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Turning airborne CO2 into diamonds + QM mischief rewrites laws of cause & effect

#1
C C Offline
Modern "Alchemists" Turn Airborne CO2 into Diamonds
https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...-diamonds/

INTRO: The dawn of the Biden administration and its focus on climate change is attracting more industries to a solution that was, until recently, thought to be more trouble than it’s worth: the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The idea of collecting CO2 from the sky and trapping it in valuable products before it can warm the Earth is a seductive marketing strategy. Especially for an industry that sells precious items that last “forever.”

That, in a nutshell, describes the global diamond trade. Composed of gem companies valued at roughly $76 billion, the industry has weathered a turbulent 150-year history rife with allegations of environmental and human degradation.

Now, two companies are selling diamonds made in a laboratory from CO2 that once circled the Earth. The sales pitch can be stunning. As Ryan Shearman, the founder and CEO of a New York-based company called Aether, recently explained to a reporter for Vogue magazine: Each carat of a diamond removes 20 tons of CO2. That, he said, is more invisible gas than the average person produces in a year.

With the purchase of a 2-carat diamond, Shearman pointed out, “you’re essentially offsetting 2 ½ years of your life.”

It can take Mother Nature as long as a billion years to make diamonds, which are formed in rocks. But as Shearman explained in an interview with E&E News, he has developed a patent-pending process that can make a batch of diamonds in a laboratory in four weeks.

Unlike other laboratory-made diamonds, his process starts with CO2 removed from the air. The gas undergoes a chemical reaction where it is subjected to high pressure and extremely high temperatures. All of this is created using solar, wind or hydraulic power. Or, as Shearman sometimes puts it, “we’re committed to the unprecedented modern alchemy of turning air pollution into precious stones.”

Aether has been selling its diamonds since the beginning of the year at prices ranging from $7,000 for a ring to around $40,000 for earrings with sparkling stone arrangements. “We have quite a large waitlist now,” he said... (MORE)


Quantum mischief rewrites the laws of cause and effect
https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-m...-20210311/

EXCERPTS: . . . The possibility follows from the quantum phenomenon known as superposition, where particles maintain all possible realities simultaneously until the moment they’re measured. In labs in Austria, China, Australia and elsewhere, physicists observe indefinite causal order by putting a particle of light (called a photon) in a superposition of two states. They then subject one branch of the superposition to process A followed by process B, and subject the other branch to B followed by A. In this procedure, known as the quantum switch, A’s outcome influences what happens in B, and vice versa; the photon experiences both causal orders simultaneously.

Over the last five years, a growing community of quantum physicists has been implementing the quantum switch in tabletop experiments and exploring the advantages that indefinite causal order offers for quantum computing and communication. [...] But the practical uses of the phenomenon only make the deep implications more acute.

Physicists have long sensed that the usual picture of events unfolding as a sequence of causes and effects doesn’t capture the fundamental nature of things. They say this causal perspective probably has to go if we’re ever to figure out the quantum origin of gravity, space and time. But until recently, there weren’t many ideas about how post-causal physics might work. “Many people think that causality is so basic in our understanding of the world that if we weaken this notion we would not be able to make coherent, meaningful theories...”

That’s changing as physicists contemplate the new quantum switch experiments, as well as related thought experiments [...] Accounting for these scenarios has forced researchers to develop new mathematical formalisms and ways of thinking. With the emerging frameworks, “we can make predictions without having well-defined causality...”

[...] many practitioners trace the origin of this line of attack on the quantum gravity problem to work 16 years ago by Lucien Hardy, a British-Canadian theoretical physicist ... The operational question is: In quantum gravity, what can we, in principle, observe? Hardy thought about the fact that quantum mechanics and general relativity each have a radical feature.

Quantum mechanics is famously indeterministic; its superpositions allow for simultaneous possibilities. General relativity, meanwhile, suggests that space and time are malleable. In Einstein’s theory, massive objects like Earth stretch the space-time “metric” — essentially the distance between hash marks on a ruler, and the duration between ticks of clocks. The nearer you are to a massive object, for instance, the slower your clock ticks. The metric then determines the “light cone” of a nearby event — the region of space-time that the event can causally influence.

When you combine these two radical features, Hardy said, two simultaneous quantum possibilities will stretch the metric in different ways. The light cones of events become indefinite — and thus, so does causality itself. Most work on quantum gravity elides one of these features... (MORE - details)
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#2
Syne Offline
This does not rewrite the laws of cause and effect. 9_9
It's just that the superposition effectively follows all possible paths.
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#3
confused2 Offline
CO2 into diamonds OMG!
20 tons of CO2 contains about five tons of pure carbon. So five tons of carbon is compressed into 0.4 gm of diamond (carbon) by a process involving almost unimaginable gullibility, sales pressure and bullshit .. and yet they get away with it.
Edit - a ton of anything be it feathers, marsupials or carbon, still weighs a ton no matter how much you compress it.
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