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The Man Who Claimed He Could Split the Earth in Half
Was Tesla truly capable of controlling the forces of nature, or was it all just a fascinating theory?
Friday, October 4, 2024
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Tuesday, June 20, 2017
Reality Doesn’t Exist Until We Measure It, Quantum Experiment Confirms
Australian scientists have recreated a famous experiment and confirmed quantum physics's bizarre predictions about the nature of reality, by proving that reality doesn't actually exist until we measure it - at least, not on the very small scale.
That all sounds a little mind-meltingly complex, but the experiment poses a pretty simple question: if you have an object that can either act like a particle or a wave, at what point does that object 'decide'?Our general logic would assume that the object is either wave-like or particle-like by its very nature, and our measurements will have nothing to do with the answer. But quantum theory predicts that the result all depends on how the object is measured at the end of its journey. And that's exactly what a team from the Australian National University has now found.
"It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it," lead researcher and physicist Andrew Truscott said in a press release.
Known as John Wheeler's delayed-choice thought experiment, the experiment was first proposed back in 1978 using light beams bounced by mirrors, but back then, the technology needed was pretty much impossible. Now, almost 40 years later, the Australian team has managed to recreate the experiment using helium atoms scattered by laser light.
"Quantum physics predictions about interference seem odd enough when applied to light, which seems more like a wave, but to have done the experiment with atoms, which are complicated things that have mass and interact with electric fields and so on, adds to the weirdness," said Roman Khakimov, a PhD student who worked on the experiment.
To successfully recreate the experiment, the team trapped a bunch of helium atoms in a suspended state known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, and then ejected them all until there was only a single atom left.
This chosen atom was then dropped through a pair of laser beams, which made a grating pattern that acted as a crossroads that would scatter the path of the atom, much like a solid grating would scatter light.
They then randomly added a second grating that recombined the paths, but only after the atom had already passed the first grating.
When this second grating was added, it led to constructive or destructive interference, which is what you'd expect if the atom had travelled both paths, like a wave would. But when the second grating was not added, no interference was observed, as if the atom chose only one path.
The fact that this second grating was only added after the atom passed through the first crossroads suggests that the atom hadn't yet determined its nature before being measured a second time.
So if you believe that the atom did take a particular path or paths at the first crossroad, this means that a future measurement was affecting the atom's path, explained Truscott. "The atoms did not travel from A to B. It was only when they were measured at the end of the journey that their wave-like or particle-like behaviour was brought into existence," he said.
Although this all sounds incredibly weird, it's actually just a validation for the quantum theory that already governs the world of the very small. Using this theory, we've managed to develop things like LEDs, lasers and computer chips, but up until now, it's been hard to confirm that it actually works with a lovely, pure demonstration such as this one.
The full results have been published in Nature Physics.
Friday, June 16, 2017
Russia Has Developed a Cyber Weapon That Can Disrupt Power Grids, New Research Finds
The malware, which researchers have dubbed CrashOverride, is known to have disrupted only one energy system - in Ukraine in December. In that incident, the hackers briefly shut down one-fifth of the electric power generated in Kiev.
But with modifications, it could be deployed against US electric transmission and distribution systems to devastating effect, said Sergio Caltagirone, director of threat intelligence for Dragos, a cybersecurity firm that studied the malware and issued a report on Monday.
And Russian government hackers have already shown their interest in targeting US energy and other utility systems, researchers said.
"It's the culmination of over a decade of theory and attack scenarios," Caltagirone warned. "It's a game changer."
The revelation comes as the US government is investigating a wide-ranging, ambitious effort by the Russian government last year to disrupt the US presidential election and influence its outcome.
That campaign employed a variety of methods, including hacking hundreds of political and other organisations, and leveraging social media, US officials said.
Dragos has named the group that created the new malware Electrum, and has determined with high confidence that it used the same computer systems as the hackers who attacked the Ukraine electric grid in 2015.
That attack, which left 225,000 customers without power, was carried out by Russian government hackers, other US researchers concluded.
US government officials have not officially attributed that attack to the Russian government, but some privately say they concur with the private sector analysis.
"The same Russian group that targeted US [industrial control] systems in 2014 turned out the lights in Ukraine in 2015," said John Hultquist, who analysed both sets of incidents while at iSight Partners, a cyber intelligence firm now owned by FireEye, where he is director of intelligence analysis.
Hultquist's team had dubbed the group Sandworm.
"We believe that Sandworm is tied in some way to the Russian government - whether they're contractors or actual government officials, we're not sure," he said. "We believe they are linked to the security services."
Sandworm and Electrum may be the same group or two separate groups working within the same organisation, but the forensic evidence shows they are related, said Robert M. Lee, chief executive of Dragos.
The Department of Homeland Security, which works with the owners of the nation's critical infrastructure systems, did not respond to a request for comment Sunday.
Energy-sector experts said that the new malware is cause for concern, but that the industry is seeking to develop ways to disrupt attackers who breach their systems.
