ENLARGE A computer simulation shows how quantum vortices might look in a turbulent material.
Grab a mug and slosh the morning coffee around and around and a spinning vortex appears. The swirling rings, with their eddies and choppy waves, obey the laws of classical turbulence, which engineers and applied physicists routinely invoke to study how air flows over an airplane wing or how blood flows through tiny vessels.
Shake up a cup of quantum fluid instead and you still get vortices, but nothing like the tornado in your morning brew.
Quantum vortices can look like tiny rings that shatter into even more minuscule rings and then shrink away altogether. Connected one moment, in the next they appear to flex into curved lines — as if snipped with scissors. Sometimes these lines tangle like a ball of cat hair on a rug. And they can cross over each other into a letter X, swap ends and then shoot away with the gusto of a rubber band flinging from the finger of a mischievous third-grader.
By sprinkling ice particles made of hydrogen (white) into supercooled helium (black), researchers have been able to watch quantum vortices meet up and then fly away from each other in real time (four movie stills shown).
When you peel off a strip of Scotch tape, you’re holding a tiny particle accelerator. Think of this during the upcoming holiday season. As you wrap present after present, you’re simultaneously creating an electric field powerful enough to accelerate any free electrons hovering around. Under the right conditions, this can coax the electrons into spewing out X-rays. The good news: As long as you aren’t playing Santa in a vacuum, you don’t need to worry about the radiation exposure—the electrons will bump into air molecules long before they get a chance to start emitting any X-rays. Science News explains:
Peeling tape separates positive and negative charges, creating an electric field. The field jump-starts free electrons in the neighborhood, accelerating them fast enough to emit X-ray photons. This bremsstrahlung radiation is like that created in the bellies of particle accelerators as they whip charged particles around near the speed of light.
Other materials can generate X-rays using the same principle, says Putterman. He imagines that soldiers and medical workers in the field could use a hand crank to peel off adhesives and create X-rays. The light is powerful enough to image a human finger.
But it’s still a mystery how tape could separate enough charge to create a strong electric field.
But those who should have died by Physical Laws do not;those who ought not, Die.
That’s Reality,Call it God,Nature.
Here’s the fascinating story of Anatoli Petrovich Bugorski, the only person to have stuck his head into a particle accelerator. His head accidentally strayed into the path of the proton beam at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino in 1978, and the beam bored a hole through his brain and out his nose. The radiation absorbed by his head was in the region of 1000 gray. 5 gray worth of X-rays is generally considered fatal, but Bugorski survived and went on to complete his PhD (a proton beam moving near the speed of light has different characteristics from an X-ray!). The side of his face that was burned by the beam’s exit has not visibly aged in the years since the accident.
I attended the Clarion science fiction writing workshop at Michigan State University in 1992, and we were privileged to tour the university’s Cyclotron. Of course, the first thing we asked was, “How do you kill someone with one of these?” (we’d been working on plotting). The scientist’s answer was very disappointing — he insisted that it was all very safe, with too many checks and balances to be a useful murder weapon. As I recall, he suggested that you could pry loose a brick from the wall and hit someone in the head with it.
As you can see from the picture, the beam entered the back of Bugorski’s head and came out around his nose. Shortly after this happened, Bugorski’s left half of his face swelled up beyond recognition. He was taken to the hospital and studied as this was something that had never been seen before and so they closely monitored him thereafter, fully expecting him to die within a few days at most.
Although the skin on the part of his face and back of his head where the beam hit eventually peeled off over the next few days, Bugorski did not die as they thought he would. The beam also burned through his skull and brain tissue along with the afore mentioned skin. However, ultimately he came through it all surprisingly well.
Despite the beam going through his brain, his intellectual capacity remained the same as before. The few negative health drawbacks he did experience were not life threatening either. He lost the hearing in his left ear and experienced a constant unpleasant noise in that ear from then on. The left half of his face slowly became paralyzed over the course of the next two years. He also gets significantly more fatigued with mental work, though he did go on to get his PhD after this incident. The remaining side effects were occasional absence seizures and later tonic-clonic seizures, though these didn’t show up right away.
