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MIT physicists and colleagues have for the first time measured the geometry, or shape, of electrons in solids at the quantum level. Scientists have long known how to measure the energies and velocities of electrons in crystalline materials, but until now, those systems’ quantum geometry could only be inferred theoretically, or sometimes not at all.

The work, reported in the November 25 issue of Nature Physics, “opens new avenues for understanding and manipulating the quantum properties of materials,” says Riccardo Comin, MIT’s Class of 1947 Career Development Associate Professor of Physics and leader of the work.

“We’ve essentially developed a blueprint for obtaining some completely new information that couldn’t be obtained before,” says Comin, who is also affiliated with MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory and the Research Laboratory of Electronics.

String theory proposes that all particles and forces are made of tiny, vibrating strings, which form the fundamental building blocks of the universe. This framework offers a potential solution to the long-standing paradoxes surrounding black holes, such as their singularities—infinitely tiny points where the laws of physics break down—and the Hawking radiation paradox, which questions the fate of information falling into black holes.

Fuzzballs replace the singularity with an ultra-compressed sphere of strings, likened to a neutron star’s structure but composed of subatomic strings instead of particles. While the theory remains incomplete, its implications are significant, offering an alternative explanation for phenomena previously attributed to black holes.

To differentiate between black holes and fuzzballs, researchers are turning to gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime caused by cosmic collisions. When black holes merge, they emit specific gravitational wave signatures that have so far aligned perfectly with Einstein’s general relativity. However, fuzzballs might produce subtle deviations from these patterns, providing a way to confirm their existence.

It is important to have a mechanism that forms Mass, because if we had a concept of how Mass is formed it would give us a deeper understanding of gravity and help us unity Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

In this theory Mass increases with speed, because Photon ∆E=hf energy is continuously transforming potential energy into the kinetic energy of matter in the form of electrons.

Continue reading “Quantum Mechanical Mass mechanism ~ Why Mass increases” »

As the multi-polar world of global politics becomes ever more complex, who better to cast light on its workings than a physicist turned President? Join Armen Sarkissian, former President of Armenia, as he argues for his new theory of quantum politics, in which individuals are necessarily connected across space and our world is dominated by randomness, uncertainty, and possibility.

And it does not violate the laws of physics.

Entanglement is perhaps one of the most confusing aspects of quantum mechanics. On its surface, entanglement allows particles to communicate over vast distances instantly, apparently violating the speed of light. But while entangled particles are connected, they don’t necessarily share information between them.

In quantum mechanics, a particle isn’t really a particle. Instead of being a hard, solid, precise point, a particle is really a cloud of fuzzy probabilities, with those probabilities describing where we might find the particle when we go to actually look for it. But until we actually perform a measurement, we can’t exactly know everything we’d like to know about the particle.

Continue reading “Can Entangled Particles Communicate Faster than Light?” »

The concept of vectors can be traced back to the 17th century with the development of analytic geometry by René Descartes and Pierre de Fermat. They used coordinates to represent points in a plane, which can be seen as a precursor to vectors. In the early 19th century, mathematicians like Bernard Bolzano and August Ferdinand Möbius began to formalize operations on points, lines, and planes, which further developed the idea of vectors.

Hermann Grassmann is considered one of the key figures in the development of vector spaces. In his 1844 work “Die lineale Ausdehnungslehre” (The Theory of Linear Extension), he introduced concepts that are central to vector spaces, such as linear independence, dimension, and scalar products. However, his work was not widely recognized at the time.

In 1888, Giuseppe Peano gave the first modern axiomatic definition of vector spaces. He called them “linear systems” and provided a set of axioms that precisely defined the properties of vector spaces and linear maps. Hilbert helped to further formalize and abstract the concept of vector spaces, placing it within a broader axiomatic framework for mathematics. He played a key role in the development of functional analysis, which studies infinite-dimensional vector spaces.

Which brings us to the big question: what about gravity?

This is something where we can’t be certain, as gravitation remains the only known force for which we don’t have a full quantum description. Instead, we have Einstein’s general relativity as our theory of gravity, which relies on a purely classical (i.e., non-quantum) formalism for describing it. According to Einstein, spacetime behaves as a four-dimensional fabric, and it’s the curvature and evolution of that fabric that determines how matter-and-energy move through it. Similarly it’s the presence and distribution of matter-and-energy that determine the curvature and evolution of spacetime itself: the two notions are linked together in an inextricable way.

Now, over on the quantum side, our other fundamental forces and interactions have both a quantum description for particles and a quantum description for the fields themselves. All calculations performed within all quantum field theories are calculated within spacetime, and while most of the calculations we perform are undertaken with the assumption that the underlying background of spacetime is flat and uncurved, we can also insert more complex spacetime backgrounds where necessary. It was such a calculation, for example, that led Stephen Hawking to predict the emission of the radiation that bears his name from black holes: Hawking radiation. Combining quantum field theory (in that case, for electromagnetism) with the background of curved spacetime inevitably leads to such a prediction.

An experiment showing that quantum and classical communication can be carried out through the same fibre at the same time may open the door to building a quantum internet with existing infrastructure.

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan