,000 or $0 and B contains $100. Box A is opaque, so you can’t see inside, Box B is clear, so you can see for sure that there is $100 in it.
Your options is to choose both boxes, or to choose only Box A.
There is an entity called “The Predictor”, which determines whether or not the $1,000 will be in Box A. How he chooses this is by predicting whether or not you will choose both boxes, or just Box A. If the Predictor predicts that you will “two box”, he will leave Box A empty. If he predicts that you will “one box”, he will put the $1,000 in Box A. He is accurate “an overwhelming amount of the time”, but not 100%. At the time of your decision, the contents of Box A (i.e. whether or not there is anything in it) are fixed, and nothing you do at that point will change whether or not there is anything in the box.
It is a paradox of decision theory that rests on two principles of rational choice. According to the principle of strategic dominance:
There are only two possibilities, and you don’t know which one holds:
Box A is empty: Therefore you should choose both boxes, to get $100 as opposed to $0.
Box A is full: Therefore you should choose both boxes, to get $1,100 as opposed to just $1,000.
Therefore, you should always choose both boxes, since under every possible scenario, this results in more money.
BUT:
According to the principle of expected value:
Choosing one box is superior because you have a statistically higher chance of getting more money. Most of the people who have gone before you who have chosen one box have gotten $1,000, and most that have chosen both boxes have gotten only $100. Therefore, if you analyze the problem statistically, or in terms of which decision has the higher probability of resulting in a higher outcome, you should choose only one box. Imagine one billion people going before you, and you actually seeing so many of them have this outcome. Any outliers became insignificant.
In terms of strategic dominance, two-boxing is always superior to one-boxing because no matter what is in Box A, two-boxing results in more money. One-boxing, on the other hand, has a demonstrably higher probability of resulting in a larger amount of money. Both of these choices represent fundamental principles of rational choice. There are two rival theories, Causal Decision Theory (which supports strategic dominance) and Evidential Decision Theory (which supports expected utility). It is pretty arcane but one of the most difficult paradoxes in contemporary philosophy.
Robert Nozick summed it up well: “To almost everyone, it is perfectly clear and obvious what should be done. The difficulty is that these people seem to divide almost evenly on the problem, with large numbers thinking that the opposing half is just being silly.”
EDIT: I made some edits…to make it clearer.
EDIT: There are also an offshoot of Newcomb’s Paradoxes called medical Newcomb’s Problems. I’ve been in a situation like this before, I’ll describe it:
I went on an antidepressant, and there’s a history of manic depression in my family. My psychiatrist told me that for some people, antidepressants bring out their manic phase, and they find out they have manic depression. They already did have manic depression, so it doesn’t cause it, it just reveals it. She told me to watch out for any impulsive decisions I making, as that can be a sign of a manic phase.
I was in line at a convenience store and thought: should I buy a black and mild? I don’t really smoke, but for some reason it seemed appealing. Then I realized, that seems like an impulsive decision. But, if it is an impulsive decision, and I go through with it, and do indeed have manic depression, then I should just do it anyways. After all, it’s not making me have manic depression, it’s simply revealing something to me that I already had. On the other hand, if I don’t do it, then I have no evidence that I have manic depression, meaning that there truly is less evidence, and therefore I have no reason to believe that I have manic depression.
Expected utility = don’t buy the black & mild Strategic dominance = buy the black & mild
These situations aren’t quite as easy to see, but they’re interesting anyways.
I’m doing quite well now and all indication is that I do not have manic depression.
I’m off to take a nap to recover.
Do you have a favorite paradox? If it’s not here, please leave it in the comments!
Yes, we’re asking you to mess with our head once again. Because that’s how we roll.
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