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Have We Been Interpreting Quantum Mechanics Wrong This Whole Time?

Have We Been Interpreting Quantum Mechanics Wrong This Whole Time?
For nearly a century, “reality” has been a murky concept. The laws of quantum physics seem to suggest that particles spend much of their time in a ghostly state, lacking even basic properties such as a definite location and instead existing everywhere and nowhere at once. Only when a particle is measured does it suddenly materialize, appearing to pick its position as if by a roll of the dice. This idea that nature is inherently probabilistic — that particles have no hard properties, only likelihoods, until they are observed — is directly implied by the standard equations of quantum mechanics. But now a set of surprising experiments with fluids has revived old skepticism about that worldview. The bizarre results are fueling interest in an almost forgotten version of quantum mechanics, one that never gave up the idea of a single, concrete reality. The experiments involve an oil droplet that bounces along the surface of a liquid. Magical Measurements Some physicists now disagree.

Quantum control: How weird do you want it? - physics-math - 11 September 2014 Entanglement used to be the gold standard of the quantum world's weirdness, now a new and noisy phenomenon could give us all the benefits with less of the fuss RAYMOND LAFLAMME works in a magnificent-looking building. The Quantum-Nano Centre on the University of Waterloo campus in Ontario, Canada, boasts an exterior whose alternating strips of reflecting and transparent glass are designed as metaphors for the mysterious nature of the quantum world. Inside, it is even more impressive. What a shame, then, if all this cutting-edge engineering proves ...

Addicting Info – The U.S. Navy Just Announced The End Of Big Oil And No One Noticed Surf’s up! The Navy appears to have achieved the Holy Grail of energy independence – turning seawater into fuel: After decades of experiments, U.S. Navy scientists believe they may have solved one of the world’s great challenges: how to turn seawater into fuel.…The new fuel is initially expected to cost around $3 to $6 per gallon, according to the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, which has already flown a model aircraft on it. Curiously, this doesn’t seem to be making much of a splash (no pun intended) on the evening news. This technology is in its infancy and it’s already this cheap? I expect the GOP to go ballistic over this and try to legislate it out of existence. There are two other aspects to this story that have not been brought up yet: 1. If we pull out massive amounts of CO2, even if we burn it again, not all of it will make it back into the water. 2. And if we “leak” the technology? Why this is not a huge major story mystifies me.

A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field "A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field" is the third of James Clerk Maxwell's papers regarding electromagnetism, published in 1865.[1] It is the paper in which the original set of four Maxwell's equations first appeared. The concept of displacement current, which he had introduced in his 1861 paper "On Physical Lines of Force", was utilized for the first time, to derive the electromagnetic wave equation.[2] Maxwell's original equations[edit] In part III of "A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field", which is entitled "General Equations of the Electromagnetic Field", Maxwell formulated twenty equations[1] which were to become known as Maxwell's equations, until this term became applied instead to a vectorized set of four equations selected in 1884, which had all appeared in "On physical lines of force".[2] Heaviside's versions of Maxwell's equations are distinct by virtue of the fact that they are written in modern vector notation. For his original text on force, see: .

When the internet dies, meet the meshnet that survives - 19 April 2014 If a crisis throws everyone offline, getting reconnected can be tougher than it looks, finds Hal Hodson during a test scenario in the heart of New York IN THE heart of one of the most connected cities in the world, the internet has gone down. Amid the blackout, a group of New Yorkers scrambles to set up a local network and get vital information as the situation unfolds. The scenario is part of a drill staged on 5 April in Manhattan by art and technology non-profit centre Eyebeam, and it mimics on a small scale the outage that affected New Yorkers after superstorm Sandy hit in 2012. The idea is to test whether communication networks built mostly on meagre battery power and mobile devices can be created rapidly when disaster strikes. I'm a volunteer node in the network, and an ethernet cable runs over my shoulders into a wireless router in my left hand. Other routers link up with mine from a few hundred metres away. More From New Scientist More from the web Recommended by

Research reveals the real cause of death for some starburst galaxies Like hedonistic rock stars that live by the "better to burn out than to fade away" credo, certain galaxies flame out in a blaze of glory. Astronomers have struggled to grasp why these young "starburst" galaxies—ones that are very rapidly forming new stars from cold molecular hydrogen gas up to 100 times faster than our own Milky Way—would shut down their prodigious star formation to join a category scientists call "red and dead." Starburst galaxies typically result from the merger or close encounter of two separate galaxies. "To form stars you need dense gas," said Gregory Rudnick, associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas. Now, Rudnick and a team of fellow astronomers have solved the mystery of why compact, young galaxies become galactic ruins. "As the stars form, the most massive and hot ones emit enough light that the pressure of this light on the gas can push the gas out of the galaxy," Rudnick said.

Molecules in a fluid not randomly arranged FOM PhD researcher Matthijs Panman and his colleagues from the University of Amsterdam have demonstrated that molecules in liquid alcohol are not randomly oriented with respect to each other. The angle between the oxygen-hydrogen bonds of two neighbouring alcohol molecules is usually about 120 degrees. This discovery refutes the commonly held idea that molecules in a liquid are randomly arranged. The researchers published their work on 12 November 2014 in Physical Review Letters. In school we learn that molecules in a liquid are randomly arranged. But is that completely correct? Light and vibrations The FOM researchers, working at the Van 't Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences in Amsterdam and in collaboration with the Amsterdam Center for Multiscale Modeling, devised an experiment to observe the local ordering. The light used is polarised, which means that the electric field of the light has a fixed direction. 120 degrees Explore further: Directly visualizing hydrogen bonds

Quantum death: How the cosmic speed limit got frozen - physics-math - 27 March 2014 Zombie universe (Image: Edward Kinsella) Light speed is no limit in the quantum world – so why can't we exploit that freedom? Perhaps because we're living in the dead husk of a richer cosmos AS ENDINGS go, it is a bit of an anticlimax. This "heat death" of the universe was a favoured topic of the gloomier sort of 19th-century physicist. Antony Valentini, a theoretical physicist at Clemson University in South Carolina, is less ...

Engineers efficiently 'mix' light at the nanoscale The race to make computer components smaller and faster and use less power is pushing the limits of the properties of electrons in a material. Photonic systems could eventually replace electronic ones, but the fundamentals of computation, mixing two inputs into a single output, currently require too much space and power when done with light. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have engineered a nanowire system that could pave the way for this ability, combining two light waves to produce a third with a different frequency and using an optical cavity to amplify the intensity of the output to a usable level. The study was led by Ritesh Agarwal, professor of materials science and engineering in Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Ming-Liang Ren, a post-doctoral researcher in his lab. It was published in Nature Communications. Current computer systems represent bits of information—the 1's and 0's of binary code—with electricity.

Denisovans: The lost humans who shared our world - life - 03 April 2014 The others (Image: Simon Pemberton) They lived on the planet with us for most of our history, yet until six years ago we didn't know they existed. Meet the species rewriting human evolution THERE was very little to go on – just the tiniest fragment of a finger bone. At his lab in the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, Svante Pääbo was just about to finish the first sequencing of a Neanderthal genome when ...

Does dark magma lurk in deep Earth? (Phys.org) —A key to understanding Earth's evolution is to look deep into the lower mantle—a region some 400 to 1,800 miles (660 to 2,900 kilometers) below the surface, just above the core. Data have suggested that deep, hot, fluid magma oceans of melted silicates, a major Earth material, may reside above the core-mantle boundary. Researchers including Carnegie's Alex Goncharov have found, using high-pressure experiments with a proxy material, that the deep Earth materials conduct far less heat under increasing pressure than previously thought. The research is published in the November 11, 2014 issue of Nature Communications. Since scientists can't sample the Earth's deep interior, they study how seismic waves travel through the Earth to determine whether material is solid, liquid, or has other features. Heat transfer occurs at a higher rate across materials of high thermal conductivity than across materials of low thermal conductivity.

Transformers: Humanity's next 1000 years - tech - 23 October 2014 (Image: Jonny Wan) Eternal health, brain uploads, the end of privacy… with technological innovations coming at breakneck speed, how will they affect our evolution? TWO million years of innovation has changed our bodies, brains and behaviour. But it's not going to stop here. Perhaps we will pop pills.

Half of stars lurk outside galaxies NASA ESA/Hubble SM4 ERO Team Collisions between galaxies can kick stars out into intergalactic space. Astronomers have spotted a faint cosmic glow, unseen until now, that may come from stars that float adrift between galaxies. “There might be people living out there, out in the middle of cold dark space, that don't have a Milky Way,” says Harvey Moseley, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The stars were probably tossed there when galaxies collided. The findings come from the Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment (CIBER), which flew briefly into space in 2010 and 2012 aboard a sounding rocket. CIBER was designed to look for fluctuations in infrared light to hunt for signs of some of the first galaxies that formed in the Universe. But when Zemcov and his colleagues began to sift through CIBER’s data, they realized that the light it captured was not nearly red enough to have come from ancient galaxies.

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