“One creates from nothing. If you try to create from something you’re just changing something. So in order to create something you first have to be able to create nothing.” –Werner Erhard
And, most often when people bring this up to me, it’s in an attempt to prove the existence of God — and the insufficiency of the Big Bang — by pointing to the Universe.
Well, let’s take this question as seriously as our knowledge allows us to. (And by that, I mean physically, rather than philosophically or theologically.) In physics, can you get something for nothing? And if so, what can you and can’t you get?
In many ways, yes, you can. In fact, in many ways, getting something when you have nothing is unavoidable! (Although you can’t necessarily get anything you want.)
For example, take a box and empty it, so that all you’ve got is some totally empty space, like above. An ideal, perfect, empty vacuum. Now, what’s in that box?
Did you guess nothing? Well, it turns out that empty space isn’t so empty.
One of the consequences of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle — that you can’t know a quantum state‘s energy exactly for a finite duration of time — means that when you’re talking about very short time intervals, there are large uncertainties in the energy of a system. Over short enough timescales, the energies are large enough that particle-antiparticle pairs wink in-and-out of existence all the time!
This experiment — first done in 1948 but repeated many times (under many conditions) — was a rousing success, and has many immediate, far-reaching and fantastic consequences.
Researchers have uncovered a fundamental link between the two defining properties of quantum physics. The result is being heralded as a dramatic breakthrough in our basic understanding of quantum mechanics and provides new clues to researchers seeking to understand the foundations of quantum theory. The result addresses the question of why quantum behaviour is as weird as it is — but no weirder.
Indian Philosophy has stated that difference between matter and non matter is one degree and not in kind.Matter can become Mind and Mind , Matter.
What the researchers unearthed is a new and unique hallmark, showing that quantum glasses have a unique signature. Many materials he says can form a glass if they’re cooled fast enough. Even though their theory is not practical for daily use: few individuals own freezers that dip down nearly 500 degrees below zero.
Research uses quantum mechanics to melt glass at absolute zero.
Quantum mechanics, developed in the 1920s, has had an enormous impact in explaining how matter works. The elementary particles that make up different forms of matter — such as electrons, protons, neutrons and photons — are well understood within the model quantum physics provides. Even now, some 90 years later, new scientific principles in quantum physics are being described. The most recent gives the world a glimpse into the seemingly impossible.
Prof. Eran Rabani of Tel Aviv University‘s School of Chemistry and his colleagues at Columbia University have discovered a new quantum mechanical effect with glass-forming liquids. They’ve determined that it’s possible to melt glass — not by heating it, but by cooling it to a temperature near Absolute Zero.
This new basic science research, to be published in Nature Physics, has limited practical application so far, says Prof. Rabani. But knowing why materials behave as they do paves the way for breakthroughs of the future. “The interesting story here,” says Prof. Rabani, “is that by quantum effect, we can melt glass by cooling it. Normally, we melt glasses with heat.”
Turning the thermometer upside-down
Classical physics allowed researchers to be certain about the qualities of physical objects. But at the atomic/molecular level, as a result of the duality principle which describes small objects as waves, it’s impossible to determine exact molecular position and speed at any given moment — a fact known as the “Heisenberg Principle.” Based on this principle, Prof. Rabani and his colleagues were able to demonstrate their surprising natural phenomenon with glass.
Many different materials on earth, like the silica used in windows, can become a glass –– at least in theory — if they are cooled fast enough. But the new research by Prof. Rabani and his colleagues demonstrates that under very special conditions, a few degrees above Absolute Zero (−459.67° Fahrenheit), a glass might melt.
It all has to do with how molecules in materials are ordered, Prof. Rabani explains. At some point in the cooling phase, a material can become glass and then liquid if the right conditions exist.
“We hope that future laboratory experiments will prove our predictions,” he says, looking forward to this new basic science paving the way for continued research.
Classical glass
The research was inspired by Nobel Prize winner Philip W. Anderson, who wrote that the understanding of classical glasses was one of the biggest unsolved problems in condensed matter physics. After the challenge was presented, research teams around the world rose to it.
Until now, structural quantum glasses had never been explored — that is, what happens when you mix the unique properties in glass and add quantum effects. Prof. Rabani was challenged to ask: if we looked at the quantum level, would we still see the hallmarks of a classical glass?
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