Jan 24, 2016 08:13 PM
Science and Life Are More Algorithm Than Math Equation
http://bigthink.com/errors-we-live-by/sc...c-patterns
EXCERPT: Recipes for science have a hot new ingredient. It lets science do what recipes can but equations can’t. It needs better language, but a key shift is afoot....
Quantum Links in Time and Space May Form the Universe’s Foundation
http://www.wired.com/2016/01/quantum-lin...oundation/
EXCERPT: [...] These correlations seriously mess with our intuitions about time and space. Not only can two events be correlated, linking the earlier one to the later one, but two events can become correlated such that it becomes impossible to say which is earlier and which is later. Each of these events is the cause of the other, as if each were the first to occur. (Even a single observer can encounter this causal ambiguity, so it’s distinct from the temporal reversals that can happen when two observers move at different velocities, as described in Einstein’s special theory of relativity.)
The time-capsule idea is only one demonstration of the potential power of these temporal correlations. They might also boost the speed of quantum computers and strengthen quantum cryptography. But perhaps most important, researchers hope that the work will open up a new way to unify quantum theory with Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which describes the structure of space-time. The world we experience in daily life, in which events occur in an order determined by their locations in space and time, is just a subset of the possibilities that quantum physics allows. “If you have space-time, you have a well-defined causal order,” said Časlav Brukner, a physicist at the University of Vienna who studies quantum information. But “if you don’t have a well-defined causal order,” he said—as is the case in experiments he has proposed—then “you don’t have space-time.” Some physicists take this as evidence for a profoundly nonintuitive worldview, in which quantum correlations are more fundamental than space-time, and space-time itself is somehow built up from correlations among events, in what might be called quantum relationalism. The argument updates Gottfried Leibniz and Ernst Mach’s idea that space-time might not be a God-given backdrop to the world, but instead might derive from the material contents of the universe....
Dark Energy May Be Distorting Our View of Gravitational Waves
http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/d...onal-waves
EXCERPT: Dark energy may be distorting long-sought gravitational wave signals from distant sources in the universe, according to a paper posted to the arXiv pre-print server by astrophysicists at Penn State University. The waves may still be visible to us, the researchers say, but because of these still poorly understood effects, they could look very different from expected. Blame the expansion of the universe....
http://bigthink.com/errors-we-live-by/sc...c-patterns
EXCERPT: Recipes for science have a hot new ingredient. It lets science do what recipes can but equations can’t. It needs better language, but a key shift is afoot....
Quantum Links in Time and Space May Form the Universe’s Foundation
http://www.wired.com/2016/01/quantum-lin...oundation/
EXCERPT: [...] These correlations seriously mess with our intuitions about time and space. Not only can two events be correlated, linking the earlier one to the later one, but two events can become correlated such that it becomes impossible to say which is earlier and which is later. Each of these events is the cause of the other, as if each were the first to occur. (Even a single observer can encounter this causal ambiguity, so it’s distinct from the temporal reversals that can happen when two observers move at different velocities, as described in Einstein’s special theory of relativity.)
The time-capsule idea is only one demonstration of the potential power of these temporal correlations. They might also boost the speed of quantum computers and strengthen quantum cryptography. But perhaps most important, researchers hope that the work will open up a new way to unify quantum theory with Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which describes the structure of space-time. The world we experience in daily life, in which events occur in an order determined by their locations in space and time, is just a subset of the possibilities that quantum physics allows. “If you have space-time, you have a well-defined causal order,” said Časlav Brukner, a physicist at the University of Vienna who studies quantum information. But “if you don’t have a well-defined causal order,” he said—as is the case in experiments he has proposed—then “you don’t have space-time.” Some physicists take this as evidence for a profoundly nonintuitive worldview, in which quantum correlations are more fundamental than space-time, and space-time itself is somehow built up from correlations among events, in what might be called quantum relationalism. The argument updates Gottfried Leibniz and Ernst Mach’s idea that space-time might not be a God-given backdrop to the world, but instead might derive from the material contents of the universe....
Dark Energy May Be Distorting Our View of Gravitational Waves
http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/d...onal-waves
EXCERPT: Dark energy may be distorting long-sought gravitational wave signals from distant sources in the universe, according to a paper posted to the arXiv pre-print server by astrophysicists at Penn State University. The waves may still be visible to us, the researchers say, but because of these still poorly understood effects, they could look very different from expected. Blame the expansion of the universe....