Month: August 2008
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The prophetic promise of category theory
When it comes to creating the final theory of everything, physicists have an ever broadening (and bewildering) choice of mathematical tricks with which to tackle the mysteries of the universe. A couple of years ago, random matrix theory cropped up as a potential framework for a new kind of science. And a fascinating idea it…
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Spook ‘n’ spock (part 2)
More highlights from the physics arXiv this week: Quantum Algorithms Dark Stars: Dark Matter in the First Stars leads to a New Phase of Stellar Evolution Sensing Shallow Seafloor and Sediment Properties, Recent History A 3D Discrete Model of the Diaphragm and Human Trunk Terahertz Metamaterials on Free-Standing Highly-Flexible Polyimide Substrates Nonlinear Energy Harvesting Feasibility…
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Spook ‘n’ spock (part 1)
The best of the rest from the arXiv this week: Placing Direct Limits on the Mass of Earth-Bound Dark Matter Self-Organized Periodicity of Protein Clusters in Growing Bacteria Neutrino Astrophysics Using the Energy Spectrum at DAMA/LIBRA to Probe Light Dark Matter Spin-Independent Elastic WIMP Scattering and the DAMA Annual Modulation Signal Introductory Lectures on String…
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Spooky action at a distance gets spookier
Take a pair of entangled photons and perform a measurement on one of them. According to the strange laws of quantum mechanics, this measurement immediately influences the state of the second photon, no matter how far apart they are. Einstein bridled at the possibility that an instantaneous influence could take place. He called it spooky…
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Schroedinger-like PageRank wave equation could revolutionise web rankings
The PageRank algorithm that first set Google on a path to glory measures the importance of a page in the world wide web. It’s fair to say that an entire field of study has grown up around the analysis of its behaviour. That field looks set for a shake up following the publication today of…
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Creating random numbers the quantum way
The stream of high quality papers continues from the lab of Andrew Shields at Toshiba Research in Cambridge, UK. Today, his team unveils a new type of quantum random number generator and a fine looking machine it appears to be. Here’s the idea. Create a stream of single photons are emitted at random intervals that…
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Quantum communication: when 0 + 0 is not equal to 0
One of the lesser known cornerstones of modern physics is Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication which he published in 1948 while juggling and unicycling his way around Bell Labs. Shannon’s theory concerns how a message created at one point in space can be reproduced at another point in space. He calls the conduit for…
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Deconstructing DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak
“The incredible record of Joe DiMaggio in the summer of 1941 is unparalleled. No one has come close—before or since—to equaling his streak of hitting safely in 56 games in a row.” So begin Steve Strogatz and Sam Arbesman from Cornell University in their paper discussing the likelihood of DiMaggio’s record. “People have…stated that it…
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In case ya missed ’em…
The iced buns from the physics arxiv blog this week: The Casimir conundrum The painful search for gravitational waves The day the solar wind disappeared Why small black holes cannot grow
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Push ‘n’ shove
The best of the rest from the physics arxiv: The NASA EPOXI Mission of Opportunity to Gather Ultraprecise Photometry of Known Transiting Exoplanets EconoThermodynamics, or the World Economy “Thermal Death” Paradox How the Surrounding Water Changes the Electronic and Magnetic Properties of DNA Traffic by Small Teams of Molecular Motors IceCube: A Cubic Kilometer Radiation…