Lifeboat Foundation

Google’s latest quantum computer chip, which the team dubbed Willow, has ignited a heated debate in the scientific community over the existence of parallel universes.

Following an eye-opening achievement in computational problem-solving, claims have surfaced that the chip’s success aligns with the theory of a multiverse, a concept that suggests our universe is one of many coexisting in parallel dimensions. In this piece, we’ll examine both sides of this argument that seems to have opened up a parallel universe of its own — with one universe of scientists suggesting the Willow experiments offer evidence of a multiverse and the other suggesting it has nothing to do with the theory at all.

According to Google, Willow solved a computational problem in under five minutes — a task that would have taken the world’s fastest supercomputers approximately 10 septillion years. This staggering feat, announced in a blog post and accompanied by a study in the journal Nature, demonstrates the extraordinary potential of quantum computing to tackle problems once thought unsolvable within a human timeframe.

Far from being an edgier sequel to the sitcom starring Jim Parsons, the ‘dark big bang’ – also known as the ‘second’ big bang – is believed by scientists to potentially be the event which brought about dark matter in our universe.

Such an idea was floated by University of Texas researchers Katherine Freese and Martin Wolfgang Winkler in a paper published in Physical Review Dback in April 2023.

The abstract to the research notes the “hot big bang” is considered to be the origin story behind “all matter and radiation in the universe”, and that there is “strong evidence” that the early universe “contained a hot plasma of photons and baryons with a temperature”

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What is time? Is it just a ticking clock, or is it something more profound?

Continue reading “What is Time? Stephen Wolfram’s Groundbreaking New Theory [Ep. 468]” »

In case dark matter didn’t seem mysterious enough, a new study proposes that it could have arisen before the Big Bang.

Conventional thinking goes that the Big Bang was the beginning of everything – matter, dark matter, space, energy, all of it. After the event itself, the Universe went through a period of cosmic inflation, which saw its size swell by a factor of 10 septillion within an unfathomable fraction of a second.

But some theories suggest that this inflation period actually occurred before what we call the Big Bang. And now, physicists at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin have proposed that dark matter was formed during this brief window.

A team of physicists from Sofia University in Bulgaria has proposed a fascinating theory that wormholes, hypothetical tunnels linking different parts of the universe, could be hiding in plain sight. These wormholes may resemble black holes so closely that current technology cannot distinguish between the two, according to a new study reported by New Scientist.

Black holes have long been a source of mystery. They absorb everything, even light, leaving no trace of what falls into them. But where does the swallowed matter go? Some physicists have speculated that black holes might connect to “white holes,” which would spew out particles and radiation on the other end. Together, these phenomena could form a wormhole, or more specifically, an Einstein-Rosen bridge, connecting distant regions of space and time.

Ultra-sensitive detectors have observed neutrinos from the Sun, whose signals mimic those expected to be produced by elusive dark matter.

Scientists have discovered that cosmic filaments, the largest known structures in the universe, are rotating. These massive, twisting filaments of dark matter and galaxies stretch across hundreds of millions of light-years and play a crucial role in channeling matter to galaxy clusters. The finding challenges existing theories, as it was previously believed that rotation could not occur on such large scales. The research was confirmed through both computer simulations and real-world data, and it opens up new questions about how these giant structures acquire their spin.

After reading the article, a Reddit user named Kane gained more than 100 upvotes with this comment: “What if galaxy clusters are like neuron and glial clusters in a brain. And dark matter is basically the equivalent of a synapse. It connects galaxies and matter together and is responsible for sending quantum information back and forth like a signal chain.”

When you stare for long enough into the heart of a galaxy to try to catch a glimpse of the black hole that lurks therein, that may not be all you catch.

When a huge collaboration directed telescopes around the world to the heart of galaxy M87 in 2018 in an ultimately successful effort to capture detail of its supermassive black hole, they also managed to observe some of the wild shenanigans such a black hole engages in.

Now, astronomers discovered that one of those shenanigans was a colossal belch – a gamma-ray eruption from one of the powerful jets of plasma launched from the black hole’s poles as it feeds.

Black holes are some of the most extreme objects in the universe, and a new mission proposal suggests launching a space telescope specifically to study them. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) group, which took both the first-ever image of a black hole in 2019 and the first-ever image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy in 2022, has plans for a new mission called the Black Hole Explorer (BHEX).

The idea of BHEX is to use a space-based telescope to collect even more detailed information from black holes, as there is less interference from water vapor when viewing them from above the Earth’s atmosphere. The aim would be to combine data from this telescope with the many telescopes on the ground that are already used in the EHT project. The next phase of the project is a collaboration between the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO).