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The National University of Singapore (NUS) and Thales have teamed up to test quantum technologies for commercial applications.

The partnership will see industry and academic experts from Thales and NUSs quantum engineering programme (QEP) develop capabilities to test and evaluate interdisciplinary quantum security technologies. They will also explore potential research collaboration opportunities in the fields of new materials and design for quantum sensing.

QEP is an initiative launched in 2018 by Singapores National Research Foundation (NRF) and hosted at NUS. The projects under the collaboration with Thales span technologies for security and sensing and will involve QEP researchers across Singapores institutes of higher learning and research centres.

Chen Tsuhan, NUS deputy president for research and technology, said the partnership will accelerate innovation and development of quantum solutions that are becoming commercially attractive. The success of this collaboration will also bolster Singapores attractiveness as a testbed and springboard for deploying new quantum technologies, he added.

To support quantum research, Thales will provide its SafeNet Luna hardware security modules and high-speed network encryptors that support interfaces to quantum devices. The algorithms and quantum random number generation technology in the equipment will make it easier to implement quantum-safe crypto and combat the threats of quantum computing.

The equipment is expected to be deployed for proof-of-concept trials and test beds in Singapore. In May 2021, Thales launched a network encryption solution capable of protecting enterprise data from future quantum cyber attacks. It supplements standard encryption with a scheme resistant to quantum computing that is under consideration for international standards.

Quantum technologies open almost infinite possibilities for the future and our researchers see real potential in three types of quantum applications, namely in sensors, communications and post-quantum cryptology, said Kevin Chow, country director and chief executive of Thales Singapore.

Chow added that while the NUS partnership involves the use of Thaless network encryption technology, the company continues to work with the research ecosystem in Singapore to explore new areas, including the use of new materials for quantum sensing or in secured quantum communications.

Thales, which has 33,000 engineers globally, is looking to become a key player in the so-called second quantum revolution, which exploits subtle properties of quantum physics and requires mastery of associated technologies.

Quantum communications, for example, relies on quantum physics to secure encryption keys that protect confidential messages sent over public networks, while quantum sensors can use quantum physics to make precise measurements. In future, quantum sensors may even help vehicles navigate without the use of global positioning systems, power new medical imaging technologies and contribute to many other fields.

A third family of quantum technologies, quantum computing, harnesses quantum physics to process information in new ways. It brings the promise of surpassing supercomputers for some data problems but also carries the threat of being able to break some of todays standard encryption.

In 2020, SK Telecom unveiled the worlds first 5G smartphone equipped with a quantum random number generator chipset. Developed together with Samsung and ID Quantique, a supplier ofquantum key distribution systems, the smartphone features quantum enhanced cryptography that generates true random numbers that cannot be hacked.

These numbers can be used to enabletwo-factor authenticationfor T-ID, SK Telecoms single sign-on service, biometric authentication for the SK Pay mobile payment service, along with a blockchain-based wallet to store and secure electronic documents such as certificates and insurance claims.

In 2019, researchers from Singtel and NUS had successfully coordinated the paths of photons across a fibre network to drive wider adoption of quantum key distribution.

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Our quirky minds thwart psychologists efforts to find durable theories. But terror-management theory has held up quite well since three psychologists proposed it more than 30 years ago. It holds that fear of death underpins many of our actions and convictions. We cling to our beliefs more tightly when reminded of our mortality, especially if those beliefs connect us to something transcending our puny mortal selves.

Terror-management theory can account for puzzling political trends, such as our attraction to outlandish conspiracies and authoritarian leaders. Last year I invoked the theory to explain why Donald Trumps popularity surged at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Recently I have begun to wonder whether terror-management theory can explain trends in physics, too.

Physicists pride themselves on their rationality, yet they are as prone to existential dread as the rest of us, if not more so. Their investigations force them to confront infinity and eternity in their day jobs, not just in the dead of night. Moreover, physicists equations describe particles pushed and pulled by impersonal forces. There is no place for love, friendship, beauty, justicethe things that make life worth living. From this chilly perspective, the entirety of human existence, let alone an individual life, can seem terrifyingly ephemeral and pointless.

