Lifeboat Foundation

By: Bryan Nelson — MNN

By James Morgan — Science reporter, BBC News

Scientists have for the first time separated a particle from one of its physical properties — creating a “quantum Cheshire Cat”.

The phenomenon is named after the curious feline in Alice in Wonderland, who vanishes leaving only its grin.

Continue reading “'Quantum Cheshire Cat' becomes reality” »

Astrophysicists like Robert Nemiroff have shown, using Hubble photographs, that quantum foam does not exist. Further, the famous string theorists, Michio Kaku, in his April 2008 Space Show interview stated that string theories will require hundreds of years before gravity modification is feasible.

Therefore the need to fund research into alternative propulsion technologies to get us into space cheaper and quicker. We can be assured that such space technologies will filter down into terrestrial technologies.

Continue reading “Funding Request” »

By: Natalie Wolchover — Quanta Magazine

More than 40 years after a Soviet nuclear physicist proposed an outlandish theory that trios of particles can arrange themselves in an infinite nesting-doll configuration, experimentalists have reported strong evidence that this bizarre state of matter is real.

In 1970, Vitaly Efimov was manipulating the equations of quantum mechanics in an attempt to calculate the behavior of sets of three particles, such as the protons and neutrons that populate atomic nuclei, when he discovered a law that pertained not only to nuclear ingredients but also, under the right conditions, to any trio of particles in nature.

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By Natalie Wolchover, Quanta Magazine

For nearly a century, “reality” has been a murky concept. The laws of quantum physics seem to suggest that particles spend much of their time in a ghostly state, lacking even basic properties such as a definite location and instead existing everywhere and nowhere at once. Only when a particle is measured does it suddenly materialize, appearing to pick its position as if by a roll of the dice.

This idea that nature is inherently probabilistic — that particles have no hard properties, only likelihoods, until they are observed — is directly implied by the standard equations of quantum mechanics. But now a set of surprising experiments with fluids has revived old skepticism about that worldview. The bizarre results are fueling interest in an almost forgotten version of quantum mechanics, one that never gave up the idea of a single, concrete reality.

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