James' World 2

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Chloe Cushman

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For over a decade, scientists have attempted to synthesize a new form of carbon called graphene with limited success. That endeavor is now at an end, though, thanks to new research from the University of Colorado Boulder. Graphyne has long been of interest to scientists because of its similarities to the “wonder material” graphene—another form of carbon that is highly valued by industry whose research was even awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010. However, despite decades of work and theorizing, only a few fragments have ever been created before now.

This research, announced last week in Nature Synthesis, fills a long-standing gap in carbon material science, potentially opening brand-new possibilities for electronics, optics, and semiconducting material research.

“The whole audience, the whole field, is really excited that this long-standing problem, or this imaginary material, is finally getting realized,” said Yiming Hu, lead author on the paper and 2022 doctoral graduate in chemistry.

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The crystal structure of a layer of graphyne. Credit: Yiming Hu

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General relativity and quantum mechanics are the two most successful conceptual breakthroughs of modern physics, but Einstein’s description of gravity as a curvature in space-time doesn’t easily mesh with a universe made up of quantum wavefunctions. Recent work that tries to bring those theories together is revealing some mind-bending truths. In this episode, the physicist and author Sean Carroll talks with host Steven Strogatz about how space and time might be emergent properties of quantum reality, not fundamental parts of it.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn, or your favorite podcasting app, or you can stream it from Quanta.

Transcript

Steven Strogatz (00:03): I’m Steve Strogatz, and this is The Joy of Why, a podcast from Quanta Magazine that takes you into some of the biggest unanswered questions in science and math today. In this episode, we’re going to be discussing the mysteries of space and time, and gravity, too. What’s so mysterious about them?

Well, it turns out they get really weird when we look at them at their deepest levels, at a super subatomic scale, where the quantum nature of gravity starts to kick in and become crucial. Of course, none of us have any direct experience with space and time and gravity at this unbelievably small scale. Up here, at the scale of everyday life, space and time seem perfectly smooth and continuous. And gravity is very well described by Isaac Newton’s classic theory, a theory that’s been around for over 300 years now.

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Michael Driver for Quanta Magazine

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Classical physics did not need any disclaimers. The kind of physics that was born with Isaac Newton and ruled until the early 1900s seemed pretty straightforward: Matter was like little billiard balls. It accelerated or decelerated when exposed to forces. None of this needed any special interpretations attached. The details could get messy, but there was nothing weird about it. 

Then came quantum mechanics, and everything got weird really fast.  

Quantum mechanics is the physics of atomic-scale phenomena, and it is the most successful theory we have ever developed. So why are there a thousand competing interpretations of the theory? Why does quantum mechanics need an interpretation at all? 

What, fundamentally, is it trying to tell us?

Affairs of state

There are many weirdnesses in quantum physics — many ways it differs from the classical worldview of perfectly knowable particles with perfectly describable properties. The weirdness you focus on will tend to be the one that shapes your favorite interpretation. 

But the weirdness that has stood out most, the one that has shaped the most interpretations, is the nature of “superpositions” and of measurement in quantum mechanics.

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Credit: Lucid Pixel / Adobe Stock

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