BAT is blockchain-based digital advertising. To improve the efficiency of digital advertising it has introduced a new browser Brave which offers 3-6x faster browsing compared to other browsers. It is a privacy-focused browser and it blocks invasive ads and trackers. The number of monthly active Brave users rose to 62 million in Jun 2022 from 33.8 million in June 2021 and daily active users to 19.2 million. Users can earn BAT by viewing the privacy-respecting ads.
Brave VS Chrome
Chrome
Brave
Speed
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8 x faster
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Technical Analysis-
BAT regained above $0.450 after a minor sell-off to $0.350. It has outperformed BTC and ETH in the past month. In the 4-hour chart, it holds above short-term (21 and 55 EMA) and long-term 200 EMA ($0.3950).
The immediate significant resistance is around $0.50, any breach above targets $0.62/$0.75/$1.
The minor weakness only if it breaks below $0.35, violation below will drag the pair o $0.25/$0.20.
We tend to think of the laws of nature as fixed. They came into existence along with the universe, and have been the same ever since. But once you start asking why the laws of the universe are what they are, their invariance also comes into question. Lee Smolin is the type of theoretical physicist who likes asking such why questions. His inquiries have led him to believe that the laws of the universe have evolved from earlier forms, along the lines of natural selection. In this in depth interview he offers an account of how he came to this view of the evolving universe and explains why physics needs to change its view of time.
Lee Smolin is a rare breed of theoretical physicist. Whereas most physicists see themselves in the business of discovering what the laws of the universe are, Lee Smolin goes a step further: he wants to know why the laws of the universe are what they are.
I believe in an aspirational form of Leibnizs Principle of Sufficient Reason. When seeking knowledge, we should act on the assumption that the principle of sufficient reason is true, otherwise we are likely to give up too soon.
The Principle of Sufficient Reason being the idea that there is a reason for why things are the way they are and Leibniz being a 17th century rationalist philosopher. Lee Smolin is not like other physicists in another way: he draws inspiration from many different fields, including philosophy.
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Smolin admits that it might be the case that at some point our explanations simply run out and there are no further why questions we can ask.
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Its perhaps hard to appreciate how unconventional this way of thinking about physics is. Leibniz was a key figure of early modern rationalist philosophy that held necessity to be the key concept that would unlock the mysteries of the universe things are the way they are because they had to be this way, and reason could explain why that was. Modern science on the other hand for the most part has given up on this idea that the world is governed by rational necessity. Instead, contingency rules: the way things are is the way things are, we cant really know why. For many scientists the question doesnt even make sense. Smolin admits that it might be the case that at some point our explanations simply run out and there are no further why questions we can ask.
Of course this might be the case, and it might not be. The only way to find out is to try to see how far we can go.
And Smolin is prepared to go a lot further in his questioning than most. Pushing the boundaries of explanation has led him to put forward some extraordinary theories, including the idea that the laws of the universe are not invariable across space and time, but are evolving. When asked to give an account of how he arrived at this theory he offers a kind of intellectual autobiography, and why he sees the issue of time as crucial to how we think about laws of nature.
Smolin came of age during the era when the main puzzle of theoretical physics was how to make Einsteins General Relativity consistent with Quantum Mechanics. Time according to General Relativity was seen as a relational property not as something absolute or external to the universe, as Newton had thought. This means that time becomes secondary, as Smolin says a merely relational property between events in the universe, not something fundamental. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, still seemed to depend on an absolute framework of time that wasnt relational. This was one the key contradictions at the heart of physics at the time Smolin was still a physics student and laws of nature were seen as invariant as time-independent.
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Smolin wasnt satisfied with having just a description of how particles interact he also wanted to know why. Why is the neutron slightly heavier than the proton?
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The second big issue playing on Smolins mind when he was a graduate student at Harvard came from particle physics. The Standard Model had just started going, and it seemed to be an immensely powerful tool for explaining the interactions of fundamental particles. But Smolin wasnt satisfied with having just a description - even if it was a very good description - of how particles interact he also wanted to know why. Why is the neutron slightly heavier than the proton? And why is the mass of the electron 1800 times smaller than that of the neutron?
These near coincidences are very important for how the world turned out to be. Smolin adds.
There was a group of cosmologists at the time who were also asking this question of why the universe seemed to be so perfectly tuned to allow for matter to be formed all these constants, including the Cosmological Constant, had just the right values to allow life to eventually develop. Was this mere accident? Or was there a reason for it? Cosmologists like Martin Rees of Cambridge developed the idea of the Anthropic Principle that postulated the existence of many different universes in which these constants all had different values, leading to completely different outcomes. Life was possible in our universe because we got lucky in other universes not only is life not possible, there are no atoms to begin with.
Smolin admits this is a pretty cool idea but he doesnt think its really a scientific theory since it doesnt make any predictions. But the puzzle it tried to tackle was a real one, and Smolin had a better idea for how to solve it. He thought to himself, where else do we find systems that are fine tuned for the emergency of complexity? Biology was to him the obvious answer. Im pretty good at stealing ideas from other fields. Everybody has a trick, and thats mine he says jokingly.
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This seemingly paradoxical balance of the cosmos is not a mere accident - there was a process behind it, akin to natural selection, that gave rise to it.
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Thats how Smolin came up with the idea of applying the principles of evolutionary biology to the universe as a whole. In the same way that in biology Darwinian evolution was able to explain the existence of perfectly developed organisms, with organs that work just the right way to keep them alive and functioning, the idea that the universe as a whole has been undergoing a process of evolution can explain the existence of this fine tuning of cosmological constants. This seemingly paradoxical balance of the cosmos is not a mere accident - there was a process behind it, akin to natural selection, that gave rise to it. Its an idea that he was surprised to find the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Peirce had also hinted at in the early 20th century.