Steven Weinberg, arguably the greatest physicist of the last half-century, urged us to accept the soul-crushing implications of physics, and he rejected attempts to turn it into a substitute for religion. In Dreams of a Final Theory, Weinberg said science cannot replace the consolations that have been offered by religion in facing death. Weinberg, who died in July, was unusually resistant to wishful thinking (except for his thinking about a final theory). Other physicists, I suspect, cling to certain hypotheses precisely because they make mortality more bearable. Below are examples.

There is a whole class of conjectures that, like religion, give us a privileged position in the cosmic scheme of things. Call them we-were-meant-to-be-here theories. They imply that we are not an accidental, incidental part of nature; our existence is somehow necessary. Without us, the universe might not exist. One example is the anthropic principle, which dates back to the 1960s. The anthropic principle suggests that the laws of nature must take the form that we observe because otherwise we would not be here to observe them.

The anthropic principle is a tautology masquerading as a truth, but it has proved remarkably resilient. Stephen Hawking took it seriously, as did Weinberg. A major reason for the endurance of the anthropic principle is the proliferation of multiverse theories, which hold that our universe is just one of many. If you buy multiverses (to which I will return below), the anthropic principle can help explain why we find ourselves in this particular universe with these particular laws.

Quantum mechanics has inspired lots of we-were-meant-to-be-here proposals because it suggests that what we observe depends on how we observe it. Look at an electron this way, it behaves like a particle; that way, it resembles a wave. Physicists, notably Eugene Wigner and John Wheeler, have speculated that consciousness, far from being a mere epiphenomenon of matter, is an essential component of reality. Your individual consciousness might not endure, but consciousness of some kind will last for as long as the universe does. I critique these we-were-meant-to-be-here propositions here and here.

A more subtle source of consolation is what Richard Feynman, in The Character of Physical Law, calls the great conservation principles. According to these laws, certain features of nature remain constant, no matter how much nature changes. The best-known conservation law involves energy. Energy can take many formskinetic, potential, electrical, thermal, gravitational, nuclearand it can change from one form into another. Matter can become energy, and vice versa, as Einstein revealed with his famous equation E = mc2. But if you add up all the kinds of energy at any given instant, that sum remains constant.

Other conservation laws apply to angular momentum and charge. In what way are these laws consoling? Because to be human is to know loss. When we look at the worldand at our own faces in the mirrorwe see the terrible transience of things. What we love will vanish sooner or later. It is reassuring to know that, on some level, things stay the same. According to conservation laws, there are no endings or beginnings, only transformations.

The most consoling conservation law involves information. Physicist Leonard Susskind says conservation of information underpins everything, including classical physics, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, energy conservation, that physicists have believed for hundreds of years. According to the law, everything that happens leaves its imprint, permanently, on the universe. Eons after you die, after the earth and the sun have vanished, every minute detail of your life will endure in some formsupposedly.

Back to multiverse theories, which stipulate that our universe is just one among multitudes. Physicists have proposed different multiverse theories inspired by quantum mechanics, string theory and inflation, a speculative theory of cosmic creation. What the theories all have in common is a lack of evidenceor even the hope of evidence. So what explains their popularity?

Here is my guess: physicists are freaked out by the mortality of our little universe. What was born must die, and according to the big bang theory, our cosmos was born 14 billion years ago, and it will die at some unspecified time in the far future. The multiverse, like God, is eternal. It had no beginning; it will have no end. If you find that proposition reassuring, perhaps you shouldnt read this critique of multiverse theories.

Determinism, physics-style, assumes that reality is strictly physical. Everything that happens, including our choices, results from physical forces, like gravity pushing and pulling physical objects. Moreover every present moment is associated with a single unique past and a single unique future. I do not like determinism because it subverts free will and makes us more likely to accept that the way things are is the way they must be.

But I can see the upside of determinism. The world often seems disturbingly out of control. We have the sense that at any moment bad things might happen, on scales small and large. A truck might strike you as you cross the street, absent-mindedly brooding over quantum mechanics. A nearby supernova might bathe the earth in lethal radiation. Millions of my fellow citizens might become enthralled by a thuggish buffoon. A mutant virus might suddenly emerge from who knows where and kill millions of people.

We desperately want to believe that beneath the apparent randomness, someone or something is in control. God, for many people, is the tough but fair chief executive running this seemingly chaotic cosmic corporation. It is hard for us to see Her/His/Their plan, but She/He/They surely know what She/He/They are doing.

If you find the God hypothesis implausible, then perhaps an extreme form of determinism, called superdeterminism, might serve as a substitute. Superdeterminism attempts to eliminate several puzzling features of quantum mechanics, including the apparent randomness of quantum events and intrusive role of measurement. Two physicists I admire, Sabine Hossenfelder and Gerard t Hooft, have promoted the theory.

According to superdeterminism, the universe is not careening wildly into an unknowable future. It is gliding serenely, undeviatingly, along a rigid track laid down at the beginning of time. As a free-will fanatic I do not find this perspective comforting, but I understand why others do. If determinism is true, there is nothing you can do to change things, so sit back and enjoy the ride. Everything is as it should beor must be.

The one physics principle that is hard to spin positively is the second law of thermodynamics. It decrees that all the creative energy in the universe will eventually dissipate, becoming useless heat. The marvelous, intricate structures that we see around usstars, planets, cathedrals, oaks, dragonflies, human beingswill vanish. The universe will descend into heat death, a state in which nothing ever happens. Clever physicists have imagined ways in which we can escape this dismal fate, but their proposals do not seem much more plausible than the heaven hypothesis.

I dont find any physics hypotheses very consoling. I wish I did. I have been brooding over death a lot lately because of my advanced age and the precarious state of the world. I have my consolations. I am a writer and father, so I fantasize about people reading my books after Im gone, and I envision my son and daughter living good, fulfilling lives and possibly having children of their own. These wishful visions require civilization to continue, so I persuade myself that civilization, in spite of its manifest flaws, is pretty good and getting better. Thats how I manage my terror.

Further Reading:

I delve into the philosophical and spiritual implications of science in my two most recent books: Pay Attention: Sex, Death, and Science and Mind-Body Problems: Science, Subjectivity and Who We Really Are.

See my podcast Mind-Body Problems and in particular my recent chat with Sabine Hossenfelder: Consolations of Physics.

See also Meta-Post: Posts on Physics, a collection of my columns on physics.

This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by theauthor or authorsare not necessarily those of Scientific American.

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Death, Physics and Wishful Thinking - Scientific American

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By now, just about everyone knows about black holes: the all-consuming regions in outer space that are so dense that not even light can escape from their mysterious interior. But those are only one kind of black hole, even if they are the most famous of the bunch.

There can be other kinds of black holes that trap other physical phenomena, like sound waves, and these kinds of black holes, known as sonic black holes, might be critical to understanding their light-consuming counterparts in the wider universe.

Most important of all, what can sonic black holes tell us about one of modern physics' most contentious debates, the so-called Information Paradox? A recent study attempted to find out, and its results seem to make the problem more complicated, not less.

One commonly-known understanding about black holes is that whatever falls into a black hole doesn't come back out, not even light. But in 1971, physicist Steven Hawking proposed an interesting theory, which set off a series of discussions that changed the way physicists looked at black holes. He predicted that the total area of a black holes event horizon would never decrease. This statement is similar to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy, or degree of disorder within an object, should also never decrease.

Hawking's theory suggested that black holes could behave as thermal, heat-emitting objects in contradiction to the normal understanding of black holes as objects which never let energy escape. In 1974, Hawking proposed a solution to this contradiction by showing that,over exceptionally long timescales, black holes could have both entropy and emit radiation by taking into account their quantum effects. This phenomenon was dubbed Hawking radiation.

Hawking argued that black holes were actually acting as an idealized black body in space that absorbed all wavelengths of light, but which emitted energy calledblack body radiation, orHawking radiation, all along the event horizon.

That is because of virtual particles matter and anti-matter particles that momentarily spawn in space out of nothing and due to their proximity to each other immediately annihilate each other and release the energy used to produce them in the first place. This maintains the vital law of thermodynamics that states that the energy of a closed system (the universe) must remain constant.

But, if a pair of virtual particles spawn along the edge of an event horizon, one of the two particles will get sucked into the black hole, while the remaining particle survives and flies away into space as a form of energy known as Hawking radiation.

You can see the problem, right? The universe just took some of its energy and created matter out of nothing, but didn't get that energy back.

The only way Hawking radiation could be allowed to exist mathematically is if the in-falling particle actually had negative energy equal in magnitude to the positive energy used to create the two particles, thereby preserving the universe's total energy.

This leads to another problem though, as that particle falling into the black hole is now a part of it, and so the negative energy balance of the particle is taken out of the energy of the black hole.

It might be slight, all things considered, but if a black hole doesn't accrete any additional material to itself, all of those infinitesimally small energy deductions will start reducing the black hole's mass. Given enough time, the black hole actually evaporates out of existence.

You might be asking why that's a problem after all, that's one less black hole to accidentally run into out there but the problem is that particles aren't just matter, they also carry quantum information, such as position, spin, and velocity.

Quantum mechanics as we know it requires that this information, just like the energy of the universe, must be preserved. It might be scrambled beyond all recognition, but there's nothing in physics that says you can't go back and undo that scrambling and reclaim that information unless it was either inside a black hole or encoded into its event horizon when that black hole winked out of existence, thus taking that information with it.

What happens to that quantum information is the heart of the Information Paradox, and physicists and philosophers have been trying to untangle it ever since to no avail.

To understand a sonic black hole, let's review the physics of a traditional black hole in space. Gravity is the warping in the fabric of spacetime that is caused by an object's mass. That warping can be envisioned as a sloped well with the object at the bottom, pulling down and stretching the fabric below the plane of unaffected space-time.

In order to climb out of that well, you need to reach a certain speed, known as escape velocity. So, in order to escape the gravity well of Earth, you need to travel about 6.95 miles per second (11.19 m/s), or a little over 25,020 mph (about 40,270 km/h). Anything less, and you'll fall back down to Earth eventually.

The only thing that makes black holes different in this sense is that a black hole's escape velocity exceeds the speed of light. So, like a rocket that is only going 6.8 miles per second, light can get very high up the slope of a relatively small black hole's gravity well, but just not enough to get fully out of it.

In effect, the light would enter into a decaying orbit as it slowly spirals back down the center, like a bit of dirt caught in the whirlpool at the bottom of a drain in a bathtub. The more massive the black hole, the higher the slope of that well, so that light might barely be able to climb it at all.

A sonic black hole then, is this exact same phenomenon, except where the escape velocity of an object exceeds the speed of sound, rather than the speed of light. Fortunately, the speed of sound is much, much lower than the speed of light, so at sea level with a temperature of 59 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celsius), sound travels at 761 miles per hour (about 1224.74 km/h).

All an object (at sea level and at 59 degrees Fahrenheit) would needis an escape velocity infinitesimally greater than 761 miles per hour and it could prevent sound from escaping its event horizon, just as sure as its space-dwelling counterparts trap light.

Since sonic black holes and light black holes both have this basic property around their escape velocities, there is a lot of interest around whether we can use sonic black holes to effectively model the light-consuming black holes we find in space.

This is especially important since it's impossible to actually measure Hawking radiation, since we'd be talking about individual photons appearing just outside an event horizon. These would be too faint to ever detect without, say,surrounding a black hole in a super-cold Dyson Sphere-like detector that blocks out any outside radiation and which emits less energy than the black hole does itself.

So, the only way to really test for Hawking radiation is to find analogies that we can actually create and measure, which is where sonic black holes come in. Since a sonic black hole with its own event horizon for sound energy is something that we can create in a lab, can it give us insight into Hawking radiation?

A key feature of these sonic black holes is that they are just as immersed in the quantum field of the universe as a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy, so virtual particles will be constantly popping in and out of existence throughout, including phonons, which are quantum units of sound equivalent to light's photons.

An Israeli research team created one such sonic black hole using about 8,000rubidium atoms cooled to nearly absolute zero and trapped in place with a laser beam to create aBose-Einstein Condensate (BEC), in which atoms become so densely packed they behave like one super atom.

The team then used a second laser beam to create an effectiveevent horizon, where one half of the BEC was flowing faster than thespeed of sound, while the other half moved slower.

What the team from Technion in Haifa, Israel, led by Jeff Steinhauer, found is that pairs of phonons (quantum sound waves) did in fact appear on either side of the sonic event horizon, with the pair in the slower half getting swept away from the "event horizon" andthe phonon on the faster half became trapped by the speed of the supersonic flowing BEC, just as Hawking predicted a photon would from the event horizon of a black hole in space.