"US utilities have been enhancing their cybersecurity, but attacker tools like this one pose a very real risk to reliable operation of power systems," said Michael Assante, who worked at Idaho National Labs and is former chief security officer of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, where he oversaw the rollout of industry cybersecurity standards.
CrashOverride is only the second instance of malware specifically tailored to disrupt or destroy industrial control systems. Stuxnet, the worm created by the United States and Israel to disrupt Iran's nuclear enrichment capability, was an advanced military-grade weapon designed to affect centrifuges that enrich uranium.
In 2015, the Russians used malware to gain access to the power supply network in western Ukraine, but it was hackers at the keyboards who remotely manipulated the control systems to cause the blackout - not the malware itself, Hultquist said.
With CrashOverride, "what is particularly alarming . . . is that it is all part of a larger framework," said Dan Gunter, a senior threat hunter for Dragos.
The malware is like a Swiss Army knife, where you flip open the tool you need, and where different tools can be added to achieve different effects, Gunter said.
Theoretically, the malware can be modified to attack different types of industrial control systems, such as water and gas. However, the adversary has not demonstrated that level of sophistication, Lee said.
Still, the attackers probably had experts and resources available not only to develop the framework but also to test it, Gunter said. "This speaks to a larger effort often associated with nation-state or highly funded team operations."
One of the most insidious tools in CrashOverride manipulates the settings on electric power control systems. It scans for critical components that operate circuit breakers and opens the circuit breakers, which stops the flow of electricity. It continues to keep them open even if a grid operator tries to close them, creating a sustained power outage.
The malware also has a "wiper" component that erases the software on the computer system that controls the circuit breakers, forcing the grid operator to revert to manual operations, which means driving to the substation to restore power.
With this malware, the attacker can target multiple locations with a "time bomb" functionality and set the malware to trigger simultaneously, Lee said. That could create outages in different areas at the same time.
The outages would last a few hours and probably not more than a couple of days, Lee said. That is because the US electric industry has trained its operators to handle disruptions caused by large storms. "They're used to having to restore power with manual operations," he said.
So although the malware is "a significant leap forward in tradecraft, it's also not a doomsday scenario," he said.
The malware samples were first obtained by ESET, a Slovakian research firm, which shared some of them with Dragos. ESET has dubbed the malware Industroyer.
2017 © The Washington Post
This article was originally published by The Washington Post.
Saturday, June 10, 2017
Scientists Have Confirmed a Brand New Phase of Matter: Time Crystals
For months now, there's been speculation that researchers might have finally created time crystals - strange crystals that have an atomic structure that repeats not just in space, but in time, putting them in constant oscillation without energy.
Now it's official - researchers have just reported in detail how to make and measure these bizarre crystals. And two independent teams of scientists claim they've actually created time crystals in the lab based off this blueprint, confirming the existence of an entirely new phase of matter.
The discovery might sound pretty abstract, but it heralds in a whole new era in physics - for decades we've been studying matter that's defined as being 'in equilibrium', such as metals and insulators.
But it's been predicted that there are many more strange types of matter out there in the Universe that aren't in equilibrium that we haven't even begun to look into, including time crystals. And now we know they're real.
The fact that we now have the first example of non-equilibrium matter could lead to breakthroughs in our understanding of the world around us, as well as new technology such as quantum computing.
"This is a new phase of matter, period, but it is also really cool because it is one of the first examples of non-equilibrium matter," said lead researcher Norman Yao from the University of California, Berkeley.
"For the last half-century, we have been exploring equilibrium matter, like metals and insulators. We are just now starting to explore a whole new landscape of non-equilibrium matter."
Let's take a step back for a second, because the concept of time crystals has been floating around for a few years now.
First predicted by Nobel-Prize winning theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek back in 2012, time crystals are structures that appear to have movement even at their lowest energy state, known as a ground state.
Usually when a material is in ground state, also known as the zero-point energy of a system, it means movement should theoretically be impossible, because that would require it to expend energy.
But Wilczek predicted that this might not actually be the case for time crystals.
Normal crystals have an atomic structure that repeats in space - just like the carbon lattice of a diamond. But, just like a ruby or a diamond, they're motionless because they're in equilibrium in their ground state.
But time crystals have a structure that repeats in time, not just in space. And it keep oscillating in its ground state.
Imagine it like jelly - when you tap it, it repeatedly jiggles. The same thing happens in time crystals, but the big difference here is that the motion occurs without any energy.
A time crystal is like constantly oscillating jelly in its natural, ground state, and that's what makes it a whole new phase of matter - non-equilibrium matter. It's incapable of sitting still.
But it's one thing to predict these time crystals exist, it's another entirely to make them, which is where the new study comes in.
Yao and his team have now come up with a detailed blueprint that describes exactly how to make and measure the properties of a time crystal, and even predict what the various phases surrounding the time crystals should be - which means they've mapped out the equivalent of the solid, liquid, and gas phases for the new phase of matter.
Published in Physical Review Letters, Yao calls the paper "the bridge between the theoretical idea and the experimental implementation".
And it's not just speculation, either. Based on Yao's blueprint, two independent teams - one from the University of Maryland and one from Harvard - have now followed the instructions to create their own time crystals.
Both of these developments were announced at the end of last year on the pre-print site arXiv.org (here and here), and have been submitted for publication in peer-reviewed journals. Yao is a co-author on both articles.
While we're waiting for the papers to be published, we need to be skeptical about the two claims. But the fact that two separate teams have used the same blueprint to make time crystals out of vastly different systems is promising.
The University of Maryland's time crystals were created by taking a conga line of 10 ytterbium ions, all with entangled electron spins.
The key to turning that set-up into a time crystal was to keep the ions out of equilibrium, and to do that the researchers alternately hit them with two lasers. One laser created a magnetic field and the second laser partially flipped the spins of the atoms.
Because the spins of all the atoms were entangled, the atoms settled into a stable, repetitive pattern of spin flipping that defines a crystal.
That was normal enough, but to become a time crystal, the system had to break time symmetry. And observing the ytterbium atom conga line, the researchers noticed it was doing something odd.
The two lasers that were periodically nudging the ytterbium atoms were producing a repetition in the system at twice the period of the nudges, something that couldn't occur in a normal system.
"Wouldn't it be super weird if you jiggled the Jell-O and found that somehow it responded at a different period?" said Yao.
"But that is the essence of the time crystal. You have some periodic driver that has a period 'T', but the system somehow synchronises so that you observe the system oscillating with a period that is larger than 'T'."
Under different magnetic fields and laser pulsing, the time crystal would then change phase, just like an ice cube melting.
Norman Yao, UC Berkeley
The Harvard time crystal was different. The researchers set it up using densely packed nitrogen vacancy centres in diamonds, but with the same result.
"Such similar results achieved in two wildly disparate systems underscore that time crystals are a broad new phase of matter, not simply a curiosity relegated to small or narrowly specific systems," explained Phil Richerme from Indiana University, who wasn't involved in the study, in a perspective piece accompanying the paper.
"Observation of the discrete time crystal... confirms that symmetry breaking can occur in essentially all natural realms, and clears the way to several new avenues of research."
Yao's blueprint has been published in Physical Review Letters, and you can see the Harvard time crystal paper here, and the University of Maryland paper here.
Update 31 January 2017: We had previously compared the constant oscillation of the time crystals as being in perpetual motion at ground state, which isn't accurate. We've now corrected this explanation.
Thursday, June 8, 2017
This 100-Million-Year-Old Bird Trapped in Amber Is The Best We've Ever Seen
Scientists have uncovered an incredible specimen in Myanmar that has given us a glimpse of life from 100 million years ago - a piece of amber containing the remarkably preserved remains of an ancient bird hatchling.
Inside the amber, you can make out the head, tail, and neck of the bird, but it's the wings and feet that are the real marvels - the chunk of fossilised tree resin has perfectly preserved the bird's feathers, flesh, and claws, and gives us insight into a doomed group of prehistoric species called the 'opposite birds'.
"It's the most complete and detailed view we've ever had," one of the team behind the discovery, Ryan McKellar from the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Canada, told New Scientist.
"Seeing something this complete is amazing. It's just stunning."
The team suspects that the little bird fell into a pool of conifer sap soon after it hatched, and got trapped in the tar-like liquid.
Interestingly enough, despite being such an important part of our understanding of the prehistoric world, scientists still aren't entirely sure of the exact chemistry at play in the amber preservation process.
Full amber sample. Credit: Lida Xing, Jingmai K. O'Connor, Ryan C. McKellar, Luis M. Chiappe, Kuowei Tseng, Gang Li, Ming Bai
What we do know is that after animals get stuck in tree resin, it starts to harden, and if you have the right levels of pressure and temperature, it will transform into a semi-fossilised substance called copal.
"The speed of this process varies tremendously depending on the conditions," Brian Palmer explains for The Washington Post.
"Scientists don't agree on when resin officially becomes copal, or when copal officially becomes amber. Some say that amber must be at least 2 million years old, but that cutoff is arbitrary."
Unfortunately, while it looks almost good as new, sitting in that amber, the bird's flesh will have likely broken down into pure carbon, which means its DNA is probably long gone.
But what we can glean from this specimen is the fact that it was probably a member of the so-called opposite birds, or Enantiornithes - a group of prehistoric birds, thought to have evolved at the same time as the ancestors of modern birds, but for some reason died off with the non-avian dinosaurs.
"In appearance, opposite birds likely resembled modern birds, but they had a socket-and-ball joint in their shoulders where modern birds have a ball-and-socket joint - hence the name," Michael Le Page reports for New Scientist.
"They also had claws on their wings, and jaws and teeth rather than beaks - but at the time the hatchling lived, the ancestors of modern birds had not yet evolved beaks either.
You can see the rest of the images of the amber below:
