Flat Circle? Try Quantum Entanglement.

“‘In classical physics, we were struggling,’ said Sandu Popescu, a professor of physics at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom…”The tendency of coffee — and everything else — to reach equilibrium is ‘very intuitive,’ said Nicolas Brunner, a quantum physicist at the University of Geneva. ‘But when it comes to explaining why it happens, this is the first time it has been derived on firm grounds by considering a microscopic theory.'”

Once dismissed as a crank 30 years ago — this apparently happens to theorists of time often — an MIT professor finds his quantum theory of time gaining adherents. “Energy disperses and objects equilibrate…because of the way elementary particles become intertwined when they interact — a strange effect called ‘quantum entanglement.’…’What’s really going on is things are becoming more correlated with each other,’ Lloyd recalls realizing. ‘The arrow of time is an arrow of increasing correlations.'”

Only One Absolute…Everything Freezes.

“‘We’re going to study matter at temperatures far colder than are found naturally,’ says Rob Thompson of JPL…’We aim to push effective temperatures down to 100 pico-Kelvin.’ 100 pico-Kelvin is just one ten billionth of a degree above absolute zero, where all the thermal activity of atoms theoretically stops. At such low temperatures, ordinary concepts of solid, liquid and gas are no longer relevant. Atoms interacting just above the threshold of zero energy create new forms of matter that are essentially…quantum.”

In the nearest reaches of space (a.k.a. the ISS), NASA scientists plan to create the coldest spot in the universe, in order to toy with the fabric of reality. “No one knows where this fundamental research will lead. Even the ‘practical’ applications listed by Thompson — quantum sensors, matter wave interferometers, and atomic lasers, just to name a few — sound like science fiction. ‘We’re entering the unknown,’ he says.’

As A Matter of Fact, It’s All Dark.

“‘There is no escape from a black hole in classical theory,’ Hawking told Nature. Quantum theory, however, ‘enables energy and information to escape from a black hole’…[The paper] does away with the notion of an event horizon, the invisible boundary thought to shroud every black hole, beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape. In its stead, Hawking’s radical proposal is a much more benign ‘apparent horizon’, which only temporarily holds matter and energy prisoner before eventually releasing them, albeit in a more garbled form.”

Also in potentially earth-shattering space news, Stephen Hawking — “one of the creators of modern black-hole theory” — has released a new paper (not-yet-peer-reviewed) arguing that there are no black holes, really: Quantum theory suggests that matter eventually escapes from them. “A full explanation of the process, the physicist admits, would require a theory that successfully merges gravity with the other fundamental forces of nature. But that is a goal that has eluded physicists for nearly a century.”

Quantum Echo.

‘It’s really cool,’ says Jeremy O’Brien, an experimenter at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the work. Such time-separated entanglement is predicted by standard quantum theory, O’Brien says, ‘but it’s certainly not widely appreciated, and I don’t know if it’s been clearly articulated before.'”

By utilizing (as I understand it) the transitive properties of quantum entanglement, scientists in Israel manage to link two photons that never exist at the same time. “It’s really neat because it shows more or less that quantum events are outside our everyday notions of space and time…This sort of thing opens up people’s minds and suddenly somebody has an idea to use it in quantum computing or something.”

Next Stop, Alderaan.

“‘We are still coming to terms with just how smooth the LHC commissioning is going,’ said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer as the record was announced. ‘It is fantastic.’” Atoms or systems into ruin hurl’d, And now a bubble burst, and now a world…Also in science news, the now armed and fully operational Large Hadron Collider is breaking particle beam records as it warms up for the Big Show, when its handlers will work to recreate the conditions at one billionth of a second after the Big Bang. “Said Heuer: ‘We are continuing to take it step by step, and there is a lot to do before we start [first] physics in 2010. I’m keeping my champagne on ice until then.’” (By way of Dangerous Meta.)

A Measure of Darkness.

“‘We’ve discovered this incredible dark energy, we don’t understand what the hell it is,’ said Lawrence Krauss, a physicist at Arizona State University. ‘It’s extremely small, extremely weak, and it’s so close to being zero, it’s just a total mystery why it should have this small value and not be zero.” While they’re still not entirely sure what in fact they’re looking at, Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicists announce they’ve found another way to measure and quantify “dark energy”, a.k.a. the repulsive “cosmological constant” force causing the universe to expand rather than contract. “This is a much-needed confirmation that the earlier work was correct, the astronomers said, comparing it to football referees examining a controversial play with multiple camera angles.“

As an added bonus, the results announced today also seem to confirm Einstein’s general theory of relativity. “‘It’s never been proved right on the scale of the observable universe,’ Spergel said.”

The Absence that Binds. | Follow the Bouncing Ball.

“Although we think of black holes as somehow threatening, in the sense that if you get too close to one you are in trouble, they may have had a role in helping galaxies to form — not just our own, but all galaxies.” German astronomers believe they have discovered a black hole right in the center of our Milky Way. “According to Dr Robert Massey, of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), the results suggest that galaxies form around giant black holes in the way that a pearl forms around grit.”

And, if that wasn’t heady enough news to wrap one’s mind around, see also this article on loop quantum cosmology (LQC) and “The Big Bounce.” “LQC has been tantalising physicists since 2003 with the idea that our universe could conceivably have emerged from the collapse of a previous universe. Now the theory is poised to make predictions we can actually test. If they are verified, the big bang will give way to a big bounce and we will finally know the quantum structure of space-time. Instead of a universe that emerged from a point of infinite density, we will have one that recycles, possibly through an eternal series of expansions and contractions, with no beginning and no end.” (Both links via Dangerous Meta.)

Dawn of the Particle Age.

“It’s really a generation that we’ve been looking forward to this moment, and the moments that will come after it in particular. September 10 is a demarcation between finishing the construction and starting to turn it on, but the excitement will only continue to grow.” A Quantum Leap Forward, or the End of Days? (Answer: The former.) Over on the border of France and Switzerland, the Large Hadron Collider — the giant, multi-billion-dollar particle accelerator decades in the making — gets ready for its first big test on Wednesday (as does its accompanying “Grid”.) “The collider will recreate the conditions of less than a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, when there was a hot ‘soup’ of tiny particles called quarks and gluons, to look at how the universe evolved, said John Harris, U.S. coordinator for ALICE, a detector specialized to analyze that question.“

Undone by The Great Eye.

Have we inadvertently killed Schrodinger’s cat? No, it’s much, much worse. Cosmologists at Case Western Reserve and Vanderbilt speculate that mankind may have hastened the end of the universe by observing dark energy in 1998. “[Q]uantum theory says that whenever we observe or measure something, we could stop it decaying due what is what is called the ‘quantum Zeno effect,’ which suggests that if an ‘observer’ makes repeated, quick observations of a microscopic object undergoing change, the object can stop changing – just as a watched kettle never boils…Prof Krauss says that the measurement of the light from supernovae in 1998, which provided evidence of dark energy, may have reset the decay of the void to zero — back to a point when the likelihood of its surviving was falling rapidly. ‘In short, we may have snatched away the possibility of long-term survival for our universe and made it more likely it will decay,’ says Prof Krauss.” D’oh! But wouldn’t this presume that at no other place or time in our unfathomably gigantic universe did any other civilization make the same observations? Given the odds of intelligent life out there, that seems unlikely. (And, if you think this all sounds goofy and ridiculous, just wait until we get to the multiverse…)