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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...

Owen Maroney worries that physicists have spent the better part of a century engaging in fraud. Ever since they invented quantum theory in the early 1900s, explains Maroney, who is himself a physicist at the University of Oxford, UK, they have been talking about how strange it is — how it allows particles and atoms to move in many directions at once, for example, or to spin clockwise and anticlockwise simultaneously. But talk is not proof, says Maroney. “If we tell the public that quantum theory is weird, we better go out and test that's actually true,” he says. “Otherwise...

New analysis shows a way to self-propel subatomic particles, extend the lifetime of unstable isotopes. David L. Chandler | MIT News Office January 20, 2015 Press Inquiries Some physical principles have been considered immutable since the time of Isaac Newton: Light always travels in straight lines. No physical object can change its speed unless some outside force acts on it. Not so fast, says a new generation of physicists: While the underlying physical laws haven’t changed, new ways of “tricking” those laws to permit seemingly impossible actions have begun to appear. For example, work that began in 2007 proved that...

In today's technological age, it might seem silly for intelligent people to consider a spiritual world where beings we cannot see might exist. Oh it's fine to read books and watch Hollywood movies about the afterlife and spirits that roam the netherworld but that's all make believe, not the real world. In the real world we are taught that reality consists of what we can touch, taste, see, hear, smell, and that the spirit world is for those weak minded individuals who use religion as a crutch to get through the day. However, what if I told you that...

Quantum entanglement, a perplexing phenomenon of quantum mechanics that Albert Einstein once referred to as “spooky action at a distance,” could be even spookier than Einstein perceived. Physicists at the University of Washington and Stony Brook University in New York believe the phenomenon might be intrinsically linked with wormholes, hypothetical features of space-time that in popular science fiction can provide a much-faster-than-light shortcut from one part of the universe to another. But here’s the catch: One couldn’t actually travel, or even communicate, through these wormholes, said Andreas Karch, a UW physics professor. Quantum entanglement occurs when a pair or a...

Most scientists would probably say that the concept of an afterlife is either nonsense, or at the very least unprovable. Yet one expert claims he has evidence to confirm an existence beyond the grave—and it lies in quantum physics. Professor Robert Lanza claims the theory of biocentrism teaches that death as we know it is an illusion created by our consciousness. … Biocentrism is classed as the theory of everything and comes from the Greek for “life center”. It is the believe that life and biology are central to reality and that life creates the universe, not the other way...

"It is widely accepted now that, without a doubt, information is physical and quantum physics provides the rules of that physical behavior," George Mason University computer science professor Richard Gomez told NewsFactor. Alan Turing might be considered the "John Forbes Nash of computer science" -- a troubled young Princeton genius who achieved prominence in the 1950s. Turing published one of the top 10 papers in all of 20th-century science -- "On the Computability of Numbers." He killed himself over a conviction for homosexuality at the height of his genius, but since his death, his definition of "computability" has stood untouched...

Government Lab Reveals It Has Operated Quantum Internet for Over Two Years A quantum internet capable of sending perfectly secure messages has been running at Los Alamos National Labs for the last two and a half years, say researchers One of the dreams for security experts is the creation of a quantum internet that allows perfectly secure communication based on the powerful laws of quantum mechanics.The basic idea here is that the act of measuring a quantum object, such as a photon, always changes it. So any attempt to eavesdrop on a quantum message cannot fail to leave telltale signs...

Now physicists at the University of Vienna in Austria have "virtually intertwined" or entangled two particles spinning faster than ever in opposite directions. Entanglement occurs when two particles remain connected so that actions performed on one affect the other, despite the distance between them. (Einstein referred to this eerie connection as "spooky action at a distance.") In the new study, Anton Fickler and his colleagues entangled two photons that had a high orbital angular momentum, a property that measures the twisting of a wave of light. In quantum physics, particles such as photons can behave as particles and waves. Such...

Physicists have proposed an experiment that could force us to make a choice between extremes to describe the behaviour of the Universe. The proposal comes from an international team of researchers from Switzerland, Belgium, Spain and Singapore, and is published today in Nature Physics. It is based on what the researchers call a 'hidden influence inequality'. This exposes how quantum predictions challenge our best understanding about the nature of space and time, Einstein's theory of relativity. "We are interested in whether we can explain the funky phenomena we observe without sacrificing our sense of things happening smoothly in space and...

