Peter Higgs, the physicist who predicted the Higgs boson particle, has passed away at the age of 94 due to a blood disorder. His work proposing the particle — and showing how it helped give mass to some matter — won him the Noble price in 2013. The Higgs boson is informally referred to as the God particle, after a book by Nobel laureate Leon Lederman.
Higgs came up with the idea in the early 1960s as an attempt to explain why atoms have mass in the first place. The research didn’t get any traction in scientific journals, primarily because few understood the concept, but he was finally published in 1964. This was just a theory at the time, but led to a 50-year race to prove the Higgs boson particle actually exists.
Scientists hit pay dirt in 2012, thanks to physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. It took four years of experiments, but the Higgs boson particle was finally discovered, proving his ideas and adding a major puzzle piece to the corpus of particle physics knowledge known as the Standard Model.
As a matter of fact, modern theoretical physicists have posited the existence of up to five Higgs boson particles that fill up what is now called the Higgs field. Scientists hope to use the Higgs boson to one day find proof for ever-elusive dark matter.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobel, wrote about the importance of his discovery ahead of the ceremony in 2013. “Even when the universe seems empty this field is there. Without it, we would not exist, because it is from contact with the field that particles acquire mass.” The Nobel was shared with François Englert, a Belgian theoretical physicist whose work in 1964 contributed to the discovery.
"At the beginning I had no idea whether a discovery would be made in my lifetime”, Higgs once said. He leaves two sons, Chris and Jonny, his daughter-in-law Suzanne and two grandchildren. His former wife Jody, a linguistics professor, died in 2008.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/physicist-peter-higgs-who-predicted-the-god-particle-has-died-at-94-153635259.html?src=rss
Peter Higgs, the physicist who predicted the Higgs boson particle, has passed away at the age of 94 due to a blood disorder. His work proposing the particle — and showing how it helped give mass to some matter — won him the Noble price in 2013. The Higgs boson is informally referred to as the God particle, after a book by Nobel laureate Leon Lederman.
Higgs came up with the idea in the early 1960s as an attempt to explain why atoms have mass in the first place. The research didn’t get any traction in scientific journals, primarily because few understood the concept, but he was finally published in 1964. This was just a theory at the time, but led to a 50-year race to prove the Higgs boson particle actually exists.
Scientists hit pay dirt in 2012, thanks to physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. It took four years of experiments, but the Higgs boson particle was finally discovered, proving his ideas and adding a major puzzle piece to the corpus of particle physics knowledge known as the Standard Model.
As a matter of fact, modern theoretical physicists have posited the existence of up to five Higgs boson particles that fill up what is now called the Higgs field. Scientists hope to use the Higgs boson to one day find proof for ever-elusive dark matter.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobel, wrote about the importance of his discovery ahead of the ceremony in 2013. “Even when the universe seems empty this field is there. Without it, we would not exist, because it is from contact with the field that particles acquire mass.” The Nobel was shared with François Englert, a Belgian theoretical physicist whose work in 1964 contributed to the discovery.
"At the beginning I had no idea whether a discovery would be made in my lifetime”, Higgs once said. He leaves two sons, Chris and Jonny, his daughter-in-law Suzanne and two grandchildren. His former wife Jody, a linguistics professor, died in 2008.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/physicist-peter-higgs-who-predicted-the-god-particle-has-died-at-94-153635259.html?src=rss
It's difficult to describe the state of the universe's affairs back when the whole of everything was compressed to a size slightly smaller than the period at the end of this sentence — on account that the concepts of time and space literally didn't yet apply. But that challenge hasn't stopped pioneering theoretical astrophysicist, Dr. Laura Mersini-Houghton, from seeking knowledge at the edge of the known universe and beyond. In her new book, Before the Big Bang, Mersini-Houghton recounts her early life in communist Albania, her career as she rose to prominence in the male-dominated field of astrophysics and discusses her research into the multiverse which could fundamentally rewrite our understanding of reality.
Scientific investigations of problems like the creation of the universe, which we can neither observe nor reproduce and test in a lab, are similar to detective work in that they rely on intuition as well as evidence. Like a detective, as pieces of the puzzle start falling into place, researchers can intuitively sense the answer is close. This was the feeling I had as Rich and I tried to figure out how we could test our theory about the multiverse. Rationally, it seemed like a long shot, but intuitively, it seemed achievable.
