Daily Archives: March 14, 2023

‘Counterportation’: Quantum breakthrough paves way for world-first experimental wormhole

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[…] The invention, by a University of Bristol physicist, who gave it the name “counterportation,” provides the first-ever practical blueprint for creating in the lab a wormhole that verifiably bridges space, as a probe into the inner workings of the universe.

By deploying a novel computing scheme, revealed in the journal Quantum Science and Technology, which harnesses the basic laws of physics, a small object can be reconstituted across space without any particles crossing. Among other things, it provides a “smoking gun” for the existence of a physical reality underpinning our most accurate description of the world.

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Hatim said, “Here’s the sharp distinction. While counterportation achieves the end goal of teleportation, namely disembodied transport, it remarkably does so without any detectable information carriers traveling across.”

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“If counterportation is to be realized, an entirely new type of quantum computer has to be built: an exchange-free one, where communicating parties exchange no particles,” Hatim said.

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“The goal in the near future is to physically build such a wormwhole in the lab, which can then be used as a testbed for rival physical theories, even ones of quantum gravity,” Hatim added.

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John Rarity, professor of optical communication systems at the University of Bristol, said, “We experience a classical world which is actually built from quantum objects. The proposed experiment can reveal this underlying quantum nature showing that entirely separate quantum particles can be correlated without ever interacting. This correlation at a distance can then be used to transport quantum information (qbits) from one location to another without a particle having to traverse the space, creating what could be called a traversable wormhole.”

More information: Hatim Salih, From counterportation to local wormholes, Quantum Science and Technology (2022). DOI: 10.1088/2058-9565/ac8ecd

Source: ‘Counterportation’: Quantum breakthrough paves way for world-first experimental wormhole

AlphaGo pushed human Go players to become more creative

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Earlier this year, an amateur Go player decisively defeated one of the game’s top-ranked AI systems. They did so using a strategy developed with the help of a program researchers designed to probe systems like KataGo for weaknesses. It turns out that victory is just one part of a broader Go renaissance that is seeing human players become more creative since AlphaGO’s milestone victory in 2016

In a recent study published in the journal PNAS, researchers from the City University of Hong Kong and Yale found that human Go players have become less predictable in recent years. As the New Scientist explains, the researchers came to that conclusion by analyzing a dataset of more than 5.8 million Go moves made during professional play between 1950 and 2021. With the help of a “superhuman” Go AI, a program that can play the game and grade the quality of any single move, they created a statistic called a “decision quality index,” or DQI for short.

After assigning every move in their dataset a DQI score, the team found that before 2016, the quality of professional play improved relatively little from year to year. At most, the team saw a positive median annual DQI change of 0.2. In some years, the overall quality of play even dropped. However, since the rise of superhuman AIs in 2018, median DQI values have changed at a rate above 0.7. Over that same period, professional players have employed more novel strategies. In 2018, 88 percent of games, up from 63 percent in 2015, saw players set up a combination of plays that hadn’t been observed before.

“Our findings suggest that the development of superhuman AI programs may have prompted human players to break away from traditional strategies and induced them to explore novel moves, which in turn may have improved their decision-making,” the team writes.

That’s an interesting change, but not exactly an unintuitive one if you think about it. As professor Stuart Russel at the University of California, Berkeley told the New Scientist, “it’s not surprising that players who train against machines will tend to make more moves that machines approve of.”

Source: AlphaGo pushed human Go players to become more creative | Engadget

Unique image obtained by scientists with high-speed camera shows how lightning rods work

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[…] “The image was captured on a summer evening in São José dos Campos [in São Paulo state] while a negatively charged bolt was nearing the ground at 370 km per second. When it was a few dozen meters from ground level, lightning rods and tall objects on the tops of nearby buildings produced positive upward discharges, competing to connect to the downward . The final image prior to the connection was obtained 25 thousandths of a second before the lightning hit one of the buildings,” Saba said.

He used a camera that takes 40,000 frames per second. When the video is played back in slow motion, it shows how lightning discharges behave and also how dangerous they can be if the protection system is not properly installed: Although there are more than 30 lightning rods in the vicinity, the strike connected not to them but to a smokestack on top of one of the buildings. “A flaw in the installation left the area unprotected. The impact of a 30,000-amp discharge did enormous damage,” he said.

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Lightning strikes branch out as the electrical charges seek the path of least resistance, rather than the shortest path, which would be a straight line. The path of least resistance, usually a zigzag, is determined by different electrical characteristics of the atmosphere, which is not homogeneous. “A lightning strike made up of several discharges can last up to 2 seconds. However, each discharge lasts only fractions of milliseconds,” Saba said.

Lightning rods neither attract nor repel strikes, he added. Nor do they “discharge” clouds, as used to be believed. They simply offer lightning an easy and safe route to the ground.

Because it is not always possible to rely on the protection of a , and most atmospheric discharges occur in summer in the tropics, it is worth considering Saba’s advice. “Storms are more frequent in the afternoon than in the morning, so be careful about outdoor activities on summer afternoons. Find shelter if you hear thunder, but never under a tree or pole, and never under a rickety roof,” he said.

“If you can’t find a safe place to shelter, stay in the car and wait for the storm to blow over. If no car or other shelter is available, squat down with your feet together. Don’t stand upright or lie flat. Indoors, avoid contact with appliances and fixed-line telephones.”

It is possible to survive being struck by lightning, and there are many examples. The odds increase if the person receives care quickly. “Cardiac arrest is the only cause of death. In this case, cardiopulmonary resuscitation is the recommended treatment,” Saba said.

Saba began systematically studying lightning with in 2003, ever since building a collection of videos of lightning filmed at high speed that has become the world’s largest.

More information: Marcelo M. F. Saba et al, Close View of the Lightning Attachment Process Unveils the Streamer Zone Fine Structure, Geophysical Research Letters (2022). DOI: 10.1029/2022GL101482

Source: Unique image obtained by scientists with high-speed camera shows how lightning rods work