September 10, 2014
Mohenjo
Science
amazon, business, Business News, Closed Timelike Curve, Grandfather Paradox, Hotels, human-rights, medicine, mental-health, Paradox, Physics, Quantum, quantum cryptography, Quantum Physics, research, Science, Science News, Scientific, Stephen Hawking, technology, Technology News, Time Travel, Time Travel Paradox, time travel's feasibility, travel, University Of Cambridge, vacation
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On June 28, 2009, the world-famous physicist Stephen Hawking threw a party at the University of Cambridge, complete with balloons, hors d’oeuvres and iced champagne. Everyone was invited but no one showed up. Hawking had expected as much, because he only sent out invitations after his party had concluded. It was, he said, “a welcome reception for future time travelers,” a tongue-in-cheek experiment to reinforce his 1992 conjecture that travel into the past is effectively impossible.
But Hawking may be on the wrong side of history. Recent experiments offer tentative support for time travel’s feasibility—at least from a mathematical perspective. The study cuts to the core of our understanding of the universe, and the resolution of the possibility of time travel, far from being a topic worthy only of science fiction, would have profound implications for fundamental physics as well as for practical applications such as quantum cryptography and computing.
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December 27, 2013
Mohenjo
Science
amazon, business, Business News, Daily Discovery, Flickr, Holmium, Hotels, huffingtonpost, human-rights, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, medicine, mental-health, Physics, Quantum, quantum computer, Quantum Computers, quantum computing, quantum mechanics, Quantum Physics, research, Science, Science News, Slideshow, technology, Technology News, travel, vacation
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Quantum computers could crack codes and run more complex simulations than current machines, but actually building one is hard to do. The bits that store this complex data don’t last long, because they are made of single atoms that get knocked around by stray electrons and photons in the environment.
Enter a team of physicists at Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. They found a way to get the bits to last long enough to do computations with, using the magnetic properties of a rare earth element called holmium and the symmetry of platinum. The experiment, detailed in tomorrow’s (Nov. 14) issue of the journal Nature, is an important step in creating quantum computers and making quantum memory useful.
What makes quantum computers powerful is the nature of the bit. Ordinary computers have bits that are 1 or 0, stored in the current in a circuit or the alignment of magnetic fields on a disk. Due to the weirdness of quantum physics, quantum bits, called qubits, can be both 0 and 1 at the same time. That means a quantum computer can do certain kinds of calculations much, much faster.
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Quantum computers can process information much faster than current machines. This image depicts “ion trap” technology developed for quantum computing in a similar, unrelated study at Oxford. | Jeff Sherman | Flickr
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