Finally, a potential solution hit me. I realized that the key to testing and validating this theory was hidden in quantum entanglement — because decoherence and entanglement were two sides of the same coin! I could rewind the creation story all the way back to its quantum-landscape roots, when our wave-universe was entangled with others.
I already knew that the separation — the decoherence — of the branches of the wave function of the universe (which then become individual universes) was triggered by their entanglement with the environmental bath of fluctuations. Now I wondered if we could calculate and find any traces of this early entanglement imprinted on our sky today.
This might sound like a contradiction. How could our universe possibly still be entangled with all the other universes all these eons after the Big Bang? Our universe must have separated from them in its quantum infancy. But as I wrestled with these issues, I realized that it was possible to have a universe that had long since decohered but that also retained its infantile “dents” — minor changes in shape caused by the interaction with other surviving universes that had been entangled with ours during the earliest moments — as identifiable birthmarks. The scars of its initial entanglement should still be observable in our universe today.
The key was in the timing. Our wave-universe was decohering around the same time as the next stage, the particle universe, was going through its own cosmic inflation and coming into existence. Everything we observe in our sky today was seeded from the primordial fluctuations produced in those first moments, which take place at the smallest of units of measurable time, far less than a second. In principle, during those moments, as entanglement was being wiped out, its signatures could have been stamped on the inflaton and its fluctuations. There was a chance that the sort of scars that I was imagining had formed during this brief period. And if they had, they should be visible in the skies.
Understanding how scars formed from entanglement is less complicated than you might imagine. I started by trying to create a mental picture of the entanglement’s scarring of our sky. I visualized all the surviving universes from the branches of the wave function of the universe, including ours, as a bunch of particles spread around the quantum multiverse. Because they all contain mass and energy, they interact with (pull on) one another gravitationally, just as Newton’s apple had its path of motion curved by interacting with the Earth’s mass, thus guiding it to the ground. However, the apple was also being pulled on by the moon, the sun, all the other planets in our solar system, and all the stars in the universe. The Earth’s mass has the strongest force, but that does not mean these other forces do not exist. The net effect that entanglement left on our sky is captured by the combined pulling on our universe by other infant universes. Similar to the weak pulling from stars on the famous apple, at present, the signs of entanglement in our universe are incredibly small relative to the signs from cosmic inflation. But they are still there!
I will admit it... I was excited by the mere thought that I potentially had a way to glimpse beyond our horizon and before the Big Bang! Through my proposal of calculating and tracking entanglement in our sky, I may very well have pinned down, for the very first time, a way of testing the multiverse. What thrilled me most about this idea was its potential for making possible what for centuries we thought was impossible — an observational window to glimpse in space and in time beyond our universe into the multiverse. Our expanding universe provides the best cosmic laboratory for hunting down information about its infancy because everything we observe at large scales in our universe today was also present at its beginning. The basic elements of our universe do not vanish over time; they simply rescale their size with the expansion of the universe.
And here is why I thought of using quantum entanglement as the litmus test for our theory: Quantum theory contains a near-sacred principle known as “unitarity,” which states that no information about a system can ever be lost. Unitarity is a law of information conservation. It means that signs of the earlier quantum entanglement of our universe with the other surviving universes must still exist today. Thus, despite decoherence, entanglement can never be wiped from our universe’s memory; it is stored in its original DNA. Moreover, these signs have been encoded in our sky since its infancy, since the time the universe started as a wave on the landscape. Traces of this earlier entanglement would simply stretch out with the expansion of the universe as the universe became a much larger version of its infant self.
I was concerned that these signatures, which have been stretched by inflation and the expansion of the universe, would be quite weak. But on the basis of unitarity, I believed that however weak they were, they were preserved somewhere in our sky in the form of local violations or deviations from uniformity and homogeneity predicted by cosmic inflation.
Rich and I decided to calculate the effect of quantum entanglement on our universe to find out if any traces were left behind, then fast-forward them from infancy to the present and derive predictions for what kind of scars we should be looking for in our sky. If we could identify where we needed to look for them, we could test them by comparing them with actual observations.
Rich and I started on this investigation with help from a physicist in Tokyo, Tomo Takahashi. I first got to know Tomo at UNC Chapel Hill in 2004 when we overlapped by one year. He was a postdoc about to take a faculty position in Japan, and I had just arrived at UNC. We enjoyed interacting, and I saw the high standards Tomo maintained for his work and his incredible attention to detail. I knew he was familiar with the computer simulation program that we needed in order to compare the predictions based on our theory with actual data about matter and radiation signatures in the universe. In 2005, I called Tomo, and he agreed to collaborate with us.
Rich, Tomo, and I decided that the best place to begin our search was in the CMB — cosmic microwave background, the afterglow from the Big Bang. CMB is the oldest light in the universe, a universal “ether” permeating the entire cosmos throughout its history. As such, it contains a sort of exclusive record of the first millisecond in the life of the universe. And this silent witness of creation is still all around us today, making it an invaluable cosmic lab.
The energy of the CMB photons in our present universe is quite low; their frequencies peak around the microwave range (160 gigahertz), much like the photons in your kitchen microwave when you warm your food. Three major international scientific experiments — the COBE, WMAP, and Planck satellites (with a fourth one on the way), dating from the 1990s to the present — have measured the CMB and its much weaker fluctuations to exquisite precision. We even encounter CMB photons here on Earth. Indeed, seeing and hearing CMB used to be an everyday experience in the era of old TV sets: when changing channels, the viewer would experience the CMB signal in the form of static — the blurry, buzzing gray and white specks that appeared on the TV screen.
But if our universe started purely from energy, what can we see in the CMB photons that gives us a nascent image of the universe? Here, quantum theory, specifically Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, provides the answer. According to the uncertainly principle, quantum uncertainty, displayed as fluctuations in the initial energy of inflation, is unavoidable. When the universe stops inflating, it is suddenly filled with waves of quantum fluctuations of the inflaton energy. The whole range of fluctuations, some with mass and some without, are known as density perturbations. The shorter waves in this spectrum, those that fit inside the universe, become photons or particles, depending on their mass (reflecting the phenomenon of wave-particle duality).
The tiny tremors in the fabric of the universe that induce weak ripples or vibrations in the gravitational field, what are known as primordial gravitational waves, hold information on what particular model of inflation took place. They are incredibly small, at one part in about ten billion of the strength of the CMB spectrum, and therefore are much harder to observe. But they are preserved in the CMB.
It's difficult to describe the state of the universe's affairs back when the whole of everything was compressed to a size slightly smaller than the period at the end of this sentence — on account that the concepts of time and space literally didn't yet apply. But that challenge hasn't stopped pioneering theoretical astrophysicist, Dr. Laura Mersini-Houghton, from seeking knowledge at the edge of the known universe and beyond. In her new book, Before the Big Bang, Mersini-Houghton recounts her early life in communist Albania, her career as she rose to prominence in the male-dominated field of astrophysics and discusses her research into the multiverse which could fundamentally rewrite our understanding of reality.
Scientific investigations of problems like the creation of the universe, which we can neither observe nor reproduce and test in a lab, are similar to detective work in that they rely on intuition as well as evidence. Like a detective, as pieces of the puzzle start falling into place, researchers can intuitively sense the answer is close. This was the feeling I had as Rich and I tried to figure out how we could test our theory about the multiverse. Rationally, it seemed like a long shot, but intuitively, it seemed achievable.
Finally, a potential solution hit me. I realized that the key to testing and validating this theory was hidden in quantum entanglement — because decoherence and entanglement were two sides of the same coin! I could rewind the creation story all the way back to its quantum-landscape roots, when our wave-universe was entangled with others.
I already knew that the separation — the decoherence — of the branches of the wave function of the universe (which then become individual universes) was triggered by their entanglement with the environmental bath of fluctuations. Now I wondered if we could calculate and find any traces of this early entanglement imprinted on our sky today.
This might sound like a contradiction. How could our universe possibly still be entangled with all the other universes all these eons after the Big Bang? Our universe must have separated from them in its quantum infancy. But as I wrestled with these issues, I realized that it was possible to have a universe that had long since decohered but that also retained its infantile “dents” — minor changes in shape caused by the interaction with other surviving universes that had been entangled with ours during the earliest moments — as identifiable birthmarks. The scars of its initial entanglement should still be observable in our universe today.
The key was in the timing. Our wave-universe was decohering around the same time as the next stage, the particle universe, was going through its own cosmic inflation and coming into existence. Everything we observe in our sky today was seeded from the primordial fluctuations produced in those first moments, which take place at the smallest of units of measurable time, far less than a second. In principle, during those moments, as entanglement was being wiped out, its signatures could have been stamped on the inflaton and its fluctuations. There was a chance that the sort of scars that I was imagining had formed during this brief period. And if they had, they should be visible in the skies.
Understanding how scars formed from entanglement is less complicated than you might imagine. I started by trying to create a mental picture of the entanglement’s scarring of our sky. I visualized all the surviving universes from the branches of the wave function of the universe, including ours, as a bunch of particles spread around the quantum multiverse. Because they all contain mass and energy, they interact with (pull on) one another gravitationally, just as Newton’s apple had its path of motion curved by interacting with the Earth’s mass, thus guiding it to the ground. However, the apple was also being pulled on by the moon, the sun, all the other planets in our solar system, and all the stars in the universe. The Earth’s mass has the strongest force, but that does not mean these other forces do not exist. The net effect that entanglement left on our sky is captured by the combined pulling on our universe by other infant universes. Similar to the weak pulling from stars on the famous apple, at present, the signs of entanglement in our universe are incredibly small relative to the signs from cosmic inflation. But they are still there!
I will admit it... I was excited by the mere thought that I potentially had a way to glimpse beyond our horizon and before the Big Bang! Through my proposal of calculating and tracking entanglement in our sky, I may very well have pinned down, for the very first time, a way of testing the multiverse. What thrilled me most about this idea was its potential for making possible what for centuries we thought was impossible — an observational window to glimpse in space and in time beyond our universe into the multiverse. Our expanding universe provides the best cosmic laboratory for hunting down information about its infancy because everything we observe at large scales in our universe today was also present at its beginning. The basic elements of our universe do not vanish over time; they simply rescale their size with the expansion of the universe.
And here is why I thought of using quantum entanglement as the litmus test for our theory: Quantum theory contains a near-sacred principle known as “unitarity,” which states that no information about a system can ever be lost. Unitarity is a law of information conservation. It means that signs of the earlier quantum entanglement of our universe with the other surviving universes must still exist today. Thus, despite decoherence, entanglement can never be wiped from our universe’s memory; it is stored in its original DNA. Moreover, these signs have been encoded in our sky since its infancy, since the time the universe started as a wave on the landscape. Traces of this earlier entanglement would simply stretch out with the expansion of the universe as the universe became a much larger version of its infant self.
I was concerned that these signatures, which have been stretched by inflation and the expansion of the universe, would be quite weak. But on the basis of unitarity, I believed that however weak they were, they were preserved somewhere in our sky in the form of local violations or deviations from uniformity and homogeneity predicted by cosmic inflation.
Rich and I decided to calculate the effect of quantum entanglement on our universe to find out if any traces were left behind, then fast-forward them from infancy to the present and derive predictions for what kind of scars we should be looking for in our sky. If we could identify where we needed to look for them, we could test them by comparing them with actual observations.
Rich and I started on this investigation with help from a physicist in Tokyo, Tomo Takahashi. I first got to know Tomo at UNC Chapel Hill in 2004 when we overlapped by one year. He was a postdoc about to take a faculty position in Japan, and I had just arrived at UNC. We enjoyed interacting, and I saw the high standards Tomo maintained for his work and his incredible attention to detail. I knew he was familiar with the computer simulation program that we needed in order to compare the predictions based on our theory with actual data about matter and radiation signatures in the universe. In 2005, I called Tomo, and he agreed to collaborate with us.
Rich, Tomo, and I decided that the best place to begin our search was in the CMB — cosmic microwave background, the afterglow from the Big Bang. CMB is the oldest light in the universe, a universal “ether” permeating the entire cosmos throughout its history. As such, it contains a sort of exclusive record of the first millisecond in the life of the universe. And this silent witness of creation is still all around us today, making it an invaluable cosmic lab.
