Atoms Morph into Quantum Waves

In the 1920s, the pioneering physicist Erwin Schrödinger formulated an equation that fundamentally transformed our understanding of the universe. Schrödinger's equation describes how particles can behave like waves, a concept that underpins much of quantum mechanics. 

Now, nearly a century later, researchers have made a remarkable advancement that perfectly recreates Schrödinger's predictions in the laboratory: capturing single atoms morphing into quantum waves.

A Historic Moment in Quantum Imaging
The recent breakthrough involves capturing images of individual atoms exhibiting wave-like behavior. This is a historic achievement, as it provides the clearest image ever seen of atoms behaving like quantum waves, just as predicted by Schrödinger's equation. 

This discovery opens up exciting possibilities for studying and understanding the exotic and often mysterious behavior of atoms at the quantum level.  READ MORE...

Mind Bending Theories of Reality

ARE there vastly many near-duplicates of you reading vastly many near-duplicates of this article in vastly many parallel universes? Is consciousness a fundamental property of all matter? Could reality be a computer simulation? Reader, I can hear your groans from here in California.

We are inclined to reject ideas like these on the grounds that they sound preposterous. And yet some of the world’s leading scientists and philosophers advocate for them. Why? And how should you, assuming you aren’t an expert, react to these sorts of hypotheses?

When we confront fundamental questions about the nature of reality, things quickly get weird. As a philosopher specializing in metaphysics, I submit that weirdness is inevitable, and that something radically bizarre will turn out to be true.     READ MORE...

Boiling Tap Water Can Remove Microplastics

Boiling tap water before use can remove at least 80 per cent of the tiny, potentially harmful plastic particles it contains.

Nano and microplastics (NMPs) are pieces of plastics like polystyrene, polythene and polypropylene that range from between 0.001 to 5 millimetres in diameter. Their impact on health is still being studied, but researchers suspect they are damaging to humans.


Eddy Zeng at Jinan University in China and his colleagues took samples of tap water and measured their levels of NMPs, finding an average concentration of 1 milligram per litre. They then boiled the samples for 5 minutes, before allowing them to cool. The levels of NMPs were then remeasured and found to have reduced by more than 80 per cent.  READ  MORE...

Magma Tunnel to Unleash Unlimited Power

ICELAND is one of the most boring countries in the world. That is meant as a compliment, not an insult. The island nation is dotted with thousands of boreholes drilled deep into the rock to extract geothermal energy. They will soon be joined by another, which will be anything but boring. “We are going to drill into a magma chamber,” says Hjalti Páll Ingólfsson at the Geothermal Research Cluster (GEORG) in Reykjavík. “It’s the first journey to the centre of the Earth,” says his colleague Björn Þór Guðmundsson.

Well, not quite the centre. Some magma chambers – underground reservoirs of molten rock – lie just a few kilometres below Earth’s surface, putting them within reach of modern drills. They occasionally leak magma to the surface, where it spews out as lava. That is exactly what was starting to happen, to spectacular and devastating effect, around the town of Grindavík in southern Iceland, as this story went to press. The trouble is, we don’t normally know where magma chambers lie. “No geophysical technique has been shown to satisfactorily locate magma reservoirs,” says John Eichelberger at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.  READ MORE...

An Alternative Picture of Particle Physics

All of nature springs from a handful of components — the fundamental particles — that interact with one another in only a few different ways. In the 1970s, physicists developed a set of equations describing these particles and interactions. Together, the equations formed a succinct theory now known as the Standard Model of particle physics.

The Standard Model is missing a few puzzle pieces (conspicuously absent are the putative particles that make up dark matter, those that convey the force of gravity, and an explanation for the mass of neutrinos), but it provides an extremely accurate picture of almost all other observed phenomena.

Yet for a framework that encapsulates our best understanding of nature’s fundamental order, the Standard Model still lacks a coherent visualization. Most attempts are too simple, or they ignore important interconnections or are jumbled and overwhelming.

A New Approach
Chris Quigg, a particle physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, has been thinking about how to visualize the Standard Model for decades, hoping that a more powerful visual representation would help familiarize people with the known particles of nature and prompt them to think about how these particles might fit into a larger, more complete theoretical framework. 

Quigg’s visual representation shows more of the Standard Model’s underlying order and structure. He calls his scheme the “double simplex” representation, because the left-handed and right-handed particles of nature each form a simplex — a generalization of a triangle. We have adopted Quigg’s scheme and made further modifications.   READ MORE...

Quaantum Batteries Providing Instant Power

THE battery, as US comedian Demetri Martin pointed out, is one technology that we personify. “Other things stop working or they break,” he said. “But batteries – they die.” The observation is keener than it may at first appear. 

So beholden are some of us to smartphones, tablets and other digital technology, that our lives pretty much go on hold when they run out of juice. Even if it is just 30 minutes, we are apt to mourn the time lost to recharging.

If that seems like a laughable reaction, there is a serious side to this when it comes to the batteries that power electric vehicles. The fact that it usually takes hours to charge them is a major stumbling block to decarbonising transport, which is among the biggest global emitters of greenhouse gases. 

For humanity’s sake, charging times need to be slashed. Yet, with the fundamentals of battery science the same as they were half a century ago, the prospect of a drastic improvement looks slim.

Slim, but not impossible. Now, quantum physics could ride to our rescue. By leveraging the strange behaviour of subatomic particles, a quantum battery could charge itself much faster than any conventional device. As a handy bonus, the bigger a quantum battery, the better it performs. 

Although the concept is in its infancy, a recent experimental demonstration and some theoretical advances suggest that a world of uninterrupted portable power isn’t so far-fetched. One day, dead batteries could spring back to life in an instant.  READ MORE...

Three "D" Printing

A strange shape described by mathematician Lord Kelvin in 1871 and predicted to behave unusually in a fluid has finally been fully studied in the real world thanks to 3D printing – and it seems Kelvin may have been wrong. The behaviour of the shape, called an isotropic helicoid, has been described in fluid dynamics textbooks, but it hadn’t been directly measured until now.

An isotropic helicoid must experience the same amount of drag from a fluid regardless of its orientation, like a sphere, but also rotate as it moves through the fluid. So if you dropped an isotropic helicoid into a tank of a viscous liquid, it should spin as it sinks, similar to the way a propeller turns.

Greg Voth at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and his colleagues 3D printed five different shapes that should be isotropic helicoids, each a little more than a centimetre across, and dropped them into a tank of silicone oil. They were unable to detect rotation in any of them, meaning the predictions for an isotropic helicoid may be wrong.

“You’ve got to guess that somebody else has tried this in 150 years – in Kelvin’s original paper, it even sounds like he tried it,” says Voth. “I suspect that people have tried to fabricate these particles, but they were limited by defects in the fabrication so they simply didn’t publish, so the hypothesis of this behaviour has stayed with us.”

Upon delving into the hydrodynamic effects in play, the researchers calculated that there was almost certainly a link, or coupling, between the movement and rotation of their particles, meaning they fulfilled Kelvin’s criteria. But this was far too small to have any detectable effect.

“The coupling is tiny, but it still exists,” says Voth. He and his team are now working on building an isotropic helicoid where that coupling could be measurable, which would finally vindicate Lord Kelvin’s idea.  READ MORE

Explaining Consciousness

If physics explains all the phenomena in the universe, and if consciousness is part of the universe, then is seems that physics can explain consciousness.

Of course, this assumes that consciousness isn’t separate from the material reality that physics explains – which runs counter to René Descartes’s dualist view of mind and matter. Some have no problem with that. 

They include Daniel Dennett at Tufts University in Massachusetts and Michael Graziano at Princeton University, who argue that our intuitive sense that consciousness needs an explanation that goes beyond objective descriptions of the physical world is misplaced. 

Consciousness is a mirage produced by sophisticated neural mechanisms in the brain, they contend, so we need no new physics to explain it. Rather, we need a better understanding of how the brain creates models: of the world, of a self in the world and of a self subjectively experiencing the world.

Other non-dualists don’t outright deny that consciousness may have unusual properties that need explaining. If they are correct, then quantum mechanics may offer an explanation.

Quantum systems can exist in a superposition of all possible states simultaneously, and classical reality emerges when this superposition collapses into a single state. One idea is that this happens when the mass of a quantum system … Read more: