Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: particle physics

About 100 trillion neutrinos are passing through your body at this very second. The particles are the second most abundant form of matter in the universe (behind light), but they interact very, very rarely. That property makes them ideal objects for studying the fundamentals of quantum mechanics; however, it also complicates measurements.

For example, neutrinos were discovered in the 1950s, but their properties are still obscure. New research, published in Nature by a team including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists, introduces an experimental technique to constrain the size of the neutrino’s wavepacket.

Imagine measuring a neutrino like finding a needle in a haystack. The particles are so elusive that, previously, researchers didn’t even know where on Earth the haystack was located. Now, they’ve identified the haystack, or, scientifically, the size of the neutrino’s “wavepacket.” This measurement doesn’t say exactly where the neutrino is located or how big it is, but it does constrain what those answers could be.

Read more | >

There is a peculiar alchemy woven into the very structure of spacetime, an unseen flux of quantum fluctuations from which the most ephemeral of entities — virtual particle-antiparticle pairs — bubble in and out of existence. The vacuum, so named for its ostensible emptiness, is anything but void. It seethes with quantum activity, a perpetual genesis and annihilation of matter and antimatter that, if properly harnessed, could redefine the very foundations of energy production. Here, we propose a speculative yet theoretically plausible mechanism by which this ceaseless quantum froth might be coerced into yielding usable energy — energy on a scale that would render conventional sources mere curiosities of an earlier epoch.

The quantum vacuum is not merely an absence of matter but rather a dynamical system governed by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, where transient pairs of particles emerge momentarily before annihilating back into the void. This effect, first mathematically formalized in quantum electrodynamics (QED) by Dirac (1930), finds experimental validation in phenomena such as the Casimir effect, where vacuum fluctuations exert measurable forces between conductive plates (Lamoreaux, 1997, p. 57). If such fluctuations can manifest macroscopically, might they not be engineered into a usable power source?

One tantalizing possibility arises from artificially stabilizing these virtual particles long enough to force matter-antimatter interactions within a controlled environment. Conventional particle-antiparticle annihilation is known to release energy per Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence relation (E=mc²), a principle routinely exploited in positron emission tomography (PET) but never yet on an industrial scale. The key challenge lies in capturing these spontaneous virtual entities before they dissolve, a feat requiring an unprecedented interplay of quantum field manipulation and high-energy containment systems.

Read more | >

By miniaturizing cold atom trapping with integrated photonics, researchers are making quantum technologies portable. Their photonic chip system replaces traditional free-space optics, offering a path toward highly precise, deployable quantum sensors and computing tools. Bringing Quantum Experime.

Read more | >

What is faster than the fastest hypersonic missile?, well a beam of light, microwaves or subatomic particles but they are impossibly small and have almost no mass compared to a projectile. However, if you have enough energy you can make a weapon that works at the speed of light and in theory can shoot down anything projectile weapon we have now.
So why don’t we have phasers like in Star Trek?, in this video we look at Directed Energy Weapons and what they can do now and in the future.

This video is sponsored by Brilliant.org :
https://brilliant.org/CuriousDroid.

Written, researched and presented by paul shillito.

Images and footage : Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Google, US Navy, Marine Forces Reserve, IPG Photonics, EngineerguyFederico Dios, MicrowaveMeShow, PyroGadgets, laserpointersafety.com.

Continue reading “Will Directed Energy Weapons be the Future?” | >

Get MagellanTV here: https://try.magellantv.com/arvinash and get an exclusive offer for our viewers: an extended, month-long trial, FREE. MagellanTV has the largest and best collection of Science content anywhere, including Space, Physics, Technology, Nature, Mind and Body, and a growing collection of 4K. This new streaming service has 3,000 great documentaries. Check out our personal recommendation and MagellanTV’s exclusive playlists: https://www.magellantv.com/genres/sci…

