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Quantum physicist Nicole Yunger Halpern just published her first book, Quantum Steampunk: The physics of yesterday’s tomorrow. I have known Nicole since she was an undergraduate at Dartmouth, where she graduated as valedictorian in 2011. From there, her career has been nothing short of meteoric. She earned a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology and received several research appointments at Harvard and at the University of Maryland. She now works at the Laser Cooling and Trapping Group of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, also at Maryland. In this week’s column, she joins me for an interview.

What has always impressed me about Nicole, apart from her extraordinarily sharp mind, was her intellectual openness — in particular, her interest in the philosophy and history of physics. There was a time when I thought, as we discussed her future career path, that she would go into the humanities. Wisely, Nicole chose the path of research. She joined the emerging field of quantum information, and from there, she has charted her own, new direction. 

Quantum steampunk is a blend of quantum information and thermodynamics. It promises to revolutionize our understanding of machines and the future of technology. As a bonus, it may provide new insights into some of the hardest questions in physics, such as the arrow of time, or why we can’t remember the future.

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Among the many changes brought about by the pandemic is the widespread use of QR codes, graphical representations of digital data that can be printed and later scanned by a smartphone or other device.

QR codes have a wide range of uses that help people avoid contact with objects and close interactions with other people, including for sharing restaurant menus, email list sign-ups, car, and home sales information, and checking in and out of medical and professional appointments.

QR codes are a close cousin of the bar codes on product packaging that cashiers scan with infrared scanners to let the checkout computer know what products are being purchased.

Bar codes store information along one axis, horizontally. QR codes store information in both vertical and horizontal axes, which allows them to hold significantly more data. That extra amount of data is what makes QR codes so versatile.

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QR codes are visual patterns that store data smartphones can read. AP Photo/Vincent Yu

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When it comes to the Universe, there are some things we can be confident are out there based on what we observe. We know that the Universe was hotter, denser, and more uniform in the distant past. We know that the stars and galaxies in the Universe have grown up and evolved as the Universe has aged. We know that gravitation has formed the large-scale structure in the Universe, and that structure has grown more complex over time. And we also know how much normal matter, altogether, is present in the Universe, and that it isn’t sufficient to explain the full suite of the gravitational effects that we see on its own.

So if the normal matter can’t be all that there is, what else can there be? The leading idea is dark matter, but we don’t know precisely what it is. What if it’s just light? Is that possible? That’s what Enon Travis Sci wants to know, asking:

“I’d love to read an article on why light isn’t a dark matter candidate, especially in light (pun intended) of the recent articles about the 50% excess in ambient light in the universe, and the known phenomena of apparent mass photons can have on spacetime…”

It’s a completely reasonable idea to consider. Let’s take a look inside.

First off, there really is an excess in the ambient light we see in the Universe. In fact, I myself wrote about it back in 2020, because it’s one of the most intriguing things that the New Horizons spacecraft was able to measure from its unique location: out beyond the orbit of Pluto. Among all fully functioning spacecrafts, only New Horizons is distant enough to be immune to the tiny, light-reflecting dust grains that exist all throughout our Solar System, and see what sort of light still remains.

Is deep space entirely dark?

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(Credit: IceCube collaboration/NASA)  In this artistic rendering, a blazar is accelerating protons that produce pions, which produce neutrinos and gamma rays. Lower-energy photons are also produced. We believe this object, like all galaxies and larger ones, is surrounded by a dark matter halo. But what is that halo composed of, and could heavy photons be an option?

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Stay off social media.

Lose 20 pounds.

Make $1 million in sales.

Do these kinds of goals ignite you into action or cause you to recoil in dread? For some, direct, concrete wording is motivating, clarifying, and effective. For others, this verbiage makes them want to give up before they’ve even started. If you find yourself in the latter category, a kinder, more self-compassionate approach to wording your goals may be the best approach for you.

Talking to yourself in a self-compassionate tone supports the achievement of your goals in multiple ways. For one, it can help you normalize any negative feelings around your goals because it acknowledges that discomfort is a natural part of the human experience. Self-compassion can also allow you to let go of paralyzing perfectionism because it leaves room for human fallibility and frailty — the acknowledgement that we all make mistakes sometimes, and that’s okay. And self-compassion can help you to stick with your goals by heightening your ability to recover from setbacks instead of getting stuck in endless rumination about what went wrong.

In short, self-compassion could be the difference between giving up on your goals (or avoiding them completely) and achieving them step by step — even when that may require a few steps back before you move forward again.

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The dazzling northern lights could light up the skies as far south as the northern United States after the detection of 17 solar eruptions blasting from a single sunspot, two of which are headed straight to Earth.

The two Earth-directed eruptions have merged into a “cannibal coronal mass ejection” and are barreling toward us at 1,881,263 mph (3,027,599 km/h). When it crashes into the Earth’s magnetic field, beginning from the night of March 30 through to April 1, the result will be a powerful G3 geomagnetic storm, according to The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC). G3 storms are classified as strong geomagnetic storms, meaning that the oncoming sun blast could bring the aurora as south as Pennsylvania, Iowa and Oregon.

The sunspot, called AR2975, has been shooting out flares of electrically charged particles from the sun’s plasma soup since Monday (March 28). Sunspots are areas on the sun’s surface where powerful magnetic fields, created by the flow of electrical charges, knot into kinks before suddenly snapping. The resulting release of energy launches bursts of radiation called solar flares, or explosive jets of solar material called coronal mass ejections (CMEs). 

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The spectrum covers everything from radio waves and microwaves to the light that reaches our eyes, to X-rays and gamma rays. And humans have mastered the art of sending and receiving almost all of them. There is an exception, however. Between the beams of visible light and the blips of radio static, there lies a dead zone where our technology isn’t effective. It’s called the terahertz gap. For decades now, no one’s succeeded in building a consumer device that can transmit terahertz waves.

“There’s a laundry list of potential applications,” says Qing Hu, an electrical engineer at MIT.

But some researchers are slowly making progress. If they stick the landing, they might open up a whole new suite of technologies, like the successor to Wi-Fi or a smarter detection system for skin cancer.

Look at the terahertz gap as a borderland. On the left side, there are microwaves and longer radio waves. On the right side lies the infrared spectrum. (Some scientists even call the terahertz gap “far infrared.”) Our eyes can’t see infrared, but as far as our technologies are concerned, it’s just like light.

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Engineers from Harvard, MIT, and the US Army created this experimental terahertz laser setup in 2019. They are among the few to do so. Arman Amirzhan, Harvard SEAS

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