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The five-decade-old paradox — long thought key to linking quantum theory with Einstein’s theory of gravity — is falling to a new generation of thinkers. Netta Engelhardt is leading the way. =============================================================================== In 1974, Stephen Hawking calculated that black holes’ secrets die with them. Random quantum jitter on the spherical outer boundary, or “event horizon,” of a black hole will cause the hole to radiate particles and slowly shrink to nothing. Any record of the star whose violent contraction formed the black hole — and whatever else got swallowed up after — then seemed to be permanently lost. Hawking’s calculation...

First of all, what is the black hole information loss problem, or paradox, as it’s sometimes called. It’s an inconsistency in physicists’ currently most fundamental laws of nature, that’s quantum theory and general relativity. Stephen Hawking showed in the early nineteen-seventies that if you combine these two theories, you find that black holes emit radiation. This radiation is thermal, which means besides the temperature, that determines the average energy of the particles, the radiation is entirely random. This black hole radiation is now called Hawking Radiation and it carries away mass from the black hole. But the radius of the...

Wigner sharpened the paradox by imagining a (human) friend of his shut in a lab, measuring a quantum system. He argued it was absurd to say his friend exists in a superposition of having seen and not seen a decay unless and until Wigner opens the lab door. [Nora] Tischler and her colleagues have carried out a version of the Wigner’s friend test. By combining the classic thought experiment with another quantum head-scratcher called entanglement—a phenomenon that links particles across vast distances—they have also derived a new theorem, which they claim puts the strongest constraints yet on the fundamental nature...

A recent test has confirmed the predictions of quantum trajectory theory, which describes what happens during the long-mysterious “collapse” of a quantum system.Imagine if all our scientific theories and models told us only about averages: if the best weather forecasts could only give you the average daily amount of rain expected over the next month, or if astronomers could only predict the average time between solar eclipses. In the early days of quantum mechanics, that seemed to be its inevitable limitation: It was a probabilistic theory, telling us only what we will observe on average if we collect records for...

Dozens of manuscripts belonging to Albert Einstein, many of them unseen in public before, have been unveiled by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. More than 110 new documents are now on display at the university, marking the 140th anniversary of Einstein's birth. It was donated by the Crown-Goodman Family Foundation and purchased from a private collector in North Carolina. The manuscripts contain an appendix to Einstein's article on Unified Theory ... The collection includes scientific work by the Nobel Prize winner that has never been published or researched.

In this mini world, the concepts of "before" and "after" dissolve, such that two events can both precede and succeed each other. In other words, event A can occur before event B, and event B can occur before event A... This idea, called a "quantum switch," was first proposed in 2009 by another team and has since been explored both theoretically and experimentally. Previous experiments showed event A could both precede and succeed event B, but the research couldn't say that these two scenarios were happening at the same place, said Cyril Branciard, co-author of this new study and a...

Scientists have been using quantum theory for almost a century now, but embarrassingly they still don’t know what it means. An informal poll taken at a 2011 conference on Quantum Physics and the Nature of Reality showed that there’s still no consensus on what quantum theory says about reality—the participants remained deeply divided about how the theory should be interpreted. Some physicists just shrug and say we have to live with the fact that quantum mechanics is weird. So particles can be in two places at once, or communicate instantaneously over vast distances? Get over it. After all, the theory...

Photosynthesis and other vital biological reactions depend on the interplay between electrically polarized molecules. For the first time, scientists have imaged these interactions at the atomic level. The insights from these images could help lead to better solar power cells, researchers added. Atoms in molecules often do not equally share their electrons. This can lead to electric dipoles, in which one side of a molecule is positively charged while the other side is negatively charged. Interactions between dipoles are critical to biology -- for instance, the way large protein molecules fold -- often depend on how the electric charges of...

Two pages from the book "Arithmetica Infinitorum," by John Wallis. In the table on the left page, the square that appears repeatedly denotes 4/pi, or the ratio of the area of a square to the area of the circumscribed circle. Wallis used the table to obtain the inequalities shown at the top of the page on the right that led to his formula. Credit: Digitized by Google ============================================================================================================= In 1655 the English mathematician John Wallis published a book in which he derived a formula for pi as the product of an infinite series of ratios. Now researchers from the University...

The bizarre nature of reality as laid out by quantum theory has survived another test, with scientists performing a famous experiment and proving that reality does not exist until it is measured. Physicists at The Australian National University (ANU) have conducted John Wheeler's delayed-choice thought experiment, which involves a moving object that is given the choice to act like a particle or a wave. Wheeler's experiment then asks - at which point does the object decide? Common sense says the object is either wave-like or particle-like, independent of how we measure it. But quantum physics predicts that whether you observe...

The road uniting quantum field theory and general relativity -- the two great theories of modern physics -- has been impassable for 80 years. Could a tool from condensed matter physics finally help map the way?

For the last ten years, theoretical physicists have shown that the intense connections generated between particles as established in the quantum law of 'entanglement' may hold the key to eventual teleportation of quantum information. Now, for the first time, researchers have worked out how entanglement could be 'recycled' to increase the efficiency of these connections. Published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the result could conceivably take us a step closer to sci-fi style teleportation in the future, although this research is purely theoretical in nature. The team have also devised a generalised form of teleportation, which allows for a...

Scientists have linked two diamonds in a mysterious process called entanglement that is normally only seen on the quantum scale. Entanglement is so weird that Einstein dubbed it "spooky action at a distance." It's a strange effect where one object gets connected to another so that even if they are separated by large distances, an action performed on one will affect the other. Entanglement usually occurs with subatomic particles, and was predicted by the theory of quantum mechanics, which governs the realm of the very small... Because energy must be conserved in closed systems (where there's no input of outside...

Denver, Colo., Sep 30, 2009 / 03:35 pm (CNA).- Contemporary astrophysics hold the scientific key to prove the existence of God, but unfortunately very few know the scientific facts, said Fr. Robert J. Spitzer, S.J, PhD, during a conference delivered on Sunday at the John Paul II Center for the New Evangelization in Denver, Colorado. The Honolulu-born Jesuit is the past president of Gonzaga University and is also well-known philosopher and physicist who is involved in bringing science and theology together. Fr. Spitzer is currently engaged in an ambitious project to explain the metaphysical consequences of the latest astrophysical discoveries,...

Science fiction looks closer to becoming science fact. Parallel universes really do exist, according to a mathematical discovery by Oxford scientists that sweeps away one of the key objections to the mind boggling and controversial idea. The work has wider implications since the idea of parallel universes sidesteps one of the key problems with time travel. Every since it was given serious lab cred in 1949 by the great logician Kurt Godel, many eminent physicists have argued against time travel because it undermines ideas of cause and effect to create paradoxes: a time traveller could go back to kill his...

Combinatorics, Probability Theory, and the Observer Problem   Combinatorics and probability theory are distinct yet related branches of mathematics. Combinatorics is the evaluation of a (usually) finite set of objects. It asks questions like, “How likely is it the next card I draw will be a seven of hearts?” Or, “What is the likelihood of my winning the five-ball Lotto tonight?” Next questions might be, “How many cards are in a standard deck?” Or “What are the possible combinations of numbers for a winning lottery ticket?” Extending the method from questions of this type, Combinatorics might ask, “How many...

  100 years of Einstein Miraculous visions Dec 29th 2004 From The Economist print edition A century after Einstein's miracle year, most people still do not understand exactly what it was he did. Here, we attempt to elucidate IN THE span of 18 months, Isaac Newton invented calculus, constructed a theory of optics, explained how gravity works and discovered his laws of motion. As a result, 1665 and the early months of 1666 are termed his annus mirabilis. It was a sustained sprint of intellectual achievement that no one thought could ever be equalled. But in a span of a...

I'd love to hear your comments on the movie "What the Bleep Do We Know." I thought it was the most impressive movie I have seen in a very long time. Has anyone seen it? "What the Bleep" is a movie that deals with quantumm science, the power of thought to shape our experience, the scientific basis for the power of thought. It ries to explain the nature of reality, both scientifically and theoretically. It is about "how the quantum world invites spiritual and mystical interpretations of reality." "What the Bleep Do We Know!?" talks about the science of possibilities...

Newton vs. The Clockwork Universe By Jean F. Drew As Wolfhart Pannenberg observes in his Toward a Theology of Nature: Essays on Science and Faith (1993), the present-day intellectual mind-set assumes that there is no relation or connection between the God of the Christian faith and the understanding of the world in the natural sciences. Ironically this separation of God from the world is commonly credited to Sir Isaac Newton, the father of classical mechanics, whose ground-breaking work on the laws of motion and thermodynamics seemed to posit a purely mechanistic, deterministic, “clockwork universe” that was not dependent on God...

“Integrative Science”: The Death-Knell of Scientific Materialism?A Meditation Excerpting from: “Toward an Integrative Science,” Menas Kefatos and Mihai Drãgãnescu; “The Fundamental Principles of the Universe and the Origin of Physical Laws,” Attila Grandpierre; “The Dynamics of Time and Timelessness: Philosophy, Physics and Prospects for Our Life,” Attila Grandpierre. Kafatos is University Professor of Interdisciplinary Science, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA. Drãgãnescu is affiliated with the Romanian Academy, Bucharest, Romania. Grandpierre is chief research assistant of the Konkoly Observatory of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary. BEFORE WE EMBARK ON THIS “MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR,” we need some clarifications: RE:...