Link to book on Amazon: http://t.ly/sMJW

QHT Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2008.09356.pdf.
Non-technical Explanation: https://jespergrimstrup.org/research/.… 0:00 — Does reductionism end? 2:24 — Why there probably is a final theory 7:00 — Quantum Holonomy theory 12:53 — Surprising implications of QHT Does a final theory exist that can end our reductionist probing into ever shorter distances? Or is there no end to reductionism? There should be an end point because as the object of our measurement gets small enough, the high energies needed to measure it will create a black hole. And no information can get out of a black hole. So there is a limit to measurable reality. We have united seemingly dissimilar forces in the past. For example, the unification of electricity and magnetism, and weak and electromagnetic forces. To continue this reductionism, we want a theory that unifies all known forces. Today we have two overarching theories for forces: Einstein’s Theory of General relativity for gravity, and The standard model for the electromagnetic, weak and strong force. The problem is that the standard model is a quantum field theory, but general relativity is a classical field theory. The two are not compatible. Past attempts for a theory of everything include string theory and loop quantum gravity. But string theory does not produce any falsifiable results. Its mathematics is too flexible. Loop quantum gravity only addresses gravity and not the other forces. Quantum Holonomy Theory or QHT was pioneered by two Danish scientists, physicist Jesper Grimstrup and mathematician Johannes Aastrup. It begins by asking question, how can a theory be immune to further scientific reductions, so that reductionism ends? The presumptive idea is that the simplest way to describe the universe is objects moving around in three dimensional space. The theory is based on the mathematics of empty 3-dimensional space, just space, not even time. So the starting point of QHT is the mathematics of moving stuff around. There are an infinite many ways you can move an arbitrary object between points in space. Any one of these combination of movements from point A to point B, is called a recipe. A recipe for a combination of movements in physics is called a gauge field. A gauge field is the recipe of how to move one particle from point A to point B. Gauge fields are what makes up the forces in the standard model. Since they are recipes of moving things around in space, they represent how things interact with each other, or how forces work. The sum of all mathematical recipes is called the “Configuration space” of these recipes. The key insight in QHT is that the this space has a geometry and stores a lot of information. Geometry means that two different recipes for moving stuff around can be said have a relationship between each other. This is complicated but can be proven mathematically. Grimstrup and Aastrup found is that this geometry results in mathematics that looks almost identical to the mathematics that we already know from quantum field theory – this includes the mathematics of the Standard model. From the geometry you can obtain a a Bott-Dirac operator. The square of this operator gives us the Hamiltonian for both matter particles and force carrying particles. The Hamiltonian represents the formula for all the energy in a system. #QHT #Theoryofeverything Once you have a description of the energies of all the matter and forces in the universe, that’s all you need to need to understand how matter interacts in the universe, and is essentially everything we would need to describe the universe, once all the math is worked out. By simply considering the movements of objects in empty space, all this rich mathematics that appears to resemble the known mathematics of the universe comes out. If QHT is correct, then here are the implications: 1) The universe is quantum because the only way you can describe things moving in empty space is via quantization. 2) Gravity is not quantized, so there is no theory of quantum gravity. 3) No singularities can exist 4) There is no infinite curvature of space-time inside black holes 5) The universe could not have come from nothing, but from a prior universe — a Big Bounce! Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=17…
0:00 — Does reductionism end?
2:24 — Why there probably is a final theory.
7:00 — Quantum Holonomy theory.
12:53 — Surprising implications of QHT
Does a final theory exist that can end our reductionist probing into ever shorter distances? Or is there no end to reductionism? There should be an end point because as the object of our measurement gets small enough, the high energies needed to measure it will create a black hole. And no information can get out of a black hole. So there is a limit to measurable reality.

We have united seemingly dissimilar forces in the past. For example, the unification of electricity and magnetism, and weak and electromagnetic forces. To continue this reductionism, we want a theory that unifies all known forces. Today we have two overarching theories for forces: Einstein’s Theory of General relativity for gravity, and The standard model for the electromagnetic, weak and strong force.

Continue reading “Does reductionism End? Quantum Holonomy theory says YES” | >

For the first time, scientists have ‘photographed’ a rare plasma instability, where high-energy electron beams form into spaghetti-like filaments.

A new study, published in Physical Review Letters, outlines how a high-intensity infrared laser was used to generate filamentation instability—a phenomenon that affects applications in -based particle accelerators and fusion energy methods.

Plasma is a super-hot mixture of charged particles, such as ions and electrons, which can conduct electricity and are influenced by magnetic fields. Instabilities in plasmas can occur because the flow of particles in one direction or within a specific region can be different from the rest, causing some particles to group up into thin spaghetti-like filaments.

Read more | >

Get NordVPN 2Y plan + 4 months extra + up to 20Gb Saily data here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/spacetime It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee!

Check out the Space Time Merch Store.
https://www.pbsspacetime.com/shop.

Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord!
https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime.

All particles belong to two large groups: fermions like protons and electrons make everything we consider “matter”, while bosons like photons and gluons transmit the fundamental forces. And that about covers the universe: matter moving through space and time under the action of forces. But what if we could create particles in between these two possibilities. Physics says these neither matter nor force anyons can exist, and they may have some pretty incredible uses. They’re called anyons.

Continue reading “Can a Particle Be Neither Matter Nor Force?” | >

The speed of light is often regarded as the ultimate cosmic speed limit, but researchers have now managed to slow it down dramatically—to just 61 kilometers per hour. This was achieved by using a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), a peculiar quantum state of matter that allows light to be slowed or even stopped entirely. This discovery, which builds on decades of research, has implications for quantum physics, computing, and information storage.

The Quantum Jelly Effect In everyday conditions, light moves at 299,792,458 meters per second in a vacuum, and its speed decreases slightly when passing through materials like glass or water. However, these reductions are relatively small. In contrast, when light travels through a Bose-Einstein condensate, it can be slowed to a near standstill.

A Bose-Einstein condensate is an exotic state of matter, first predicted by Albert Einstein and Satyendra Nath Bose, that occurs when a gas is cooled to temperatures just above absolute zero. Under these conditions, the atoms behave as a single quantum entity, exhibiting superfluidity and interacting with light in ways not seen in ordinary materials.

Read more | >

For over a century, physicists have grappled with one of the most profound questions in science: How do the rules of quantum mechanics, which govern the smallest particles, fit with the laws of general relativity, which describe the universe on the largest scales?

The optical lattice clock, one of the most precise timekeeping devices, is becoming a powerful tool used to tackle this great challenge. Within an optical lattice clock, atoms are trapped in a “lattice” potential formed by laser beams and are manipulated with precise control of quantum coherence and interactions governed by .

Simultaneously, according to Einstein’s laws of general relativity, time moves slower in stronger gravitational fields. This effect, known as gravitational redshift, leads to a tiny shift of atoms’ internal energy levels depending on their position in gravitational fields, causing their “ticking”—the oscillations that define time in optical lattice clocks—to change.

Read more | >