This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Fossil or beehive? — … And the snideness? That isn’t unusual, either. Nor is it new. In 1934, the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences printed a report called “The supposed fossil ear of maize from Cuzco, Peru”. Quantum […]
Can that act of stirring porridge provide insights into the puzzle of light’s quantum wave/particle duality? Photographer / author David Gepp (pron. ‘jep’) explains how – citing : 1) An encounter with Professor Jacques Mandelbrojt (cousin of Benoit Mandelbrot, of fractals fame) 2) Various contemplations of Albert Einstein’s gedankenexperiments (thought experiments) 3) The experience of […]
Trinity College Dublin produced a press release, on January 31, 2020, with this headline: “Supercomputers help link quantum entanglement to cold coffee“. The press release is meant to draw attention to a research paper by Marlon Brenes, Silvia Pappalardi [pictured here], John Goold, and Alessandro Silva. The paper is titled “Multipartite Entanglement Structure in the Eigenstate […]
It was back in 1994 that Dr William Peterman (then at the University of Illinois at Chicago) mooted the idea of ‘Quantum Geography’ (QG) with an article for the journal The Professional Geographer, Volume 46, 1994 – Issue 1, entitled : ‘Quantum Theory and Geography: What Can Dr. Bertlmann Teach Us’. Dr. Peterman examined the possibilities […]
How can the vastness of cyberspace can be ‘governed’ in any practical way? Perhaps some ‘Constructive Ambiguity’ might help resolve such questions? A 2015 thesis by Professor Paul Cornish (Associate Director of Oxford University’s Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre and Research Group Director for Defence, Security and Infrastructure at RAND Europe in Cambridge, UK) suggests […]
Improbable can say, with some confidence, that no-one has even seen a ‘Quantum Dragon’. But that shouldn’t be taken to mean that they don’t exist. Dr. Mark A. Novotny Professor and Head of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the HPC² Center for Computational Sciences, Mississippi State University, US, asserts that they do – […]
Can ‘Reality’ be ‘Bifurcated’? If so, what would be the energy required to do so? Could a human brain bifurcate reality? And, if one brain had managed to achieve the critical threshold energy to do so, would other observers existing within the same space-time frame also perceive related phenomena? All these questions are examined by […]
Can one’s brain become entangled? Einstein called quantum entanglement ‘spooky’, but he was nevertheless obliged to grapple with the puzzles and possibilities of Verschränkung – which were first fully described by Erwin Schrödinger, circa 1935. Since then, a series of experimental studies have convincingly demonstrated entanglement behaviour at the quantum level – but few theorists […]
A bicycle is stolen, it later reappears in another place. A likely explanation is that the bicycle was unlawfully moved (as a unified and coherent macro-collection of atoms and molecules) by the thief. But not all criminologists are happy with such broad-brushed Newtonian descriptions of events. Take for example professor Dragan Milovanovic of Northeastern Illinois […]
Some reports explain more than other reports do. Here’s an example: “Quantum Probabilistic Structures in Competing Lizard Communities,” Diederik Aerts, Marek Czachor, Maciej Kuna, Barry Sinervo, Sandro Sozzo [pictured here], arXiv:1212.0109, December 1, 2012. The authors, at Brussels Free University, Belgium, Politechnika Gdanska, Poland, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, explain: “Almost two […]