Putting forward this theory of the dynamically evolving universe led to the other central idea in Smolins work: a reassessment of the centrality of time.
Smolin is always talking about his collaborators - many of them unconventional thinkers and eccentric in their own way - and how theyve contributed to his work. Roberto Mangabeira Unger is one of them, a professor at Harvards Law School, a Brazilian politician, and a philosopher. Smolin credits Mangabeira with forcing him to come to terms with the contradiction he was seemingly committed to. On the one hand Quantum Gravity that Smolin was working on saw laws of nature as fundamental, and time as secondary, as emergent. But applying natural selection to cosmology we get the opposite: time becomes fundamental, and laws of nature evolve, are emergent. This led to a collaboration between the two thinkers, and the publication of their book The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time. Smollin ended up espousing the view that time is fundamental, not secondary as General Relativity would have it, and space an emergent property of it. This was a view that Fotini Markopoulou, another collaborator of Smolins, also arrived at independently a view that most theoretical physicists, including Carlo Rovelli, oppose (although Smolin thinks Rovelli is coming around to that view in his recent publications).
Both these theories, that the universe and its laws are changing, and that time is a fundamental property of the universe, whereas space derivative, pose several questions, questions that Smolin sees as invitations for further elaboration and investigation, rather than as objections.
One of the questions I was curious to find out more about was how Smolin thought of the evolution of the universe. What is the mechanism here, exactly?
Smolin has three possible answers to this question, all of them hypotheses, as he stresses to me, given that they arent capable of making predictions: Im not Darwin! he says.
The most prominent hypothesis is that the universe gives birth to other universes through black holes. This, in itself, was not a new idea. Theoretical physicists John Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt first put forward this hypothesis before, but Smolin tweaked it to fit his view of a universe that evolves, almost along the lines of natural selection. Whereas Wheeler and DeWitt thought the new universe produced each time has random values of the cosmological constant and other key parameters, Smolin took a more Darwinian approach, proposing that each universe embodies very small changes to those cosmological values, allowing for a cumulative change and fine tuning, until we arrive at the universe we have today.
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How can the universe learn anything, and how does the universe remember what has happened in the past, and use it as a precedent to decide what will happen in the future?
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The question I immediately raise is whether this picture of an evolving set of universes, in which the laws of nature are not fixed, but are ever changing, requires us to postulate a kind of meta-law, a law that would dictate the way that this evolution can take place. So are we not back to where we started, the cosmos being dictated by some fixed meta-laws? Smolin is not happy with this solution, you cant solve this by just accepting that there are fixed laws, theyre just meta-laws he says. But he also doesnt really have a definitive answer either. Its a question he takes seriously, however, and has spent much of his book with Roberto Mangabeira Unger tackling this issue.
Smolin has two other hypotheses for how the universe might be changing. One he calls The Autodidactic Universe, the self-learning universe, the other The Principle of Precedence - borrowing a concept from jurisprudence when thinking about laws seems quite clever, and in line with Smolins trick of stealing ideas from other disciplines. They each come with their own conceptual challenges how can the universe learn anything, and how does the universe remember what has happened in the past, and use it as a precedent to decide what will happen in the future? Thinking of the universe in these terms seems to bend our concepts to breaking point, although admittedly things like machine learning, a technology that is very much real, does the same. If machines can learn from a trial-and-error process, why not the universe as a whole? In fact, Smolin has collaborated with Microsoft computer scientist Jaron Lanier, to model how the universe might be understood as a giant machine learning process.
The other major challenge to Smolins theory is directed at his view that time is more fundamental than space. How is that even possible, I asked him. If time is some measure of change, how can there be change without space? Where is the change taking place?
Here Smolin brings up another collaborator, Julian Barbour, who he acknowledges as his mentor when it comes to the philosophy of fundamental physics. In work they did together they showed that it is indeed possible to do dynamics, the study of evolving quantities, without space. In order to do that, Smolin tells me, you need to think of time as playing a causal role itself as creating new events from past ones. If we think of time this way, all we have to do is look back in time coming at you from your past and the causes that have made you, to see change.
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I dont claim to have complete ideas, but I believe I have done enough to show that these are things worth thinking about. I havent built a new paradigm yet, but Im having a lot of fun in the process.
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These are fascinating ideas that really capture the imagination, which goes some way to explain why Smolin, a theoretical physicist who is mostly in the business of publishing highly technical papers, impenetrable to the uninitiated, has acquired something of a cult status beyond the world of academia. But even though his theories are these beautiful mosaics of ideas from physics, philosophy, biology, computer science, the question is, do they ultimately offer us answers to the puzzles they set out to tackle? Smolin offers a humble self-diagnosis that captures both the joy of research, but also the hope of an enduring legacy:
I dont claim to have complete ideas, but I believe I have done enough to show that these are things worth thinking about. I havent built a new paradigm yet, but Im having a lot of fun in the process.
Summit Led by Dr. and Master Zhi Gang Sha Features Conversations with Dr. Deepak Chopra, Dr. Ervin Laszlo, Dr. Rulin Xiu
Quarterly Held Event Targeting Spirituality and Science Will Help People Navigate Unprecedented Challenges of 2022
NEW YORK, July 8, 2022 /PRNewswire/ --As millions of Americans continue to grapple with strife in their daily lives caused by a continuing global pandemic, a looming economic recession, lingering social injustices, upsetting political upheavals, and heartbreaking events including deadly mass shootings and fighting in Europe unseen since World War II, a diverse cross section of the world's leading spiritual and wellness icons, humanitarians, philanthropists, philosophers and physicists are launching a series of events to raise awareness about the science of spirituality and help people navigate the unprecedented challenges of 2022.
"Tapping the Source" is an online science and spirituality summit premiering on July 16 that will be held quarterly for the remainder of 2022 and beyond. Leading the effort is Dr. and Master Zhi Gang Sha, a Tao Grandmaster who has authored more than 10 New York Times bestselling books, and the first panel of guest speakers includes Dr. Deepak Chopra, a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine, Dr. Ervin Laszlo, an accomplished philosopher and two-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and Dr. Rulin Xiu, a University of California, Berkeley trained quantum physicist who heads the Hawaii Theoretical Physics Research Center.
Responding to an overwhelming need for mental health and wellbeing, and as millions of people are meditating and seeking inner peace, "Tapping The Source" will offer conversations with experts sharing their original discoveries and insights about the science of spirituality. With their own unique perspectives, each panelist will explain how every person has the power to transform their own reality and also have a dramatic impact on the world. This is a rare chance to expand the public's understanding of complex sciences and connect with deeper, underlying sources of life.
Once recognized by Maya Angelou in her own powerful words, "We, the human race, need more Zhi Gang Sha," Dr. and Master Sha combines 5,000-year-old Soulfulness practices together with 21st-century innovations to successfully help celebrities, entrepreneurs, athletes, scientists and everyday people tap into a power, passion, clarity, and purpose they didn't even know they had.
"I am honored to join together with these outstanding thinkers who are revolutionizing how we understand the nature of consciousness and the power of quantum healing," said Dr. and Master Sha. "The mind is just one piece of a bigger puzzle at play, and it is essential for people to align their heart and soul to overcome challenges affecting health, relationships, careers, and beyond."
The online summit will take place on July 16 from 12pm to 5pm. For more information and tickets, visit http://www.tappingthesource.org 100% of proceeds will support The Chopra Foundation, The Love Peace Harmony Foundation, and the Laszlo Institute of New Paradigm Research, a range of community-serving non-profits established by the program speakers. Tapping the Source is an initiative by Universal Soul Service Corp.
About Tapping The Source July 16 Speakers
Dr. and Master Zhi Gang Sha a Tao Grandmaster, international spiritual teacher, and 11-times New York Times bestselling author as well as an M.D from China and Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine in China and Canada. Founder of Tao Academy, the Love Peace Harmony Foundation, the Sha Research Foundation, and the Tao Calligraphy meditation practice - combining the essence of modern Western medicine with ancient Taoist teachings to help people lead happier and healthier lives. Awarded the Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemorative Commission Award for promoting world peace. Featured on PBS with 'The Power of Soul' and 'Soul Healing Miracles'. Appointed to the position of Shu Fa Jia (National Chinese Calligrapher Master) as well as Yan Jiu Yuan (Honorable Researcher Professor) at the State Ethnic of Academy of Painting in China.
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Dr. Deepak Chopra World-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation and author of over 90 books, MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day Health company at the intersection of science and spirituality.
Dr. Ervin Laszlo Renowned philosopher and systems scientist. Twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, he has published more than 101 books and over 400 research papers and was the subject of the PBS Documentary Life of a Modern-Day Genius. Laszlo is the founder and president of the international think tank, The Club of Budapest.
Dr. Rulin Xiu - Ph.D.,University of California, Berkeley. Quantum physicist, co-founder of Tao Science, Research Director for the Hawaii Theoretical Physics Research Center, and co-author of the international bestselling book,Tao Science: The Science, Wisdom, and Practice of Creation and Grand Unification.
Quantum computing is the next frontier in technological innovation, one which could change the world forever. But it also represents a potential ticking time bomb from a cybersecurity perspective. Thats because quantum computers, once perfected beyond laboratory conditions, will be able to crack the asymmetric (public key), cryptography on which many enterprises, societies, and economies rely to keep prying eyes away.
The good news is that symmetric cryptography is resistant to this kind of quantum cracking. It represents a useful bulwark against quantum-related security risks, while industry experts work out ways to transition public key infrastructure (PKI) to quantum safety.
Quantum computing sounds like magic. Based on the theory of quantum mechanics, pioneered by Albert Einstein, it derives much of its power from qubits, quantum particles which behave in ways that defy the normal rules of physics. When applied to computing, qubits can be used to represent a zero and a one at the same time. Encoding one and zero simultaneously rather than sequentially dramatically accelerates processing speeds, making lightning-fast calculations and problem solving a reality.
This could be used to super-charge AI algorithms and open the door for potentially revolutionary discoveries in pharmaceutical and chemical sectors, as well as huge leaps forward in finance, autonomous driving and many other use cases. Unfortunately, it could also undermine trust in the PKI on which much of the modern world is builtfrom financial transactions and secure communications, to e-commerce, identity, electronic voting, and much more.
Although we are at least 10-15 years away from a working quantum computer which can achieve this, threat actors could theoretically steal data now to decrypt in a decades time when they have the means to do so. That lends an urgency to the challenge of discovering quantum safe algorithms to replace current asymmetric cryptography with.
While PKI is facing an existential threat in the form of quantum computing, symmetric encryption systems are already quantum safe. In fact, we offer mobile post quantum safes which protect enterprise data anywhereat rest, in motion and in use. Tokenization technology like this provides peace-of-mind that the corporate crown jewels can be kept safe from prying eyes, even in a post-quantum world.
But the bigger picture is that enterprises still rely heavily on PKI. In fact, all internet communication is based on asymmetric encryption. That means, until PKI has been transitioned to quantum safety, there will always be opportunities for threat actors to find a way to access sensitive data stores.
The good news is that standards for quantum safe asymmetric encryption are being worked out today. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Program has already shortlisted several algorithms, and aims to have new quantum-safe standards in place by 2024.
In the meantime, governments are already planning for the new post-quantum era, and enterprises would do well to start thinking about it too. While some of the worlds smartest minds work on creating more certainty in the PKI sphere, symmetric encryption solutions represent a technology organizations can invest in today, that will stand them in good stead.
The road to quantum safety will be a long one. But tokenization represents a solid first step.
I was actually shaking, said Mitesh Patel, a particle physicist at Imperial College, London, as he describes the moment he saw the results. I realised this was probably the most exciting thing Ive done in my 20 years in particle physics.
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Dr Patel is one of the leaders of lhcb, an experiment at cern, in Geneva. cern is the worlds largest particle-physics laboratory, and the lhc bit of the experiments name stands for Large Hadron Collider, which is likewise the worlds biggest particle accelerator. This machine, which collides packets of high-speed protons (examples of a type of subatomic particle called a hadron) was switched on again on July 5th, after a three-and-a-half-year upgrade, for what is known as Run 3. In the interim Dr Patel and his colleagues have been crunching data collected from previous runs. It is the results of these crunchings that are giving him palpitations.
The lhcb team has spent the best part of a decade measuring how subatomic particles known as b mesons decay into lighter particles. b mesons come in many varieties, but all have a constituent called a bottom antiquark. One way in which these mesons decay is by the transformation of the bottom antiquark into a so-called strange antiquark and a pair of leptons, a different class of fundamental particle that includes electrons and their more massive cousins, muons. According to the accepted rules of particle physics, such decays should yield as many muons as they do electrons. For the forces that govern them, there is no difference between the two, an idea called lepton universality.
But that is not what the tallies counted by the lhcb showed. Instead, Dr Patels team found that only 85 muons were emitted for every 100 electrons.
To the person in the street this may not sound a big deal. To a physicist it is practically an invitation to book a flight to Stockholm. A violation of lepton universality would be a crack in what is called the Standard Model, and therefore Nobel prizewinning stuff. This model has, with assistance from the general theory of relativity developed earlier by Albert Einstein, held physics together for around half a century.
Nor is the b meson anomaly, as it is known, the only recent result that might attract the attention of the prize-awarders at Swedens Royal Academy of Science. Two other Standard Model-violating results, from cerns American frenemy Fermilab, have also been published recently. After a long period in the doldrums, the sails of the ship of physics are rustling in the breeze. The lhcs latest run may provide the wind needed to fill them properly.
Fermilabs contributions to the anomaly list, announced respectively in the Aprils of 2021 and 2022, are that the magnetic properties of muons wobble around at frequencies which do not match predictions; and that the mass of another Standard Model particle, the w boson, which carries the weak nuclear force that is responsible for a form of radioactivity called beta decay, seems larger than predicted.
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time, as Ian Fleming opined through the mouth of Auric Goldfinger, does look like enemy action. None of these results, it must be said, yet quite reaches the gold standard of confirmation, known as 5-sigma (ie, five standard deviations from the mean) which particle physicists normally demand before they will call something a discovery. Five-sigma equates to a probability of around one in a million that something of interest in fact happened by chance. But all of them are close enough to this threshold to be eye-catching (Dr Patels, for example, is 3.1-sigma), and thus worthy of further work to attempt to reach the magic value of five.
If they do survive scrutiny, these three findings may go into future textbooks as the keys which unlocked the door marked Physics beyond the Standard Model. Practitioners have been battering on this portal since the Model was put together in the 1960s and 1970s, to no avail. Their ultimate goal is to unify the Standard Model and general relativity into an overarching theory of everything. That is some way off. But there was until recently a widespread belief that lurking behind this door would be a predicted step on the journey, called Supersymmetry. That is not what these results suggest.
The Standard Model describes two broad classes of particlesfermions and bosons. Fermions are the stuff of matter. Bosons carry the forces which hold that stuff together, or sometimes push it apart.
Fermions divide into leptons, quarks and their antimatter equivalents, which are identical to normal matter but with opposite electrical charges. Bosons include photons, which carry the electromagnetic force (and are the particles of light), the aforementioned w boson, the gluons that hold atomic nuclei together via a second, strong nuclear force, and the Higgs. The discovery of this, in 2012, using the then recently opened lhc, was a triumph of scientific prediction, the particle having been described theoretically by the eponymous Peter Higgs in 1964. The field associated with it confers mass on the other particles, and ties the Standard Model together.
But, though it is one of the most tested, most successful scientific ideas of all time, the Standard Model is not a complete description of the universe. Not only does it fail to account for gravity (this is the purview of general relativity), it cannot explain why matter is more abundant than antimatter. Neither does it say anything about two other important but obscure phenomena: dark matter and dark energy.
Dark matter is stuff that interacts with gravity but not electromagnetism, so can be felt, but not seen. Its abundance can be calculated from its effects on visible matterthan which, the sums suggest, it is six times more plentiful. And, though it is invisible, its influence is profound. Galaxies, for example, are held together largely by the gravitational fields of their dark matter.
Dark energy is even weirder. Belief in it depends on calculations about the speed at which the universe is expanding, for dark energy is the stuff that propels this expansion. And, to show how little physicists really understand the cosmos, it is worth noting that, together, dark matter and dark energy make up more than 95% of it, and the familiar stuff of stars, planets and human beings themselves less than 5%.
Nor is the Model itself quite as elegant as it is sometimes made out to be. It is, rather, a thing of sealing-wax and string, held together by arbitrary mathematical assumptions. Until recently, this was not a cause of great worry. Supersymmetry, people thought, would ride to the rescue. Susy, as this theory is known for short, got rid of the arbitrary assumptions by predicting a set of heavier (and as-yet-unseen) particles, a superpartner for each known fermion and boson. These sparticles would be too massive for older, less powerful, machines to find (mass being, as per Einsteins E=mc2, an embodiment of energy) but not, it was hoped, for the lhc. It was Susys smiling face that people expected to greet them when the physics beyond the Standard Model door eventually opened.
Run 2 of the lhc, however, found no evidence of sparticles. If Run 3 also fails to reveal Susy, some of her supporters will no doubt tweak the numbers to try to explain why. But there is now a whiff of desperation in the air about the theory, and it would be sensible to assume that even if Susy is not dead, she is missing in action. And that will leave physicists scrabbling around for a replacement.
The kit they have to conduct their search with is a yet-more-powerful version of the collider that found the Higgs boson a decade ago. Since the machine paused operations in December 2018, dozens of its superconducting magnets have been replaced with stronger ones and the injection system, which packs 120bn protons into bunches the size of a human hair and then accelerates them before they enter the lhc itself, has been upgraded. The new version of the machine will thus collide more protons, more often and at higher energies than previous incarnations.
The four experiments that sit around its 27km ring and analyse the results of those collisions have also been given a once-over. The lhcb detector in particular has been almost entirely rebuilt. According to Chris Parkes, a physicist from the University of Manchester who acts as the detectors spokesman, something like 90% of the sensitive elements which do the actual detecting have been changed.
Collisions happen so fast and abundantly within the experiments that software known as a trigger system is normally used to decide, quickly, which data to keep and which to delete. A new trigger system at lhcb will permit retention of data from almost all the 40m collisions occurring per second in the upgraded detector, so that more intelligent decisions can be made later about which to retain and analyse.
The first job will be to gather more data on the b meson anomaly, in search of that precious 5-sigma status. Theoreticians, meanwhile, have been busy devising ways to extend the Standard Model to try to explain those mesons anomalous decays.
One approach starts with the idea of a fundamental particles flavour. This term was invented in 1971, by Murray Gell-Mann, an architect of the Standard Model, and his student Harald Fritzcsh as they sat eating ice cream at a Baskin-Robbins store in Pasadena, California. They wanted a way to label the different types of quarks that had so far been found inside atomic nuclei. Up and down quarks are the constituents of protons and neutrons, but there are two further pairs (or generations) of quarks of different flavours: charm and strange, and top and bottom (also known as truth and beauty). Each successive generation is heavier than the previous.
Leptons are similar. The lightest generation contains the electron; a second, heavier, generation, the muon; the third and heaviest, the tau. Each generation also sports an associated neutrino.
It is ingrained within the Standard Model that its fundamental forceselectromagnetic, weak nuclear and strong nucleardo not distinguish between flavours. Photons, carriers of the electromagnetic force, interact with electrons, muons and taus in identical ways. Similarly, the gluons of the strong force bind with the same strength to all flavours of quark.
The b meson anomaly challenges this idea. To me that looks like theres a picture developing where a lot of things are pointing in the same direction. To a beyond-the-Standard Model theorist, thats exciting, says Ben Allanach, a professor of theoretical physics at Cambridge University. What it means is there could be additional interactions within the b meson, thats breaking it up with the wrong frequencies.
By frequencies, Dr Allanach means the rates at which electrons and muons are emitted when b mesons decay. The hypothetical new interaction could be what he and his colleagues call the flavour forcea fifth fundamental force of nature besides gravity and the three of the Standard Model. This would act more strongly on muons than it does on electrons. Like Standard Model forces, this force would have a particle associated with it, which they call the z (pronounced z prime) boson.
The idea of a force that discriminates between flavours is not in itself newsuch theories have been invoked in the past to fill other gaps in the Standard Model. But in all previous versions the force-carrying particle was so heavy that no particle collider was or is powerful enough to create it. Theory suggests that Dr Allanachs particle, if it exists, should have a mass less than 8,000 times that of a proton. This may sound quite big but it puts it squarely in the sights of Run 3.
Others, though, have a different explanation for the b meson decay anomalya proposed new particle called a leptoquark. This theory says that, at a deeper level of nature, quarks and leptons are actually the same thing. What are seen as electrons, muons, top quarks, bottom quarks and so on are actually different faces of the same underlying entity. The leptoquark force that this theory posits would be able to transform quarks into leptons, and vice versa. Crucially, it would also interact at different strengths with the different generations of fermions. In interacting with this force, b mesons would therefore emit electrons and muons at different rates.
Unifying quarks and leptons in this way could explain other things, too. One is why protons and electrons have exactly the same electric charges (though of opposite polarity), even though protons weigh more than 1,000 times as much as electrons do. It is this exact match which allows atoms to exist. The charges of the orbiting electrons are perfectly balanced by those of the protons in the nucleus, which get them from their constituent quarks. But if these two objects are the same thing, you could understand it, says Gino Isidori of the University of Zurich, who is a leading proponent of the leptoquark hypothesis.
Looking for exchanges of leptoquarks between known particles could be possible during Run 3. The leptoquark itself would be too heavy for the collider to produce, says Dr Isidori. But if we are lucky with the Run 3, we will start to see a more consistent series of deviations in the high-energy collisions. That would be an unambiguous sign of the exchange of leptoquarks. Collisions of protons, for example, can (rarely but predictably) give rise to pairs of tau particles. If the number of taus appearing in Run 3 begins to grow, compared with the predictions of the Standard Model, as the energy is cranked up, Dr Isidori says This would be a striking signal.
Both the z particle and the leptoquark could also go some way towards explaining the discrepancy discovered by Fermilab between its measurement of the mass of the w boson and the mass that the Standard Model predicts. This result will need to be checked further by independent experiments but, assuming it stands, Dr Allanach says, One of the things that can affect the prediction of [the w boson] is a z of exactly the kind that weve introduced.
The Standard Model does not predict the w bosons mass directly. Instead, it predicts the ratio of its mass to that of a z boson, the other weak-nuclear-force carrier. The z boson of the flavour force would interact with the z boson of the weak nuclear force and thus alter the predicted ratio. Put the z bosons mass, which has been measured experimentally, into the altered ratio, says Dr Allanach, and out comes a w boson mass prediction that is much closer to the Fermilab measurement.
The third Model-breaking anomaly came from an experiment called Muon g-2. Like other leptons, muons contain a tiny internal magnet. When placed in a strong magnetic field, the direction in which this magnet points wobbles around like the axis of a spinning top.
The strength of the magneta number known as the g-factordetermines the size of this wobble. The g-factor, and therefore the amount of wobble, is also influenced by a muons interactions with any particles that briefly pop into and out of existence around it from the vacuum of space. (This happens because of the uncertainties inherent in quantum mechanics.) The Standard Model can take all of these factors and all known particles and forces into account to make a precise prediction of how much a muons internal magnet should be wobbling. The measurements from Fermilab, which tallied the motions of 8bn muons, showed a deviation from the Standard Models prediction. The result had a statistical significance of 4.2-sigma, about a one in 40,000 chance that the result is a fluke.
A tweaked version of the flavour force could ride to the rescue here, as well. This time the z boson would have to be lighter than the one used to explain the b meson anomalyonly a thousand times more massive than a protonbut it would also interact preferentially with muons. Muons might randomly emit and reabsorb these lighter z bosons, and that would change the frequency of their magnetic wobbles enough to match the data seen at Fermilab.
As well as investigating these anomalies, Run 3 will poke and prod all the known fundamental particles in ever more detail. The Standard Model makes very clear predictions about how the Higgs boson should interact with different particles, says Dr Parkes. If you were to see some deviation of how the Higgs boson is interacting with particles in nature, and compare that with the Standard Model and see some differences, that will be another way of taking you on a journey beyond. But even at the moment, its telling you about the confidence you have in our current theory. Its telling you about the level at which that theory is a reliable description of the fundamental particles and forces in nature.
Physicists have other things, too, in their sights for Run 3. One is the top quark, the heaviest of the lot, of which only a few hundred had been made before the lhc was built. Two of cerns detectorsatlas and cmshave recently announced hints of excesses in the production of this and other heavy fermions, notably bottom quarks and tau leptons. These things will all need to be investigated.
What physics no longer has, though, is an all-embracing model of the future to try to fit everything into. Perhaps, just perhaps, Susy will still show up at the party as the collisions get more energeticpossibly she will be wearing one of the disguises that those who have not yet abandoned her are trying to dress her up in. But dont bet on it. For the moment, fundamental physics is back a pragmatic phase, gathering more pieces of the jigsaw in the hope of fitting them together later. Physicists have by no means abandoned the lofty goal of unifying forces and creating a grand theory that encompasses everything. But they need a new map to get them there.
To hear our podcast series about the reopening of the Large Hadron Collider, go to economist.com/LHC-pod
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Carbon-based nanomaterials such as carbon nanotubes (CNTs), fullerenes, and graphene receive a great deal of attention today due to their unique physical properties. A new study explores the potential of hybrid nanostructures and introduces a new porous graphene CNT hybrid structure with remarkable thermal and mechanical properties.
Image Credit:Orange Deer studio/Shutterstock.com
The study shows how the remarkable characteristics of novel graphene CNT hybrid structures could be modified by slightly changing the inherent geometric arrangement of CNTs and graphene, plus various filler agents.
The ability to accurately control thermal conductivity and mechanical strength in the graphene CNT hybrid structures make them a potentially suitable candidate for various application areas, especially in advanced aerospace manufacturing where weight and strength are critical.
Carbon nanostructures and hybrids of multiple carbon nanostructures have been examined recently as potential candidates for numerous sensing, photovoltaic, antibacterial, energy storage, fuel cell, and environmental improvement applications.
The most prominent carbon-based nanostructures in the research appear to be CNTs, graphene, and fullerene. These structures exhibit unique thermal, mechanical, electronic, and biological properties due to their extremely small size.
Structures that measure in the sub-nanometer range behave according to the peculiar laws of quantum physics, and so they can be used to exploit nonintuitive phenomena such as quantum tunneling, quantum superposition, and quantum entanglement.
CNTs are tubes made out of carbon and that measure only a few nanometers across in diameter. CNTs display notable electrical conductivity, and some are semiconductor materials.
CNTs also have great tensile strength and thermal conductivity due to their nanostructure, and the strength of covalent bonds formed between carbon atoms.
CNTs are potentially valuable materials for electronics, optics, and composite materials, where they may replace carbon fibers in the next few years. Nanotechnology and materials science also use CNTs in research.
Graphene is a carbon allotrope that is shaped into a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a two-dimensional lattice structure composed of hexagonal shapes. Graphene was first isolated in a series of groundbreaking experiments byUniversity of Manchester, UK, scientists Andrew Geim and Konstantin Novoselov in 2004, earning them the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010.
In the few decades since then, graphene has become a useful nanomaterial with exceptionally high tensile strength, transparency, and electrical conductivity leading to numerous and varied applications in electronics, sensing, and other advanced technologies.
A fullerene is another carbon allotrope that has been known for some time. Its molecule consists of carbon atoms that are connected by single and double bonds to form a mesh, which can be closed or partially closed. The mesh is fused with rings of five, six, or seven atoms.
Fullerene molecules can be hollow spheres, ellipsoids, tubes, or a number of other shapes and sizes. Graphene could be considered an extreme member of the fullerene family, although it is considered a member of its own material class.
As well as a great deal of research invested into understanding and characterizing these carbon nanostructures in isolation, scientists are also exploring the properties of hybrid nanostructures that combine two or more nanostructure elements into one material.
For example, foam materials have adjustable properties that make them suitable for practical applications like sandwich structure design, biocompatibility design, and high strength and low weight structure design.
Carbon-based nanofoams have been utilized in medicine as well, examining bone injuries as well as acting as the base for replacement bone tissue.
Carbon-based cellular structures are produced both with chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and solution processing. Spark plasma sintering (SPS) methods are also implemented for using graphene for biological and medical applications.
As a result, scientists have been looking at ways to make three-dimensional carbon foams structurally stable. Research suggests that stable junctions between different types of structures (CNTs, fullerene, and graphene) need to be formed for this material to be stable enough for extensive application.
New research from mechanical engineers at Turkeys Istanbul Technical University introduces a new hybrid nanostructure formed through chemical bonding.
The porous graphene CNT structures were made by organizing graphene around CNTs in nanoribbons. The different geometrical arrangement of graphene nanoribbon layers around CNTs (square, hexagon, and diamond patterns) led to different physical properties being observed in the material, suggesting that this geometric rearrangement could be used to fine-tune the new structure.
The study was published in the journal Physica E: Low-dimensional Systems and Nanostructures in 2022.
Researchers found that the structures with fullerenes inserted, for example, exhibited significant compressive stability and strength without sacrificing tensile strength. The geometric arrangement of carbon nanostructures also had a significant effect on their thermal properties.
Researchers said that these new hybrid nanostructures present important advantages, especially for the aerospace industry. Nanoarchitectures with these hybrid structures may also be utilized in hydrogen storage and nanoelectronics.
Belkin, A., A. Hubler, and A. Bezryadin (2015). Self-Assembled Wiggling Nano-Structures and the Principle of Maximum Entropy Production. Scientific Reports. doi.org/10.1038/srep08323
Degirmenci, U., and M. Kirca (2022). Carbon-based nano lattice hybrid structures: Mechanical and thermal properties. Physica E: Low-dimensional Systems and Nanostructures. doi.org/10.1016/j.physe.2022.115392
Geim, A.K. (2009). Graphene: Status and Prospects. Science. /doi.org/10.1126/science.1158877
Geim, A.K., and K.S. Novoselov (2007). The rise of graphene. Nature Materials. doi.org/10.1038/nmat1849
Monthioux, M., and V.L. Kuznetsov (2006). Who should be given the credit for the discovery of carbon nanotubes? Carbon. doi.org/10.1016/j.carbon.2006.03.019
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Named for ErwinSchrdinger, the quantum physicist who created the theory,Schrdinger's Cat is a thought experiment where (theoretically) a cat is placed inside a box along with poison and some radioactive material. If any of the radiation decays, this triggers the poison, killing the cat. But if the material doesn't do anything, the cat, as unseen by the observer, is in a state of both life and death (via Discover Magazine).
When u/Aggressive-Nobody473 asked other "Big Bang Theory" fans about what they learned from the show, several commenters mentioned Schrdinger's Cat as a favorite. The theory is first explained in Season 1, Episode 17 ("The Tangerine Factor") as Sheldon uses it to explain the possibilities for Leonard and Penny's blossoming relationship.
In one comment,u/FruitySwiftA113 wrote, "I use it in every day [sic] conversation and comparisons now." Other Reddit users appreciated the real-life science reference, but also ultimately remained reticent to use it in everyday life. For example,u/Rosemoorstreetshared that theyloved it, but wrote, "the science is so far over my head that there is no hope for me to learn any of that!" Still, the concept is so compelling that it is hard not to think over it, even if one part sounds particularly creepy.
When you see the Heavy Ion Accelerator Facility which, if you live in Canberra, you almost certainly have you probably dont feel any particularly powerful emotions.
Its the 40-metre tall rectangular tower conspicuously located among the low-rise campus buildings on the edge of Lake Burley Griffin. In terms of architecture, functional is possibly the politest way to describe its appearance.
When Professor Mahananda Dasgupta looks up at the same tower, known as the HIAF, she feels something quite different.
I feel very, very proud of it, she says. It is a tower of strength.
Then she repeats, with emphasis: A. Tower. Of. Strength.
Professor Dasgupta is an experimental physicist at the ANU Research School of Physics, and the Director of the HIAF, which, she notes admiringly, hasn't even needed repainting in the 50 years since it was built.
An ion accelerator enables scientists to look inside an atom, beyond even the capabilities of an electron microscope. The HIAF is the largest and most powerful ion accelerator in Australia, and one of the three highest-voltage ion accelerators in the world.
Among its many achievements, the HIAF has helped researchers to unveil ancient climate records, discover evidence of nearby supernovae, trace and track soil erosion in Australia, and find the most efficient nuclear reaction to lead to the discovery of new elements.Its also used for hands-on teaching and training in nuclear physics and its applications.
It is here for the nation, Professor Dasgupta says of the facility, supported by the Federal Governments National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. Quite simply, the accelerators capabilities are necessary for our national advancement.
Professor Dasgupta would like the world-class reputation and capabilities of the HIAF to be better known within Australia. When she speaks with politicians about her research, she says, they assume she travels to CERN.
Researchers from many countries including Germany, the US, France and Japan come to Australia to collaborate with us because we are known for our brand, which is: we advance frontiers.
And our students are very, very sought after by international labs, because of our wide-ranging hands-on training. You can stand them in front of almost anything in a laboratory, and they will solve the problem.
It was the international reputation of experimental physics at ANU that brought Professor Dasgupta herself to Australia.
Its a funny story actually, she says. I was finishing my thesis at Bombay, where I was the first PhD out of their accelerator lab, and I was giving my thesis seminar.
And I said, Look, there is an idea, where if you could make exquisitely precise measurements then that will answer a highly sought-after question in quantum mechanics, except the data quality is so poor, that this will not be achieved very soon. That is still whats written at the end of my thesis.
And then someone at the end of my talk says, Oh, by the way, have you seen the publication in Physical Review Letters yesterday? A group from the Australian National University has made the measurement that you are saying is not possible.
And I said, Well, there you go! I stand corrected. This is how science progresses.
In the next issue of Nature magazine, there was an advertisement for a position with that ground-breaking team at ANU and Professor Dasgupta applied. She has remained here ever since.
