Posted on 10/05/2012 4:06:16 PM PDT by LibWhacker
In 1938 one of the world's greatest scientists withdrew all his money and disappeared during a boat trip from Palermo to Naples. Whether he killed himself, was murdered or lived on under a different identity is still not known. But no trace of The Italian physicist Ettore Majorana has ever been found.
Majorana was a brilliant theorist who in the 1930's showed great insight into physics at a young age. He discovered a hitherto unknown solution to the equations from which quantum scientists deduce elementary particles: the Majorana fermion. Majorana deduced from quantum theory the possibility that there must be a special particle that would be right on the border between matter and antimatter. Fast forward to February 2012, the mysterious Majorana fermion was detected in a nanowire, according to Dutch nanoscientist Leo Kouwenhoven. The discovery could confirm the theory that assumes that dark matter, which is thought to form about 73 percent of the Universe, is composed of Majorana fermions.
Kouwenhoven leaked preliminary results of his research at a scientific congress. On April 12, Kouwenhoven went public in Science Express, saying his team at at TU Delft’s Kavli Institute and the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM Foundation) — and also financed by Microsoft — had created a nanoscale electronic device in which a pair of Majorana fermions magically (my word) “appear” at either end of a nanowire.
The recipe was simple: take one nanowire (made by colleagues from Eindhoven University of Technology) and add a superconducting material and a strong magnetic field.
Quantum computer experts say that Majorana fermions could be fundamental building blocks for a future quantum computer that would be exceptionally stable and barely sensitive to external influenceswould avoid the decoherence. challenge facing all current quantum computers.
Kouwenhoven’s team hopes to use a scheme called “topological quantum computation” that could evade decoherence at the hardware level by storing quantum information non-locally, which could lead to a Nobel Prize for Kouwenhoven and total domination of the future of quantum computing by Microsoft.
Practically all theoretic particles that are predicted by quantum theory have been found in the last decades, with just a few exceptions, including the enigmatic Majorana particle and the well-known Higgs boson being sought by CERN"s massive LHC project.
On June 7, 2011 Italian media reported that the Carabinieri‘s RIS had analyzed a photograph of a man taken in Argentina in 1955, finding ten points of similarity with Majorana’s face. The mystery of the Majorana fermion lives on!
The image below shows two Majorana fermions (orange balls) are formed at the end of the nanowire. Electrons enter the nanowire from the Gold contact, and meet the Majorana fermion on the way. If the electron has the wrong energy, it is reflected back into the contact. If it has the right energy, it can go through the Majorana fermion via a special interaction.
The Daily Galaxy via ns.tudelft.nl/, kurzweilai.net, and Ref.: V. Mourik, et al., Signatures of Majorana Fermions in Hybrid Superconductor-Semiconductor Nanowire Devices, Science, 2012; [DOI:10.1126/science.1222360]
Image credit: TU Delft
So, ‘special interaction’ and, lo and behold, Dark Matter.
Fascinating!
But the guy was like Judge Crater!
Okay, these things are supposed to exist on the edge between matter and antimatter. One of the big problems with antimatter, in the development of antimatter propulsion, say, is that it’s hard to contain the stuff. I wonder... might it be possible, in principle, to build antimatter containers out of Majorana fermions?
I'm down for that. What he said.
It continues to amaze me that the human race can produce this kind of genius, and btw reach for the stars too, all while gibbering idiots like Obama and the moslem brotherhood keep sinking their moldy green teeth into humanity's heels.
Go figure.
A top physicist on the eve of WW2 disappears. My guess is he disappeared into the German nuclear research program, or was planning to defect to the US, got caught, and was made to disappear.
The German nuclear energy project started in 1939.
So two Electrons walk into a bar, and Majorana Fermion checks them out....
“Storing quantum information non-locally” - I guess we’ll be back to using floppy discs.
Is he talking about storing data in dark matter or another dimension?
Such that Windows will crash before you boot up.
I'd like to get out the pancake bunny,
but I suspect I'm just too stupid to grok the subject.
No doubt some philosopher of quantum physics will figure out some explanation for them someday, but in the meantime the folks we know as Acolytes of the Antichrist are very real, overlyplentiful in recent centuries, and as yet quite remote.
not only crash but rotate into dimensions occupied by unix ~
Hitler and his guys didn't want to END THE WAR in 1942 ~ or even later!
So what happened that "ending the war" became the watchword for NOT developing nuclear weapons ~ over on the German side, but it was actually the watchword for DEVELOPING nuclear weapons on our side?
You'd have expected the Germans to be sufficiently oversubscribed to their kind to have allocated a modicum of Acolytes of the Antichrist to their atomic programs ~ but apparently they didn't ~ but we did!
Just how far did Majorana go in this line of thought before he jumped the reservation? What else did he come up with.
Is it possible we pulled his plug before he delivered something useful to Hitler?
Yes they did want to end the war - but by that time they had several tigers by the tail and couldn’t let go.
German grand strategy as of 1941 was premised on quick, relatively low cost campaigns that wouldn’t require a full mobilization of Germany in order to limit the sacrifices required in the home front, while at the same time laying the foundations of advanced armaments and massively increased industrial capacity. They also intended to achieve this mainly by looting their conquests.
A often overlooked fact is that German industry wasn’t really on a full war footing until later in 1942. This was deliberate; the Nazis didn’t want to risk upsetting the German public as they were afraid of the popular disillusion with war that eventually brought German defeat in WWI.
But the failed blitzkrieg against the Soviets plus the failure to pressure Britain into negotiations plus the entry of the US into the war put an end to these ideas. By the end of 1941 Germany was in a total war situation and short of resources. From that point the German strategic outlook became progressively shorter and shorter as the problem of near term survival became more and more pressing. Many longer term strategic projects were cancelled or put on the back burner. Considering the urgency of the production deficit it is often argued that Germany kept far too many of these ambitious projects going for much too long, wasting resources that could have been put to more immediate needs.
Germany simply didn’t have the time and resources to put into a Manhattan project, as from end of 1941 they were desperately short of basic armaments, transport, fuel and other immediate needs. They didn’t have the spare capacity the US had.
plug that sucker inyt your electric meter hole and you’d have free power forever.......or something!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.