The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in memeform.
The Quantum Internet is Born
“Years from now it may be said that the quantum Internet was born today.” Of course, the quantum internet is just in the baby stages now - but when it matures, it will be able to process ridiculous amounts of data at blaring speed, and never be hacked. The system, developed by physicists Stephan Ritter and Gerhard Rempe at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany, has two nodes. Although this is small, the internet you’re on right now started in the 1960s in a similar process.
This first quantum network was built by utilizing two atoms of rubidium which exchange photons. Each atom is placed inside an individual ‘room’ with highly reflective mirrors surrounding it, and at a short distance from its sister atom. These rooms, called optical cavities, are connected by an optical fiber.
First, scientists aim a laser at the first rubidium atom, which induces an emission of a single photon. That photon travels along the optical fiber to the other optical cavity, containing the other atom. Thanks to the mirrors, the photon bounces off the mirrors thousands of times, and is absorbed by the atom upon collision. This absorption transmits information about the first atom’s quantum state - and voila, a transfer of information.
The two rubidium atoms were entangled beforehand, which effectively means that they were linked together. During entanglement (read more about entanglement here), certain properties of the atoms are linked, and measuring one instantaneously produces the same result in the other atom. During this experiment, the atoms were entangled for 100 microseconds - a long time in quantum physicists. Entanglement what renders any form of hacking impossible - as soon as a would-be hacker tapped into the quantum network, the quantum states of the atoms would no longer match up.
This is the first step towards something great.
This is great.
(via somescience)
Coffee and science presented in a slightly smartass way.
I need this in my life.
I just started up a new science focused blog. The point of this blog is simple. It is for those of you who want to expose yourselves to some science. Nothing too complicated or advanced. You have an interest in the way the world works and want to learn more. It’s also sort of a tool for me to combine the various sources I stumble across on my dash and put them into one nice and tidy container that I can reference. I currently hold back on the science stuff I would like to post here so this will be good for me to put more stuff on.
Keep in mind, I am no scientist. I simply have an interest in how the world works and a thirst for knowledge. I get most of what I post here from other sources. So, if you want more, please click some of the sources and browse.
So, if you’re interested in having some science come across your dash then be sure to follow.
If you would like to submit anything or have any questions, feel free to send them my way. I may not be a scientist, but I am skilled at finding answers and putting together newly learned information. I’m always eager to learn more!
Also, any suggestions are welcomed.
![solsticeretouch:
Science Fiction Meets Reality: Interactive Transparent LCD Computing
Your current world is about to look incredibly outdated when you see this video.
What do you get when you combine MIT and Microsoft? You get something truly ingenious.
I can already see the direction that the future is going to go in when seeing this video.
MIT student Jinha Lee designed a prototype as an intern in the Microsoft Applied Sciences Group which allows a user to physically interact with the objects on a transparent screen. Moving windows forward and backward with your fingers, cameras sense where the users hands are and allows for a true 3D interaction with the content on (or is that “in”) the screen. Linking the pixellated world and that of humans is something that has been dreamed up many times before — with movies like Tron taking the concept as far as it could — to a whole digital world beyond the physical.
The display is transparent, and it recognizes where your hands are in space. Then the display overlays a space that lets you adjust it with your hands. So you ‘virtually’ grab things, rotate them, and so forth. Furthermore, the space itself moves so it replicates what it would look like in real life when looking around objects.
Just watch, it will make more sense.
Top youtube comment:
And they say Apple is innovative
[Via source]
This is crazy..](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1qn5jxbxm1qknfz7o1_1280.png)
Science Fiction Meets Reality: Interactive Transparent LCD Computing
Your current world is about to look incredibly outdated when you see this video.
What do you get when you combine MIT and Microsoft? You get something truly ingenious.
I can already see the direction that the future is going to go in when seeing this video.
MIT student Jinha Lee designed a prototype as an intern in the Microsoft Applied Sciences Group which allows a user to physically interact with the objects on a transparent screen. Moving windows forward and backward with your fingers, cameras sense where the users hands are and allows for a true 3D interaction with the content on (or is that “in”) the screen. Linking the pixellated world and that of humans is something that has been dreamed up many times before — with movies like Tron taking the concept as far as it could — to a whole digital world beyond the physical.
The display is transparent, and it recognizes where your hands are in space. Then the display overlays a space that lets you adjust it with your hands. So you ‘virtually’ grab things, rotate them, and so forth. Furthermore, the space itself moves so it replicates what it would look like in real life when looking around objects.
Just watch, it will make more sense.
Top youtube comment:
And they say Apple is innovative
[Via source]
This is crazy..
Adam Savage dipping his fingers into a pot of molten lead. Immediately prior to submerging his fingers in the lead, he wet them with water, which will form a thin protective layer of water vapor on contact with the lead, which was heated to 850 degrees Fahrenheit. This is known as the Leidenfrost effect.
When you believe in science, it backs you up.
(via 14-billion-years-later)
New York Times
August 21, 2011
Part of collection of opinions on the topic: If I Were President… which appeared in the Sunday Review section. What follows is the unedited version of what was published.
The question, “If I were President I’d…” implies that if you swap out one leader, put in another, then all will be well with America—as though our leaders are the cause of all ailments.
That must be why we’ve created a tradition of rampant attacks on our politicians. Are they too conservative for you? Too liberal? Too religious? Too atheist? Too gay? Too anti-gay? Too rich? Too dumb? Too smart? Too ethnic? Too philanderous? Curious behavior, given that we elect 88% of Congress every two years.
