Category: Weird ‘n’ spooky
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The world’s first quantum ratchet
A quantum ratchet sounds like a handy device. The idea is to push a quantum particle in a specific direction by periodically kicking it with an unbiased force. But why would an unbiased force push it in a specific direction? It sounds as if you’re more likely to end up with a random walk/brownian-type motion.…
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The puzzle of flyby anomolies
On 8 December 1990, something strange happened to the Galileo spacecraft as it flew past Earth on its way to Jupiter. As the mission team watched, the spacecraft’s speed suddenly jumped by 4 mm per second. Nobody took much notice — a few mm/s is neither here or there to mission planners. Then on 23…
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Quantum dreamin and optical illusions
Quantum consciousness, a phrase that sends most eggheads running for the hills, is currently on a roll. A coupla months back, Efstratios “Moussaka” Manousakis of Florida State University in Tallahassee published a paper suggesting that a certain kinda optical illusion could be explained in quantum terms. The optical illusion in question is the double image…
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Future computers to run on quantum monoxide
Them quantum eggheads have long been a-huntin and a-scramblin to find the perfect building blocks for their quantum computers. They looked at photons, electrons, ions, neutral atoms and quantum dots. In fact there ain’t much they haven’t looked at. Now Elena “Coolhand” Kuznetsova and chums at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge says the…
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Delayed-choice and double slits
Send single photons through a double slit and they will somehow interfere with themselves to produce an interference pattern, as if they were waves. That’s quantum mechanics for ya. ‘Cept it don’t work if the photons are being watched, in which case each photon appears to pass through one slit or the other, as if…
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Particle physicists build time machine
Back to the future, here we come. A couple a eggheads over at the Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow, Russia, reckon that the boys at CERN have a surprise up their sleeves. They’ve gone and built themselves a time machine. Yep, ya’ll heard right: a time machine. The fellas at the world’s largest particle physics…
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The horrible truth behind quantum games
If ya follow quantum game theory, you could be forgiven for thinking that quantum players always trounce their classical counterparts like T Rex versus the cavemen. But it ain’t so. After some egg scratchin’ physicists have realised that quantum games are actually entirely different from classical games and so it ain’t fair to compare them.…
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Why our time dimension is about to become space-like
It don’t get much weirder than this. The universe is about to lose its dimension of time says a group of theoretical astrobods at the University of Salamanca in Spain. And they got the evidence to prove it. The idea comes from the study of braneworlds: the thinking that the universe we see around us…
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Einstein and the greatest scientific fraud of the 20th century
In 1926, when the scientific world was still a-puzzling and a-wondrin over the wave-particle duality of light, Einstein asked a pal, Emil “Hurry” Rupp, to conduct an experiment that would settle the matter. If anyone could do it, thought Einstein, it was Rupp who was considered the latest and greatest experimental physicists of the day.…
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How do black holes move?
There’s more to that question than meets the eye. Black holes ain’t like nothing else in the Universe, havin’ all kinds strange quantum properties as well as some curious gravitational ones too. So when it comes to cruisin’ the cosmos, do black holes move like classical objects such as stars or like quantum objects such…