In a study the team published in January 2021 in the journal Nature, the team reported that theyobserved spontaneous Hawking radiation at six different times after the formation of the sonic black hole, and verified that the temperature and strength of the radiation remained constant. The evolution of the Hawking radiation throughout the life of the sonic black hole also compared to thepredictions for real black holes.The experiment provided experimental support to Hawkings analysis.

However, an inner horizon formed within the sonic black hole, in which the sound waves are no longer trapped. This inner horizon stimulated additional Hawking radiation, beyond the spontaneous emission.This phenomenon was not included in Hawkings analysis.

Not everyone is convinced that the two types of black holes are truly analogous, however.

A key point of contention is that Hawking speculates that all along the event horizon of a black hole, spacetime can be considered smooth; this is essential for the creation of Hawking radiation.

If spacetime around the event horizon is not smooth, however, quantum-scale variations could be encoding information into Hawking radiation in ways we can't detect.

What's more, the fact that sonic black holes and the Hawking radiation they produce behave a certain way does not prove that the light-trapping black holes in space that they are attempting to model will also behave in the same fashion.

In the Steinhauer team's recent experiment, the sonic black hole collapsedevery time they took a picture, due to the heat created in the process (the team repeated their experiment 97,000 times over 124 days to come up with the results in their paper). Therubidium atoms didn't disappear in the collapse, though; they remained, as did whatever quantum information the infalling phonon imprinted on them. This information can still, theoretically, be extracted even now.

What's more, even though a sonic black hole behaves the same way in one regard, the creation of an event horizon that produces a form of Hawking radiation, it might be too reductive to say that sharing a surface-level characteristic makes the two identical on more fundamental levels. A collection of 8,000 rubidium atoms in a BEC is not the same thing as a spacetime singularity of infinite density where physics as we know it breaks down. An analogy is just an analogy, after all.

Still, this recent experiment does provide some evidence that information that falls into a black hole is permanently lost when the black hole evaporates from Hawking radiation, so that raises the question of what would happen if this fundamental premise of quantum mechanics turned out to be incorrect?

A key principle of classical physics is that having a perfect knowledge of the state of all the particles of the universe should give you the ability to predict the future state of the universe at any given point in the future (at least theoretically).

Physics does not require that having such perfect knowledge of a current state gives you that same predictive ability about the past. If two different states (A and B) both lead to the same state (C), then you can know that having A and B will give you C and C, but having C by itself can't tell you whether you started with A, with B, or with both. That quantum information would be lost forever when A and B make the transition to state C.

Quantum mechanics forbids this loss of information, however, owing to the principle of unitarity, which essentially means that all probabilities of any given quantum state must sum to 1.

If we look at a six-sided die, the probability of getting a value between 1 and 6, inclusive, are all 1/6. But the probability of getting anyvalue is 1, which is the sum of all six probabilities of 1/6.

A six-sided die can't also become a five-sided die simply because it is rolled, all six sides of the die must remain intact during the transition between quantum states, so that two quantum states cannot become the same quantum state, they must remain separate and distinct.

Losing quantum information then is like taking one of those probabilities off the board, so rather than adding six values of 1/6 together, you add five of them and end up with 5/6 rather than 1. If this were possible, thenthe Schrodinger equation is wrong, the wave function is wrong, essentially the entire foundation of quantum mechanics is a lie and nothing is as it appears to be, even if a century of work in quantum mechanics tells us otherwise.

This is why the Information Paradox is such a thorny problem, since even though something as simple as permanently losing the knowledge of the spin of a virtual particle as it falls into a black hole might not seem like it should matter, it alters and unbalances the probabilities of the universe that quantum mechanics relies on, turning it from science to just really good guessing, and no one likes being told that they're just making stuff up.

There have been all sorts of proposed solutions to the information paradox over the years, and none have really settled the issue. Sonic black holes aren't likely to do so either, though they're still a pretty cool attempt regardless.

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What Sonic Black Holes Can Teach Us About the Information Paradox - Interesting Engineering

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Texas A&Ms Hagler Institute brings renowned scholars and researchers to campus to collaborate with students and faculty.

TheHagler Institute for Advanced Studyat Texas A&M University announced eight Hagler Fellows for its Class of 2021-22, including a recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics.

This 10th class in the Hagler Institutes history includes scientists, engineers and scholars who are recognized internationally for their achievements. Each belongs to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, or hold recognitions of equal stature in their fields.

Every year for the last decade, the Hagler Institute has enhanced the Texas A&M research community through its exceptional ability to consistently attract the worlds brightest minds to our campus, Texas A&M University System Chancellor John Sharp said. Combined with the Chancellors Research Initiative, the Hagler Institute also persuades many of these National Academy-level researchers to join our own illustrious and permanent faculty.

The fellows will collaborate with faculty, researchers and students in the colleges of agriculture and life sciences, engineering, medicine and science; Texas A&M AgriLife Research; and the Institute for Quantum Science and Engineering.

Congratulations to the Hagler Institute for recruiting an outstanding new class of fellows for its 10th anniversary, Texas A&M Interim Vice President for Research Jack Baldauf said. We look forward to the collaboration of these renowned scholars with our own outstanding faculty members, researchers and students.

The institute selects its Hagler Fellows from among top scholars who have distinguished themselves through outstanding professional accomplishments or significant recognition. Previous classes of Hagler Fellows have included two Nobel laureates, a Wolf Prize recipient, a recipient of the Hubble Medal in Literature for Lifetime Achievement, a recipient of the National Medal of Science, an awardee of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, a two-time recipient of the State Prize of Russia and a recipient of both the National Humanities Medal and the Johan Skytte Prize, the most prestigious award in political science.

We expect this remarkable 10th class of Hagler Fellows to have a productive and enduring impact on our faculty, our students and on the culture of the Texas A&M campus, Founding Director John L. Junkins of the Hagler Institute said. Since 2012, the Hagler Institute has now attracted 88 outstanding scientists, engineers and scholars to enhance our research community.

The Hagler Institute plans to induct the following Class of 2021-22 Hagler Fellows during its annual gala in early 2022:

About the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study:The Hagler Institute for Advanced Study was established in December 2010 by The Texas A&M University System Board of Regents to build on the growing academic reputation of Texas A&M and to provide a framework to attract top scholars from throughout the nation and abroad for appointments of up to a year. The selection of Hagler Fellows initiates with faculty nominations of National Academies and Nobel Prize-caliber scholars who align with existing strengths and ambitions of the University.

About Research at Texas A&M University: As one of the worlds leading research institutions, Texas A&M is at the forefront in making significant contributions to scholarship and discovery, including science and technology. Research conducted at Texas A&M generated annual expenditures of more than $1.131 billion in fiscal year 2020. Texas A&M ranked in the top 25 of the most recent National Science Foundation Higher Education Research and Development survey based on expenditures of more than $952 million in fiscal year 2019. Texas A&Ms research creates new knowledge that provides basic, fundamental, and applied contributions resulting in economic benefits to the state, nation, and world. research.tamu.edu

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Hagler Institute for Advanced Study Announces 10th Class of Fellows - Texas A&M University Today

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Sitting in the top-floor study of his childhood Niskayuna home, Paul LaViolette puzzles over the deepest questions of the universe.

Massive bound volumes of his doctoral thesis in general systems theory, old science journals and a series of volumes of his self-published book line shelves in the house designed by famous GE architect Victor Civkin.

Working through dense calculations and decoding pictures of faraway stars and galaxies, LaViolette has spent decades refining his own theories about the universe. He doesnt work with massive telescopes or particle accelerators, tools used by enormous teams of scientists across the planet to refine their theories about how the universe originated and how it operates. But he asks the same questions. Where did the universe come from and how did it start? How is matter created? Why does it appear the universe is expanding so quickly?

LaViolette, though, has come up with very different answers to those questions than the mainstream scientists who populate university faculties, government agencies and research laboratories.

I disproved the Big Bang theory, LaViolette said in a phone call last month, adding that he recently published a pair of papers this summer in the International Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics, a peer-reviewed journal, outlining his definitive takedown of what has been considered the definitive scientific model of the origin of the universe.

The first articles title, Expanding or Static Universe: Emergence of a New Paradigm, understates what LaViolette is proposing: scrap the dominant theory of the history of the universe taught in nearly every grade in nearly every school in the country.

The Big Bang theory basically holds that the history of our universe traces back to a single point of energy that exploded into existence and over a long period of time expanded into the universe we know today.