A second tradition-in-progress is the expectation that everyone else in our culturally pluralistic land should hold exactly your own outlook, on all issues.
When you’re scientifically literate, the world looks different to you. It’s a particular way of questioning what you see and hear. When empowered by this state of mind, objective realities matter. These are the truths of the world that exist outside of whatever your belief system tells you.
One objective reality is that our government doesn’t work, not because we have dysfunctional politicians, but because we have dysfunctional voters. As a scientist and educator, my goal, then, is not to become President and lead a dysfunctional electorate, but to enlighten the electorate so they might choose the right leaders in the first place.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
New York, Aug. 21, 2011
This is an excerpt from The Believing Brain: From Ghosts & Gods to Politics & Conspiracies: How We Construct Beliefs & Reinforce Them as Truths by Michael Shermer taken from his website at the link above. Follow the link for references.
The Demographics of Belief
According to a 2009 Harris Poll of 2,303 adult Americans, when people are asked to “Please indicate for each one if you believe in it, or not,” the following results were revealing:1
- 82% believe in God
- 76% believe in miracles
- 75% believe in Heaven
- 73% believe in Jesus is God or the Son of God
- 72% believe in angels
- 71% believe in survival of the soul after death
- 70% believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ
- 61% believe in hell
- 61% believe in the virgin birth (of Jesus)
- 60% believe in the devil
- 45% believe in Darwin’s Theory of Evolution
- 42% believe in ghosts
- 40% believe in creationism
- 32% believe in UFOs
- 26% believe in astrology
- 23% believe in witches
- 20% believe in reincarnation
Wow. More people believe in angels and the devil than believe in the theory of evolution. That’s disturbing. And yet, such results should not surprise us as they match similar survey findings for belief in the paranormal conducted over the past several decades.2 And it is not just Americans. The percentages of Canadians and Britons who hold such beliefs are nearly identical to those of Americans.3 For example, a 2006Readers Digest survey of 1,006 adult Britons reported that 43 percent said that they can read other people’s thoughts or have their thoughts read, more than half said that they have had a dream or premonition of an event that then occurred, more than two-thirds said they could feel when someone was looking at them, 26 percent said they had sensed when a loved-one was ill or in trouble, and 62 percent said that they could tell who was calling before they picked up the phone. In addition, a fifth said they had seen a ghost and nearly a third said they believe that Near-Death Experiences are evidence for an afterlife.4
Although the specific percentages of belief in the supernatural and the paranormal across countries and decades varies slightly, the numbers remain fairly consistent that the majority of people hold some form of paranormal or supernatural belief.5 Alarmed by such figures, and concerned about the dismal state of science education and its role in fostering belief in the paranormal, the National Science Foundation (NSF) conducted its own extensive survey of beliefs in both the paranormal and pseudoscience, concluding with a plausible culprit in the creation of such beliefs:
Belief in pseudoscience, including astrology, extrasensory perception (ESP), and alien abductions, is relatively widespread and growing. For example, in response to the 2001 NSF survey, a sizable minority (41 percent) of the public said that astrology was at least somewhat scientific, and a solid majority (60 percent) agreed with the statement “some people possess psychic powers or ESP.” Gallup polls show substantial gains in almost every category of pseudoscience during the past decade. Such beliefs may sometimes be fueled by the media’s miscommunication of science and the scientific process.6
I too would like to lay the blame at the feet of the media, or science education in general, because the fix then seems straightforward—just improve how we communicate and educate science. But that’s too easy. In any case, the NSF’s own data do not support it. Although belief in ESP decreased from 65% among high school graduates to 60% among college graduates, and belief in magnetic therapy dropped from 71% among high school graduates to 55% among college graduates, that still leaves over half of educated people fully endorsing such claims! And for embracing alternative medicine, the percentages actually increased, from 89% for high school grads to 92% for college grads.
Perhaps a deeper cause may be found in another statistic: 70% of Americans still do not understand the scientific process, defined in the NSF study as grasping probability, the experimental method, and hypothesis testing. So one solution here is teaching how science works in addition to the rote memorization of scientific facts. A 2002 article in Skeptic magazine entitled “Science Education is No Guarantee of Skepticism,” presented the results of a study that found no correlation between science knowledge (facts about the world) and paranormal beliefs. The authors, W. Richard Walker, Steven J. Hoekstra, and Rodney J. Vogl, concluded: “Students that scored well on these [science knowledge] tests were no more or less skeptical of pseudoscientific claims than students that scored very poorly. Apparently, the students were not able to apply their scientific knowledge to evaluate these pseudoscientific claims. We suggest that this inability stems in part from the way that science is traditionally presented to students: Students are taughtwhat to think but not how to think.”7 The scientific method is a teachable concept, as evidenced in the NSF study that found that 53% of Americans with a high level of science education (nine or more high school and college science/math courses) understand the scientific process, compared to 38% with a middle level (six to eight such courses) of science education, and 17% with a low level (less than five such courses) of science education. So maybe the key to attenuating superstition and belief in the supernatural is in teaching how science works, not just what science has discovered. I have believed this myself for my entire career in science and education. If I didn’t believe it I might not have gone into the business of teaching, writing, and editing science in the first place.
Alas, I have come to the conclusion that belief is largely immune to attack by direct educational tools, at least for those who are not ready to hear it. Belief change comes from a combination of personal psychological readiness and a deeper social and cultural shift in the underlying zeitgeist of the times, which is affected in part by education, but is more the product of larger and harder-to-define political, economic, religious, and social changes.
