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Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle Explained

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle Explained

Quantum Computers Animated IDTIMWYTIM: Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle Killing sharks is killing coral reefs too The growing demand for shark fin as an ingredient in Chinese cuisine has caused an explosion in the number of shark fisheries in recent decades. But sharks are important members of ocean food chains, and removing them can have unintended consequences. Our new study, conducted off the coast of northwest Australia, shows that killing sharks isn’t just bad for sharks; it can also harm coral reefs. What do sharks have to do with coral? Sharks are apex predators - they live at the top of the food chain. Nowhere is immune to this phenomenon, as rising prices for shark fin drive fishermen to search every corner of the oceans to harvest sharks. While we recognise this loss is occurring, we still have very little idea of what effect the removal of sharks has on coral reef ecosystems. But a unique combination of circumstances now allows us to test the impact of sharks on coral reefs, on offshore atolls in the remote north-west of Western Australia. The difference between the two is striking.

What Is the Higgs? - Interactive Graphic Imagine never having seen a snowflake. Now prove one exists by probing the slush and mist of melting snow. You can’t see a Higgs boson, and no sensor can pick one out from the Higgs field that it forms. For 50 years, physicists have been building larger and more powerful accelerators to vaporize particles and sift through the debris. In the tunnels at CERN, protons are sped along a track to within a breath of the speed of light, then smashed together in a violent explosion. The protons annihilate each other, releasing a burst of energy. But Einstein tells us that mass is energy, and physics tells us that energy can’t be destroyed. An array of new particles pours from the fireball, energy spun back into tiny specks of mass. A machine surrounds and tracks the debris, bending charged particles as they plow through layers of sensors. Repeat this a million times, then tens of millions, before a second has passed. And keep going because you’re looking for something very rare. Once every few billion impacts,

Where Was The Big Bang? The Astounding Link Between the P≠NP Problem and the Quantum Nature of Universe — The Physics arXiv Blog The paradox of Schrodinger’s cat is a thought experiment dreamed up to explore one of the great mysteries of quantum mechanics—why we don’t see its strange and puzzling behaviour in the macroscopic world. The paradox is simple to state. It involves a cat, a flask of poison and a source of radiation; all contained within a sealed box. If a monitor in the box detects radioactivity, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison and killing the cat. The paradox comes about because the radioactive decay is a quantum process and so in a superposition of states until observed. But that means the cat must also be in a superposition of alive and dead states until the box is open and the system is observed. Nobody knows why we don’t observe these kinds of strange superpositions in the macroscopic world. But that mystery may now be solved thanks to the extraordinary work of Arkady Bolotin at Ben-Gurion University in Israel. First some background. Schrödinger’s equation has a direct bearing on this.

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