But LaViolette thinks most scientists are looking at the data from the wrong perspective, misunderstanding shifts on the light spectrum as they observe faraway galaxies as evidence of an expanding universe. Rather, he thinks the so-called redshift most scientists point to as evidence of an expanding universe is just a sign of the loss of energy that photons from distant galaxies have as they travel through space. That theory of the redshift, known as the tired light theory, has been around for decades. But LaViolette has repurposed it to demonstrate that a static universe, one that is not expanding as is commonly understood, makes a simpler explanation of numerous astronomical phenomena. His paper presents a series of cosmology tests, used to test different theories of the universe against various data sets, and argues that a static model of the universe bests an expanding model of the universe on all of the tests he presents unless various assumptions are added into the models about anything from the angles of galaxies to factors about their distance. Even then, LaViolette argues, assumptions made to improve the performance of a traditional expanding-universe model on one test worsen the theorys performance on other tests.

In overview, it is concluded that a static universe cosmology must be sought to explain the origin of the universe, he declared in the papers abstract.

His theory

LaViolette, now in his 70s, grew up in Niskayuna, where his parents worked in the areas scientific research industry, including at Knolls labs. After two years of high school in Niskayuna, his family moved to Greece. He studied at Johns Hopkins and University of Chicago, and worked at the Harvard School of Public Health. During the Vietnam era, he conducted research into ventilation systems used on masks. He earned a patent on new mask technology in 1973, but said he was unable to gain traction as he spent a few years trying to sell his idea he couldnt induce the wide-scale adoption he had hoped for.

Because they used to make [masks] a certain way, they didnt want to change, he said.

He eventually moved to Portland, Oregon, to study at the countrys only doctoral program in general systems theory at the time. As he worked on his tome of a dissertation, LaViolette started to think of the universe in terms of an open system, one where matter could effectively generate out of itself, especially in the most volatile parts of the universe.

It was the longest Ph.D. in the history of the program, and it still is, he said of his dissertation. They bring it out to intimidate people.

Since then he has continued to develop and fine-tune his arguments against an expanding-universe model, hoping his ideas would gain traction.

In an article titled Is the Universe Really Expanding? published in 1985, LaViolette relies on a smaller set of cosmology tests and data than his most recent papers to build a case that a static-universe model can offer a better explanation than the Big Bang.

I thought that one had disproved Big Bang, he said of the earlier paper.

The theory, though, has proved stubbornly resistant to its demise. As scientists collect more and more data about the universe, they have fine-tuned their own models, theories and equations but major holes and uncertainty still persist (no model has yet tied together large-scale and subatomic theories of physics, for example).

If mainstream science ever does adopt LaViolettes theory of the universe, it will spell doom for many fundamental tenets of physics and astronomy. No black holes, he said. No quantum mechanics (which helps explain physics at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles). No Einsteins theory of general relativity (which helps explain gravitational physics at a large scale).

You have to throw it out, he said. Even the ages of stars change.

He has also inched toward his own novel cosmology a broad theory of the origin of the universe developed over decades called subquantum kinetics. He has written numerous editions of a book on the topic. The model, which replaces the void left by the destruction wrought by disproving the Big Bang theory, predicts that a cosmic ether at the subatomic level is capable of producing energy fluctuations that in some scenarios can nucleate a subatomic particle. He calls it a continuous-creation theory, where matter is constantly being created within a static universe.

Matter produces more matter its like biological reproduction in a way, he said.

LaViolette argues that most scientists stubbornly adhere to the law of energy conservation that the total amount of energy in a system remains constant and should instead accept a model where new energy can emerge.

They [mainstream scientists] believe in taking the first law of thermodynamics and applying it down to the minutest detail, he said. The whole thing is based on faith that energy is conserved so rigorously.

He said mainstream scientists are often clouded by their beliefs in their own models and create theoretical assumptions that ensure those models work. Using an unflattering analogy to tree monkeys, he explained that scientists will hold fast to the Big Bang theory until an alternative gains broader acceptance fearing the metaphorical limb.

Theyve already assumed their model is correct. They dont want to admit another way of looking at things, he said. Physicists, they are like monkeys clinging to a tree. Unless they see another tree to jump to, they wont.

Huge Unknowns

Heidi Jo Newberg, an astrophysicist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute known for her work understanding the structure of the Milky Way galaxy, earths home galaxy, said the broader field often hears from out-of-the-box thinkers with a hodgepodge of their own theories. She said the ideas fall on a wide spectrum of seriousness and rigor.

