quantum physics

Chris Knight's avatar

See if you can wrap your noggin around this one: the Large Hadron Collider – that super-powered high-energy thingamabob at CERN in Switzerland that previously had been predicted would destroy the world – is now theorized to be the first observed occurrence of the “grandfather paradox” of time travel!

According to two physicists, the LHC’s mission to produce the hypothesized and long-sought Higgs boson is damned to failure by its own future. The reason? Because the Higgs boson “might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather”. And according to Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, this “predestination” from the Higgs particle goes far beyond screwing ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

It’s a very rare moment when I read something for the first time that goes almost completely over the top of my head. This is one of them: researchers are building a “time telescope” that can compress data into smaller chunks of time, that is then transmitted via fiber optics. Hit the link if you want to feel your brains getting twisted.

Of course, there are going to be some who will say that time is going too fast already, but I digress… 😛...

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Chris Knight's avatar

In 1939, a young French student named Bernard d’Espagnat began considering that behind the empirical world of mass and energy, there might be something even more fundamental to our universe than we can measure. Reality, d’Espagnat came to argue, is only the sum of what we have observed… and may be a thin veneer over what is truly at work in the cosmos.

Seventy years, twenty books and many journal articles later on what he refers to as “veiled reality”, Bernard d’Espagnat has been awarded the Templeton Prize: a yearly reward of $1.4 million to that “honors a living person who has made an exceptional contribution affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works.”

If you’ve an interest in things like physics, quantum mechanics and relativity, the above-linked article is extremely intriguing. I am certainly feeling compelled to go hunt for some of d’Espagnat’s work, after ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

(Okay, for us stubborn Americans we’re inclined to say “yard” instead of “meter” but since this is dealing with physics I’m going to use the metric system out of principle!)

Teleportation of matter has been achieved over a distance of one meter, scientists at the Joint Quantum Institute of the University of Maryland along with colleagues at the University of Michigan have announced. ‘Course, the matter in question was a single atom, but to transmit the information of its quantum state from one location to another – via that spooky “entangling” thingy – is still a huge milestone to have achieved. And if you read the Fox News story, it does sound suspiciously like the “beaming” used in the Star Trek franchise, right down to the “Heisenberg Compensators”.

But if I were an editor on the Fox News website, I would have chosen a better picture to accompany this ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

So… does the world really exist? Do you exist? Do I exist for that matter? Believe it or not, according to bleeding-edge quantum physics our reality may be a massive illusion. Physicists have discovered that the entire cosmos is structured like a hologram at its most basic level.

Then again, to those who are students of the Bible, this probably comes as no surprise anyway…

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

— Genesis 1:3

Einstein established a long time ago that matter was frozen energy (i.e. light). So I could see how that would perfectly jibe with the “universe as hologram” theory....

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Chris Knight's avatar

This one is way too wacky to pass up commenting on…

The Large Hadron Collider is a few hours away from getting turned on for the first time. This is a humongous particle accelerator (also happens to be the biggest machine yet built) that scientists are hoping will help answer some questions about the fundamental nature of physics.

All well and good. Except some people are afraid that the Large Hadron Collider (or LHC) is going destroy the planet. The biggest fear is that it’s going to spawn a black hole that’ll suck down the entire Earth. At least one lawsuit has been filed on those grounds, seeking to impose an injunction against the LHC’s activation.

And then there is the tale going around that the LHC has an even more nefarious purpose. That it is going to be used to open up a portal to an unknown ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Here’s something that I’ve been wondering about for awhile now (actually going on three years). Maybe it’s time to let others ponder it too…

We’re told in Genesis 5:1 that “When Adam had lived 130 years…” (as the New International Version words it) that he gave birth to his son Seth. This is the first time in scripture that we are told that a person had lived a certain number of years. A few verses later it says that Adam lived 930 years, and then he died.

But are those the years total that Adam lived… or only the years following the Fall, and the entrance of sin into the world?

Because compared to the other antedeluvians, who were born after the Fall, Adam had a fairly equal lifespan. But if the 930 years is the total amount of time that Adam lived, from his creation until death, then Adam ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Here is my current proposal for a quantum mechanics definition of God:

In reference to a system encompassing the totality of the physical universe, God is that outside observer which has the unique properties of comprehending the position and momentum of every particle and all energy within the system without violating the observer effect and simultaneously across all points throughout the spacetime of that system.

I think that such a definition easily allows for the occurrence of un-scientific phenomenon as “miracles”, since if God is comprehending all quantum behavior throughout every point and moment of the universe’s existence, that this means He can pretty much do whatever He wants to with the universe. He can manipulate the quantum state of anything, including altering mass and energy so that water turns into wine. What’s more, such a definition might not violate the laws of physics at all. It seems to fit ...

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Over the weekend I finally, finally, found time to do an “updated” version of Schrodinger’s Bedroom. This was the short film that I made last year as an entry for the short-lived Fox “reality” show On The Lot. It had already been uploaded to YouTube, but that was the version that was submitted for the competition, and unfortunately because of the limit on length that was in the rules I didn’t have time to put proper credits in this film. That’s always bugged me. So now I get to fix this and let it be, in my mind, a true and proper film that gives a nod toward everybody who helped make it.

So without further ado, here is Schrodinger’s Bedroom starring Dawn Swartz, Chris Otto, Selassie Amana, Ed Woody, Olivia Woody, Doug Smith, Tyler Richardson, Melody Hallman Daniel, Chad Austin, Veronica Jones, and a cameo appearance ...

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