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A new kind of laser could mean cheaper gadgets for allLasers might be pushing 50, but they are still the youthful pin-ups of fundamental physics. Since the first one was unveiled in 1960, the more apocalyptic predictions of how they might be used - as death rays, for example - have proved to be overblown. Their peaceful application, on the other hand, can be seen everywhere from cutting and welding to combating cancer and cataracts, to powering telecoms and consumer electronics, and has mushroomed into an industry worth $6 billion in 2007. Advances in the laser lab translate into gadgets...

On March 16, 2009, the Templeton Foundation announced the winner of its annual 1 million pound sterling (1.42 million USD) prize, an amount that exceeds the payoff of the prestigious Nobel Prize...Dr. d’Espagnat was awarded the prize for his work using theoretical physics to predict the reality of a hypercosmic god, who exists outside of the physical universe...

ScienceDaily (Mar. 4, 2009) — In quantum mechanics, a vanguard of physics where science often merges into philosophy, much of our understanding is based on conjecture and probabilities, but a group of researchers in Japan has moved one of the fundamental paradoxes in quantum mechanics into the lab for experimentation and observed some of the 'spooky action at a distance' of quantum mechanics directly, Hardy's Paradox, the axiom that we cannot make inferences about past events that haven't been directly observed while also acknowledging that the very act of observation affects the reality we seek to unearth, poses a conundrum...

ABHAY ASHTEKAR remembers his reaction the first time he saw the universe bounce. "I was taken aback," he says. He was watching a simulation of the universe rewind towards the big bang. Mostly the universe behaved as expected, becoming smaller and denser as the galaxies converged. But then, instead of reaching the big bang "singularity", the universe bounced and started expanding again. What on earth was happening? Ashtekar wanted to be sure of what he was seeing, so he asked his colleagues to sit on the result for six months before publishing it in 2006. And no wonder. The theory...

Here’s an interesting conundrum involving nuclear decay rates. We think that the decay rates of elements are constant regardless of the ambient conditions (except in a few special cases where beta decay can be influenced by powerful electric fields). So that makes it hard to explain the curious periodic variations in the decay rates of silicon-32 and radium-226 observed by groups at the Brookhaven National Labs in the US and at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesandstalt in Germany in the 1980s. Today, the story gets even more puzzling. Jere Jenkins and pals at Purdue University in Indiana have re-analysed the raw data...

http://www.optics.rochester.edu/workgroups/boyd/presentations/Boyd_UMD-Q-Im_08.pdf

Quantum weirdness even stranger than previously thought.Two photons can be connected in a way that seems to defy the very nature of space and time, yet still obeys the laws of quantum mechanics. Physicists at the University of Geneva achieved the weird result by creating a pair of ‘entangled’ photons, separating them, then sending them down a fibre optic cable to the Swiss villages of Satigny and Jussy, some 18 kilometres apart. The researchers found that when each photon reached its destination, it could instantly sense its twin’s behaviour without any direct communication. The finding does not violate the laws...

Newswise: Using a convenient and flexible method for creating twin light beams, researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) of the Commerce Departments National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland have produced quantum images, pairs of information-rich visual patterns whose features are entangled, or inextricably linked by the laws of quantum physics. In addition to promising better detection of faint objects and improved amplification and positioning of light beams, the researchers' technique for producing quantum imagery is unprecedented in its simplicity, versatility, and efficiency, and may someday be useful for storing patterns of data in...

After getting the bad end of his own ax in a fight, a bloodied villain limps alone in a stark desert. Mathieu Amalric stumbles to the red, rocky ground. "CUT!" rings loudly from the set of the 22nd James Bond film. Picking up an hour after "Casino Royale" left off, "Quantum of Solace" is the spy franchise's first direct sequel. Filming began in January and has taken the crew from Britain to Panama to this moonlike landscape in northern Chile, which is standing in for Bolivia. It's a place that director Marc Forster said evokes Bond's "isolation and loneliness." "He...

Science Daily — Australian and French scientists have made another breakthrough in the technology that will drive next generation computers and teleportation. The researchers have successfully superposed light beams, which produces a state that appears to be both on and off at once. Light beams that are simultaneously on and off are vital for the next-generation super computers which should be faster than current computers based on bits, that are either on or off. Previously, only smaller light particles had been superposed and the group has also proved a quantum physics theory known as Schrödinger's cat. This theory, named after...

Folks, I want to keep commenting on the article published in this month's Discover magazine by Jane Bosveld, titled Soul Search, which I began reviewing in One monk goes up over the rainbow. The article goes on to narrate a 1921 experiment perform by Duncan MacDougall, a physician, who claimed he was able to weigh a human soul. He accomplished this by measuring how much a person weighs before and immediately after death. After monitoring six deaths, he reported that people lost between 11 and 43 grams at death, which he attributed to the material weight of the soul. Others...

SPYING is big business, and avoiding being spied on an even bigger one. So imagine if someone came up with a simple, cheap way of encrypting messages that is almost impossible to hack into? American computer engineer Laszlo Kish at Texas A&M University in College Station claims to have done just that. He says the thermal properties of a simple wire can be exploited to create a secure communications channel, one that outperforms quantum cryptography keys. His cipher device, which he first proposed in 2005, exploits a property called thermal noise. Thermal noise is generated by the natural agitation of...

Scientists in Japan have made a key step toward the development of a quantum computer -- a still largely hypothetical device that would be dramatically more powerful than today's supercomputers -- according to Japanese electronics giant NEC Corp. In what they claimed was a world first, researchers at NEC and the state-funded Institute of Physical and Chemical Research successfully demonstrated a circuit that can control the state of a pair of elemental particles and how strongly they interact with one another. Being able to control these particles -- called "qubits" -- in this fashion may help scientists to build a...

Quantum mechanics just got even stranger.There's only one way to describe the experiment performed by physicist Anton Zeilinger and his colleagues: it's unreal, dude. Measuring the quantum properties of pairs of light particles (photons) pumped out by a laser has convinced Zeilinger that "we have to give up the idea of realism to a far greater extent than most physicists believe today." By realism, he means the idea that objects have specific features and properties —that a ball is red, that a book contains the works of Shakespeare, or that an electron has a particular spin. For everyday objects, such...

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Quantum computing is such an elusive goal that even the company claiming to have the "world's first commercial quantum computer" acknowledged it isn't entirely sure the machine is performing true quantum calculations. ADVERTISEMENT And independent quantum computing researchers said they are dubious of some of the claims made by D-Wave Systems Inc. because the privately held Canadian company has not yet submitted its findings for peer review, a standard step for gaining acceptance in scientific circles. Many scientists believe that true quantum computing — which is based on the unusual properties of quantum physics — promises...

Twenty years before most scientists expected it, a commercial company has announceda quantum computer that promises to massively speed up searches and optimisation calculations. D-Wave of British Columbia has promised to demonstrate a quantum computer next Tuesday, that can carry out 64,000 calculations simultaneously (in parallel "universes"), thanks to a new technique which rethinks the already-uncanny world of quantum computing. But the academic world is taking a wait-and-see approach. D-Wave is the world's only "commercial" quantum computing company, backed by more than $20 million of venture capital (there are more commercial ventures in the related field of quantum cryptography). Its...

WILL CHINA LEAD A STAMPEDE OUT OF THE US DOLLAR? by Gary Dorsch Editor, Global Money Trends Magazine November 29, 2006 The $2 trillion per day foreign exchange market never sleeps. Yet for the past six months, the big-3 central banks, the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, and the Bank of Japan managed to lull the currency markets into a deep trance. Since last May, the big-3 central banks corralled the US dollar to within a 3% to 5% trading range against the British pound, the Euro and Japanese yen. The big-3 central banks utilized their three major weapons,...

An individual "dopant" atom has been spied interfering with the flow of electrons through a silicon transistor for the first time. Researchers say the feat could help scientists squeeze more power out of conventional computers and ultimately develop silicon-based quantum computers. Dopants are chemical impurities that affect the flow of electrons through a conducting or semiconducting material. They are deliberately added to pure silicon, for example, to create different types of electronic component. To analyse a lone dopant atom in action, Sven Rogge and colleagues at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands cryogenically cooled 35-nanometre-wide silicon wires, taken from...

Building upon recent studies on optomechanical entanglement with lasers and mirrors, a group of scientists has developed a theoretical model using entanglement swapping in order to entangle two micromechanical oscillators. This ability could lead to advances in information processing, as well as other applications that use micromechanical resonators, such as electrometers, displacement detectors, and radio frequency signal processors, wrote scientists Stefano Pirandola et al. in a recent Physical Review Letters. "Until now, entanglement has been observed only for optical modes, i.e., photons (which are massless particles)," Pirandola told PhysOrg.com. "The significance of purely mechanical entanglement would be that it involves...

Even if quantum computers can be made to work, there will still be two big obstacles preventing quantum networks becoming a reality. First, quantum bits, or qubits, stored in matter will have to be transferred to photons to be transmitted over long distances. Secondly, errors that creep in during transmission have to be corrected. Two unrelated studies have now shown how to clear these hurdles. Both studies use quantum entanglement, a spooky property that links particles however far apart they are. Measuring a quantum property on one particle immediately affects the other, and this effect can be used to “teleport”...