Enlarge Image Light touch. Serge Haroche and David Wineland (right) won the Nobel for their work manipulating the quantum states of individual atoms. Credit: CNRS and NIST The past couple of decades have witnessed a sea change in quantum physics. Previously, scientists relied on the strange rules of quantum theory mainly to explain the odd natural behavior of masses of atoms and other quantum particles such as photons. Increasingly, however, physicists are exploiting those rules to create delicate quantum states of individual particles and to do novel things with them. This year's Nobel Prize in physics honors two experimenters...

A group of physicists at the University of Glasgow is claiming a first: taking photos of entangled photons. In this paper in Nature (hooray for free access!), they explain that their 201 x 201 pixel images captured around 2,500 different entangled quantum states. The entangled photons were imaged using different lens configurations to capture correlations of position and momentum – the characteristics (to shorthand Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle) that mutually preclude excessive knowledge about a given quantum system. From the 100,000 images taken by their setup (pictured*), the scientists say they were able to observe 2,500 states which they described as...

In a paper published in the March 29 issue of the journal Nature, the scientists describe the emergence of “spontaneous coherence,” “spin textures” and “phase singularities” when excitons—the bound pairs of electrons and holes that determine the optical properties of semiconductors and enable them to function as novel optoelectronic devices—are cooled to near absolute zero. This cooling leads to the spontaneous production of a new coherent state of matter which the physicists were finally able to measure in great detail in their basement laboratory at UC San Diego at a temperature of only one-tenth of a degree above absolute zero....

Researchers have bent one of the most basic rules of quantum mechanics, a counterintuitive branch of physics that deals with atomic-scale interactions. Its "complementarity" rule asserts that it is impossible to observe light behaving as both a wave and a particle, though it is strictly both. In an experiment reported in Science, researchers have now done exactly that. They say the feat "pulls back the veil" on quantum reality in a way that was thought to be prohibited by theory. Quantum mechanics has spawned and continues to fuel spirited debates about the nature of what we can see and measure,...

When probing the deepest reaches of the Cosmos or magnifying our understanding of the quantum world, a whole host of mysteries present themselves. This is to be expected when pushing our knowledge of the Universe to the limit. But what if a well-known -- and apparently constant -- characteristic of matter starts behaving mysteriously? This is exactly what has been noticed in recent years; the decay rates of radioactive elements are changing. This is especially mysterious as we are talking about elements with "constant" decay rates -- these values aren't supposed to change. School textbooks teach us this from an...

An artificial "black hole" designed to capture wayward atoms has been created. It paves the way for an atom trap that could yield previously unknown states of matter. A team led by Lene Hau of Harvard University has mimicked the death spiral of matter falling into a cosmic black hole by applying a voltage across a carbon nanotube – a rolled-up sheet of carbon atoms. This created a powerful electric field that tugged at nearby rubidium atoms, which had been chilled to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero: a positive charge on the surface of the nanotubes attracts...

Scientists celebrated at the world's biggest atom smasher at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva on Tuesday as they started colliding particles at record energy levels mimicking conditions close to the Big Bang, opening a new era in the quest for the secrets of the universe. The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) said it had unleashed the unprecedented bursts of energy on the third attempt, as beams of protons thrust around the 27-kilometre (16.8-mile) accelerator collided at close to the speed of light. "This is physics in the making, the beginning of a new era, we...

Largest ever object put into quantum state.A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving. Andrew Cleland at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his team cooled a tiny metal paddle until it reached its quantum mechanical 'ground state' — the lowest-energy state permitted by quantum mechanics. They then used the weird rules of quantum mechanics to simultaneously set the paddle moving while leaving it standing still. The experiment shows that the principles of quantum mechanics can apply...

In today's technological age, it might seem silly for intelligent people to consider a spiritual world where beings we cannot see might exist. Oh it's fine to read books and watch Hollywood movies about the afterlife and spirits that roam the netherworld but that's all make believe, not the real world. In the real world we are taught that reality consists of what we can touch, taste, see, hear, smell, and that the spirit world is for those weak minded individuals who use religion as a crutch to get through the day.  However, what if I told you that...

The typical Hollywood action hero skirts death for a living. Time and again, scores of bad guys shoot at him from multiple directions but miss by a hair. Cars explode just a fraction of a second too late for the fireball to catch him before he finds cover. And friends come to the rescue just before a villain’s knife slits his throat. If any one of those things happened just a little differently, the hero would be hasta la vista, baby. Yet even if we have not seen the movie before, something tells us that he will make it to...