James' World 2

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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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Hydrogen could be an important part of our future energy supply: It can be stored, transported, and burned as needed. However, most of the hydrogen available today is a by-product of natural gas production, and this has to change for climate protection reasons. The best strategy so far to produce environmentally friendly “green hydrogen” is to split water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity that comes from renewable energy sources, for example, photovoltaic cells.

However, it would be much easier if sunlight could be used directly to split water. This is exactly what new catalysts are now making possible, in a process called “photocatalytic water splitting.” The concept is not yet used industrially. At TU Wien, important steps have now been taken in this direction: on an atomic scale, scientists have realized a new combination of molecular and solid-state catalysts that can do the job while using relatively inexpensive materials.

Interaction of atoms

“Actually, to be able to split water with light you have to solve two tasks at the same time,” says Alexey Cherevan from the Institute for Materials Chemistry at TU Wien. “We have to think about oxygen and about hydrogen. The oxygen atoms of the water must be transformed into O₂ molecules, and the remaining hydrogen ions—which are just protons—must be turned into H2 molecules.”

Solutions have now been found for both tasks. Tiny inorganic clusters consisting of only a small number of atoms are anchored on a surface of light-absorbing support structures such as titanium oxide. The combination of clusters and carefully chosen semiconductor supports lead to the desired behavior.

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Structural models of two clusters that enable water splitting into O2 and H2 by means of light energy. Credit: Vienna University of Technology

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On a series of 70-year-old photographic plates containing images of the night sky, a few astronomers say they’ve found something weird: flashes of light that appear and then disappear, like ghosts.

“We found one image where nine stars were out there, and they vanished. And they are not there half an hour earlier, and they are not there six days later,” says Beatriz Villarroel, a postdoctoral researcher at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics. “And you wonder, ‘Is this real?’”

There isn’t any readily available astronomical explanation for what these vanishing points of light, which the researchers call transients, might be. The dots might be defects in the photographic emulsions or image artifacts from when astronomers first scanned the plates. But in a series of recent papers, Villarroel and a small team of astronomers have been more seriously probing the possibility that the flashes might be something more exciting — extraterrestrial objects.

A shiny, spinning object passing by Earth would leave a line of dots in a long-exposure image of the night sky. Asteroids or meteors aren’t likely to look like that — most asteroids are dark, and meteors are moving so fast they’d look like streaks. And, most intriguingly for the researchers, there weren’t any satellites in the night sky when the images were taken, as all the plates were before the launch of Sputnik.

Still, Villarroel and colleagues haven’t ruled out Earthly explanations for these tantalizing dots. And there’s a long history of events associated with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) fizzling out under closer scrutiny.

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In about 5 billion years, the Sun will leave the main sequence and become a red giant. It’ll expand and transform into a glowering, malevolent ball and consume and destroy Mercury, Venus, Earth, and probably Mars.

Can humanity survive the Sun’s red giant phase? Extraterrestrial Civilizations (ETCs) may have already faced this existential threat.

Could they have survived it by migrating to another star system without the use of spaceships?

Universe Today readers are well-versed in the difficulties of interstellar travel. Our nearest neighboring solar system is the Alpha Centauri system.

If humanity had to flee an existential threat in our Solar System, and if we could identify a planetary home in Alpha Centauri, it would still take us over four years to get there – if we could travel at the speed of light!

It still takes us five years to get an orbiter to Jupiter at our technological stage. There’s lots of talk about generation starships, where humans could live for generations while en route to a distant habitable planet.

Those ships don’t need to reach anywhere near the speed of light; instead, entire generations of humans would live and die on a journey to another star that takes hundreds or thousands of years. It’s fun to think about but pure fantasy at this point.

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(Cavan Images/Getty Images)

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