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Physicists at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, together with colleagues in Russia and Poland, have managed to achieve ultra-strong coupling between light and matter at room temperature. The discovery is of importance for fundamental research and might pave the way for advances in light sources, nanomachinery and quantum technology.

A set of two coupled oscillators is one of the most fundamental and widely used systems in physics. It is a very general toy model that describes a plethora of systems including guitar strings, acoustic resonators, the physics of children’s swings, molecules and chemical reactions, gravitationally bound systems, and quantum cavity electrodynamics.

The degree of coupling between the two oscillators is an important parameter that mostly determines the behavior of the coupled system. However, not much is known about the by which two pendula can couple to each other—and what consequences such coupling can have.

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador and founder of Bioquark interviews Dr Vitaly Vanchurin, PhD, Associate Professor, Theoretical Physics and Cosmology, Swenson College of Science and Engineering, at the University of Minnesota (UMN).

Dr Vanchurin’s big questions and the tools we need to answer them:

“What is the origin of our Universe? What determines our vacuum and the cosmological constant that is responsible for the observed accelerated expansion of space? What determines the onset of structure formation and the birth of galaxies in our Universe? Our innate curiosity about our beginnings has been, since time immemorial, and still is, at the heart of every human being. This age old question of our origin can now be addressed by applying the scientific method”.

Ira Pastor comments:

Physicist Jim Al-Khalili routinely deals with the strangest subject in all of science — quantum physics, the astonishing and perplexing theory of sub-atomic particles. But now he’s turning his attention to the world of nature. Can quantum mechanics explain the greatest mysteries in biology?

His first encounter is with the robin. This familiar little bird turns out to navigate using one of the most bizarre effects in physics — quantum entanglement, a process which seems to defy common sense. Even Albert Einstein himself could not believe it.

Jim finds that even the most personal of human experiences — our sense of smell — is touched by ethereal quantum vibrations. According to the latest experiments, it seems that our quantum noses are listening to smells. Jim then discovers that the most famous law of quantum physics — the uncertainty principle — is obeyed by plants and trees as they capture sunlight during the vital process of photosynthesis.

Finally, Jim asks if quantum physics might play a role in evolution. Could the strange laws of the sub-atomic world, which allow objects to tunnel through impassable barriers in defiance of common sense, effect the mechanism by which living species evolve?

In the sixties of the previous century, the science of Cybernetics emerged, which its founder Norbert Wiener defined as “the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine.” Whereas the cyberneticists perhaps saw everything in the organic world too much as a machine type of regulatory network, the paradigm swapped to its mirror image, wherein everything in the natural world became seen as an organic neural network. Indeed, self-regulating networks appear to be ubiquitous: From the subatomic organization of atoms to the atomic organization of molecules, macromolecules, cells and organisms, everywhere the equivalent of neural networks appears to be present.

#EvolutionaryCybernetics #CyberneticTheoryofMind #PhilosophyofMind #QuantumTheory #cybernetics #evolution #consciousness


“At a deep level all things in our Universe are ineffably interdependent and interconnected, as we are part of the Matryoshka-like mathematical object of emergent levels of complexity where consciousness pervades all levels.” –Alex M. Vikoulov, The Syntellect Hypothesis.

Researchers have created a molecule in a single, precisely characterized quantum state by merging two carefully prepared atoms.

Researchers have demonstrated a quantum molecular assembler—a device that takes individual atoms as inputs and merges them into a molecule in a desired quantum state. The team used lasers to trap and cool one sodium (Na) atom and one cesium (Cs) atom, bring them together, and merge them into an NaCs molecule in a specific quantum state. Such a quantum-controlled molecule is a promising building block for quantum computers and could help researchers study the quantum details of chemical reactions.

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory used quantum optics to advance state-of-the-art microscopy and illuminate a path to detecting material properties with greater sensitivity than is possible with traditional tools.

“We showed how to use squeezed light – a workhorse of quantum information science – as a practical resource for microscopy,” said Ben Lawrie of ORNL’s Materials Science and Technology Division, who led the research with Raphael Pooser of ORNL’s Computational Sciences and Engineering Division. “We measured the displacement of an atomic force microscope microcantilever with sensitivity better than the standard quantum limit.”

Unlike today’s classical microscopes, Pooser and Lawrie’s quantum microscope requires quantum theory to describe its sensitivity. The nonlinear amplifiers in ORNL’s microscope generate a special quantum light source known as squeezed light.

A new D-Theory of Time, or Digital Presentism, is predicated on reversible quantum computing at large, including the notion of ‘Anti-Time’ around which the present article revolves. If you think Anti-Time is nothing but fiction, and doesn’t apply to our reality, think again. As Dr. Antonin Tuynman writes in his Foreword to The Physics of Time: D-Theory of Time & Temporal Mechanics by Alex M. Vikoulov: “Whereas quantum physics and relativity theory have been solidly in place for over a century now, stubbornly and forcedly we still cling to atavistic interpretations, which are no longer in line with the well-established findings of our experiments in physics. Amidst the turmoil of this spinning convoluted dreamtime of our digital Cyberbardo, Vikoulov carves out a trajectory for understanding.”

#AntiTime #PhysicsofTime #DTheoryofTime #DigitalPresentism #TemporalMechanics


Many temporal concepts are undoubtedly extremely counterintuitive. Time directionality and time symmetry are especially notorious ones. Any of the possible pasts may have led to the present “digital” conscious instant. This is a strange idea if you are accustomed to looking at the world in a strictly linear, deterministic way, but it reflects the uncertain world described by quantum mechanics. A major counterargument to the multitude of pasts could be a combinatorial explosion of observer ‘anti-time’-lines, i.e., digital timelines extending in the opposite temporal direction from the present temporal singularity to the Alpha Point (Digital Big Bang). So, how in the quantum multiverse are those digital anti-timelines supposed to converge once again at the Alpha Point?

The answer has to do with reversible entropy (not observable, of course, in the Newtonian classicality). Reversing information entropy is like going from higher complexity to lower complexity. As long as you continue to unwind the complexity bit-by-bit, you’ll end up at the point of the lowest possible complexity with, perhaps, 1 bit of entropy — the Alpha Point — the convergent point of all anti-timelines and simultaneously the point of origin of all observer probable timelines.

This cloud-based quantum computing service includes verification and is now available to members of the IBM Q Network.

IBM and Cambridge Quantum Computing have built a random number generator that uses quantum computing with verification and plan to offer the new capability as a cloud service.

IBM and CQC announced the news Thursday at the final day of the IBM Q Summit. CQC developed the application, which generates true maximal randomness, or entropy.

The world is one step closer to having a totally secure internet and an answer to the growing threat of cyber-attacks, thanks to a team of international scientists who have created a unique prototype that could transform how we communicate online.

The invention led by the University of Bristol, revealed today in the journal Science Advances, has the potential to serve millions of users, is understood to be the largest-ever quantum network of its kind, and could be used to secure people’s online communication, particularly in these internet-led times accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.