Lifeboat Foundation

The famous Copenhagen Interpretation favored by the founders of quantum mechanics is most definitely psi-epistemic. Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and others saw the state vector as being related to our interactions with the Universe. As Bohr said, “Physics is not about how the world is; it is about what we can say about the world.”

QBism is also definitively psi-epistemic, but it is not the Copenhagen Interpretation. Its epistemic focus grew organically from its founders’ work in quantum information science, which is arguably the most important development in quantum studies over the last 30 years. As physicists began thinking about quantum computers, they recognized that seeing the quantum in terms of information — an idea with strong epistemic grounding — provided new and powerful insights. By taking the information perspective seriously and asking, “Whose information?” the founders of QBism began a fundamentally new line of inquiry that, in the end, doesn’t require science fiction ideas like infinite parallel universes. That to me is one of its great strengths.

But, like all quantum interpretations, there is a price to be paid by QBism for its psi-epistemic perspective. The perfectly accessible, perfectly knowable Universe of classical physics is gone forever, no matter what interpretation you choose. We’ll dive into the price of QBism next time.

The universe is expanding, but why? Dark Energy might be the key in solving this mystery.
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Continue reading “Where Is the Rest of the Universe Hidden?” »

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“The Universe Came From a Black Hole” String Theory Founder Reveals James Webb Telescope’s New Image. Deep within dense star clusters, something extraordinary dwells: Stars. But these, are no ordinary stars, but colossal celestial beings, known as supermassive stars. And now, their existence has been unveiled by the piercing gaze of the James Webb Space Telescope.

According to the standard model of cosmology, after the universe came out of the big bang, it took between 500 million to 1 billion years for the first stars to form. That however, is changing.

Continue reading “James Webb Telescope Just Announced First Ever Black Hole at the Edge of the Universe” »

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Joscha Bach is the VP of Research at the AI Foundation, previously doing research at MIT and Harvard. Joscha work explores the workings of the human mind, intelligence, consciousness, life on Earth, and the possibly-simulated fabric of our universe.

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Continue reading “Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality” »

The radio astronomy experiment LuSEE-Night will test technologies for radio telescopes on the far side of the moon.

Astronomers have found the first direct evidence of a black hole spinning, and it’s confirmed Einstein’s theory of relativity yet again.

The discovery was made by studying powerful jets of energy beamed from the solar system-size black hole at the center of the neighboring Messier 87 galaxy. The black hole, called M87, is the best studied black hole to date and the first to ever be directly imaged in 2019, with its “donut hole” shadow crowned by a fuzzy halo of light.

Every so often, astronomers glimpse an intense flash of radio waves from space—a flash that lasts only instants but puts out as much energy in a millisecond as the sun does in a few years. The origin of these “fast radio bursts” is one of the greatest mysteries in astronomy today.

There is no shortage of ideas to explain the cause of the bursts: a catalog of current theories shows more than 50 potential scenarios. You can take your pick from highly magnetized neutron stars, collisions of incredibly dense stars or many more extreme or exotic phenomena.

How can we figure out which theory is correct? One way is to look for more information about the bursts, using other channels: specifically, using ripples in the fabric of the universe called gravitational waves.

The LHC is back delivering collisions to the experiments after the successful leak repair in August. But instead of protons, it is now the turn of lead ion beams to collide, marking the first heavy-ion run in 5 years. Compared to previous runs, the lead nuclei will be colliding with an increased energy of 5.36 TeV per nucleon pair (compared to 5.02 TeV previously) and the collision rate has increased by a factor of 10. The primary physics goal of this run is the study of the elusive state of matter known as quark-gluon plasma, that is believed to have filled the Universe up to a millionth of a second after the Big Bang and can be recreated in the laboratory in heavy-ion collisions.

Quark-gluon plasma is a state of matter made of free quarks (particles that make up hadrons such as the proton and the neutron) and gluons (carriers of the strong interaction, which hold the quarks together inside the hadrons). In all but the most extreme conditions, quarks cannot exist individually and are bound inside hadrons. In heavy-ion collisions however, hundreds of protons and neutrons collide, forming a system with such density and temperature that the colliding nuclei melt together, and a tiny fireball of quark-gluon plasma forms, the hottest substance known to exist. Inside this fireball quarks and gluons can move around freely for a split-second, until the plasma expands and cools down, turning back into hadrons.

The ongoing heavy-ion run is expected to bring significant advances in our understanding of quark-gluon plasma. In addition to the improved parameters of the lead-ion beams, significant upgrades have been performed in the experiments that detect and analyse the collisions. ALICE, the experiment which primarily focuses on studies of quark-gluon plasma, is now using an entirely new mode of data processing storing all collisions without selection, resulting in up to 100 times more collisions being recorded per second. In addition, its track reconstruction efficiency and precision have increased due to the installation of new subsystems and upgrades of existing ones. CMS and ATLAS have also upgraded their data acquisition, reconstruction and selection infrastructure to take advantage of the increased collision rates. ATLAS has installed improved Zero Degree Calorimeters, which are critical in event selection and provide new measurement capabilities.

Though a doomed star exploded some 20,000 years ago, its tattered remnants continue racing into space at breakneck speeds—and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has caught the action.

The nebula, called the Cygnus Loop, forms a bubble-like shape that is about 120 light-years in diameter. The distance to its center is approximately 2,600 light-years. The entire nebula has a width of six full moons as seen on the sky.

Astronomers used Hubble to zoom into a very small slice of the leading edge of this expanding supernova bubble, where the supernova blast wave plows into surrounding material in space. Hubble images taken from 2001 to 2020 clearly demonstrate how the remnant’s shock front has expanded over time, and they used the crisp images to clock its speed.