The tangles of wires, pipes and tubes of the HIAF have provided the backdrop to her research career, but to Professor Dasgupta, its more than just a workplace.
If you asked me to leave my house and buy another house, sure, Id do it. But if you asked me to change my lab, I would say no. I would not swap my career for anything else.
And now, the capabilities of the HIAF and its scientists are needed more than ever.
If we are going into nuclear science and technology in a big way, our international credibility in experimental nuclear science depends on the HIAF. We have important national projects coming up in defence, in the space industry, and in cancer treatment using accelerated protons. All these projects are underpinned by nuclear science and supported by accelerators.
It is important that people know the breadth and depth of what we can achieve.
There is more than one tower of strength in this story, and its important people know that too.
When Professor Dasgupta arrived in Canberra in 1992, she was the only woman at HIAF.
She faced structural disadvantages, but went on to become the first woman to secure tenure in physics at the University, which, shockingly was not until 2003. Now, she is a Fellow of both the Australian Academy of Science and the American Physical Society, and a recipient of the prestigious Pawsey Medal.
It is very slow, but things have changed, she says of the sexism and racism she has faced along the way. It is changeable.
Professor Dasgupta gets frustrated about this sometimes, that being a woman in physics is still noteworthy, a topic on which she speaks regularly.
I am a physicist first, she says. But I have a platform as a female physicist to articulate the problems I see, so I need to use it.
This is an important project for the nation, too.
The kind of STEM workforce numbers that we are talking about which will be required for our future capabilities in health, in space, in national security, it is such large numbers, she says.
As a nation, we need to make sure women can be part of that opportunity.
This is, after all, how science progresses.
Study a Master of Science in Nuclear Science at the ANU: home to Australia's largest university-based research and teaching activity in physics.
The Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) is a research centre of excellence in Singapore. It brings together physicists, computer scientists and engineers to do basic research on quantum physics and to build devices based on quantum phenomena. Experts in this new discipline of quantum technologies are applying their discoveries in computing, communications, and sensing.
CQT is hosted by the National University of Singapore and also has staff at Nanyang Technological University. With some 180 researchers and students, it offers a friendly and international work environment.
Learn more about CQT atwww.quantumlah.org
Job Description
Associate Professor Ng Hui Khoonis seeking to hire a motivated and independent candidate as a Research Assistant (RA) for a duration of one year, starting in July 2022.The Research Assistant will work in the group of Dr. Ng, doing theoretical research on surface codes, the current go-to scheme for quantum error correction quantum computing implementations.
Specifically, the project will involve the investigation of decoding strategies that accommodate noise information for enhanced surface-code performance. The RA will be assisting in the building of numerical code to test decoding algorithms and generating ideas for strategic use of noise information.
Job Requirements
Covid-19 Message
At NUS, the health and safety of our staff and students are one of our utmost priorities, and COVID-vaccination supports our commitment to ensure the safety of our community and to make NUS as safe and welcoming as possible. Many of our roles require a significant amount of physical interactions with students/staff/public members. Even for job roles that may be performed remotely, there will be instances where on-campus presence is required.
Taking into consideration the health and well-being of our staff and students and to better protect everyone in the campus, applicants are strongly encouraged to have themselves fully COVID-19 vaccinated to secure successful employment with NUS.
Altcoin prices stayed in the green on Thursday as digital assets defied the crypto winter. - Photo: Shutterstock
Most altcoin prices stayed in the green Thursday as digital assets contradicted the crypto winter.
The majority of top 100 cryptocurrencies were up again after enjoying some solid increases on ]Wednesday. Low-profile altcoin prices again stole the show, but some big names also posted large increases.
STORJ enjoyed another banner day as it was up about 14% in afternoon trading in North America. (All figures based on CoinMarketCap data.)
But large player AAVEs increase was also in the same ballpark, ranking second among top gainers. AAVE was up about 18% from a week earlier.
Relative unknown internet computer (ICP) which is well-priced at more than $6 despite its low profile posted a 10% gain. Polygon (MATIC), whose increase trailed ICP by a few basis points, rounded out the four gainers.
Other lesser lights that stood out included the Convex Finance coin (CVX), MINA, NEO, NEAR, gnosis (GNO). And, NEXO was well in the green again after ranking among top gainers on Wednesday.
NEXO appears to be picking up steam after its parent company of the same name announced that it intends to buy distressed crypto lender and trader Vauld earlier this week.
Vauld froze deposits, withdrawals and trades earlier this week.
But the troubled Celsius Networks coin (CEL) bucked the rising altcoin price gain during afternoon. CEL nosedived 16% after the Wall Street Journal reported that the crypto lending company behind the network and digital asset had shaken up its board.
The Celsius Network froze customer withdrawals and transfers in mid-June while extreme market conditions. The company has slashed its debt, according to reports from Crypto Potato and other outlets.
VGX, the coin backed by troubled crypto lender and trader Voyager Digital, was down marginally.
Voyager Digital filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US on Tuesday and is seeking protection from creditors in Canada, where the companys stock had traded before being suspended Wednesday by the countrys investment industry regulator.
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Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team, has come under fire from its fans on social media, including Reddit and Twitter, for promoting Voyager to them in a five-year partnership with the company launched in October 2021.
The critics included New York Times bestselling author James (Jim) Rickards, who is also the editor of the Strategic Intelligence financial newsletter.
When Mark Cuban partnered with crypto player Voyager, he said, There's a lot of hype..but most people don't understand the fundamentals behind it. I guess Cuban didn't either. It's called banking, Rickards wrote on Twitter.
Ether (ETH) rises with bitcoin
Bitcoin (BTC) rose above $21,000 which is considered a key benchmark as investors hope to avoid a precipitous drop. The worlds largest cryptocurrency posted a solid increase of approximately 6%.