I regularly get books and manuscripts from people all of the time, and they range from people who are just crazy, have crazy, crazy things, to people who are very knowledgeable and have a really good sense of science and terminology and the fields they are in, she said in an interview.

While Newberg had not studied LaViolettes recent papers and did not offer direct support or rebuttal of his theory, she noted that it was published in a refereed journal and appeared to be scientifically rigorous.

It looks to me like this is on the more knowledgeable side of it, she said.

Newberg explained that the scientific fields dominant understanding of the origin of the universe is both highly detailed and supported by vast data, while also containing huge holes filled by yet-to-be-proven explanations.

There are a lot of things we think we do know and some of them are really amazing, but there is a huge amount, almost an embarrassing amount, we dont understand about our standard model, she said.

The standard model the framework broadly accepted by scientists and taught at different academic levels holds that our universe expanded out of an infinitely dense source point, Newberg said, expanding at fluctuating rates over vast amounts of time as gravitational forces pulled together galaxies and ever-bigger astronomical structures.

Scientists have accumulated enormous quantities of data on the size and scale of different formations in the universe. The intergalactic distances light must travel to be observed by satellites and telescopes offers a glimpse of stars as they existed billions of years ago.

We have a kind of working understanding of the history of the universe that explains everything that we see, she said. In the last few decades, we have been in a really, really strong period for constraining the universe and how its evolved.

While much of the data lends further support to the standard model and further refines scientific understanding of different dimensions of that model, the explanations underpinning the standard model rely on some theoretical patches to cover enormous gaps of knowledge.

For the standard model to work, for instance, scientists posit the existence of so-called dark matter, which accounts for the majority of the matter in the universe and helps explain various observations and patterns in astronomy.

But one big problem remains for dark matter theorists: After decades of theorizing and building highly tuned detectors aimed at identifying an actual dark matter particle, scientists have still come up short in doing so.

People have been looking for 30 years. We think eventually someone will find this, Newberg said, noting that the theoretical presence of dark matter helps tie together numerous theories around how things work on a large scale.

There are very big pieces that are notional, she said of the dominant cosmological model. Dark matter is notional, but when you put it in everything works.

For LaViolette, the holes in the standard model bolster his theory that it doesnt actually hold together without the ad-hoc assumptions he said scientists plug into their equations to make their theories work. He argues that scientists at mainstream institutions are too wedded to their theories to accept an alternative model or allow consideration of paradigm-shifting ideas.

Newberg countered that scientists broadly are independently minded fact-finders who regularly contest one anothers theories, ideas, data and approaches, forcing further refinement and defense of their ideas on a regular basis. I think the science establishment isnt so monolithic as people think, she said. We are all individuals and we argue all the time. In my work, Im constantly challenged by people who have all the data that is available and make sure what I do is consistent with what we know.

Newberg said it is possible that cosmology may be more susceptible to a dramatic paradigm shift because of the large unknowns and vast space and time at play. The mystique and allure of questions about the universe and its history serve as a further accelerant that draws contrarian thinkers to propose ideas and theories that counter the dominant model. She said she is working with an artist-inventor who proposed to her an alternative idea for a space telescope.

Where you have a big problem that is very exciting and interesting, and has such huge unknowns, thats going to be a big draw for people that are really interestingand in some ways, there is an opportunity for someone to come with an idea from outside the field that changes everything, she said.

She noted that over the years various scientists have proffered alternative theories to different components of the standard model, but that they dont hold up against a deluge of observational data the same way theories attached to the standard expanding-universe model do. An alternative theory might explain one phenomenon but not another. Among most scientists, though, there is no leading competitor to the Big Bang theory, she said.

I think there is an opportunity to come up with other versions of cosmology, but its challenging to fit all of the data, she said. Its easy to come up with something that is consistent with some things but not everything.

For his part, LaViolette isnt waiting for the rest of science to catch up, working on a new edition to his book, Subquantum Kinetics: A Systems Approach to Physics and Cosmology, and taking comfort in his confidence that science will eventually follow the path he has tried to lay out. Whether or not hes around to see the day that happens is another question.

I totally believe this is the way physics will go in the future, he said.

Categories: Schenectady County, Your Niskayuna

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