The energy of the CMB photons in our present universe is quite low; their frequencies peak around the microwave range (160 gigahertz), much like the photons in your kitchen microwave when you warm your food. Three major international scientific experiments — the COBE, WMAP, and Planck satellites (with a fourth one on the way), dating from the 1990s to the present — have measured the CMB and its much weaker fluctuations to exquisite precision. We even encounter CMB photons here on Earth. Indeed, seeing and hearing CMB used to be an everyday experience in the era of old TV sets: when changing channels, the viewer would experience the CMB signal in the form of static — the blurry, buzzing gray and white specks that appeared on the TV screen.
But if our universe started purely from energy, what can we see in the CMB photons that gives us a nascent image of the universe? Here, quantum theory, specifically Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, provides the answer. According to the uncertainly principle, quantum uncertainty, displayed as fluctuations in the initial energy of inflation, is unavoidable. When the universe stops inflating, it is suddenly filled with waves of quantum fluctuations of the inflaton energy. The whole range of fluctuations, some with mass and some without, are known as density perturbations. The shorter waves in this spectrum, those that fit inside the universe, become photons or particles, depending on their mass (reflecting the phenomenon of wave-particle duality).
The tiny tremors in the fabric of the universe that induce weak ripples or vibrations in the gravitational field, what are known as primordial gravitational waves, hold information on what particular model of inflation took place. They are incredibly small, at one part in about ten billion of the strength of the CMB spectrum, and therefore are much harder to observe. But they are preserved in the CMB.
We’ve seen our fair share of real-world exoskeletons that try to show how manual labor could be different in the future, even without the help of robots. True to the common image of these mechanical suits, these exoskeletons are often large, heavy armors that don’t trade comfort and flexibility for power, making them more tedious to use despite their advertised benefits. It doesn’t have to be like that, though, especially if you’re not aiming to lift heavy crates anyway. This exoskeleton, for example, doesn’t use batteries to move, making it better suited (no pun intended) for more recreational activities.
Exoskeletons, at least those that aren’t works of fiction, are often designed to allow feeble humans to perform extraordinary feats. In most cases, it’s to enable work that would otherwise be impossible for a normal human being to perform, like lifting heavy objects. Sure, a robot arm or forklift could probably do that, too, but those would lack the finesse that comes naturally to humans. At the same time, there will be places where heavy machinery won’t be able to squeeze into to get the job done.
On the flip side, those suits, or sometimes just legs, aren’t exactly the most comfortable or the easiest to wear. In addition to the weight of the metal parts themselves, the exoskeletons are weighed down even more by batteries and electric motors that make the parts move. While they might be more agile than some industrial machines, they aren’t exactly more graceful than their purely mechanical counterparts.
Skeletonics is different in almost all aspects. It isn’t designed to be an industrial working tool, though it could help you carry and move some heavy objects, too. It is, instead, designed to augment the fluidity and precision of human movement, allowing humans to be stronger and reach farther than they normally could without turning them into a mechanical Hulk. It is also meant to be lightweight and easy to use, thanks to having no batteries or parts that need electricity to function.
Instead of electricity-powered motors, Skeletonics uses your body’s own kinetic energy to move its own limbs. In a way, it mirrors your arms’ and legs’ movement but also adds a bit of strength and length to it, but you are literally the one in the driver’s seat. It’s the difference between reaching for an object with your hand and using a joystick to move a robotic arm instead. The drawback is that Skeletonics can’t exactly be used as something like power armor for heavy lifting, but it can gracefully swing a baseball bat better than those.
The exoskeletons are, after all, envisioned to be used for different applications, particularly what is being called “superhuman sports” or augmented sports. At the same time, however, it could also be an opportunity to give people with physical disabilities a chance to participate in those events because they could use their own bodies and the superhuman abilities they developed to drive these battery-free machines. Best of all, Skeletonics offers an alternative way to drive these exoskeletons, and hopefully, there will come a time when we won’t have to choose between that more sustainable technology and mechanical power.
The Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator that enabled the discovery of the Higgs boson, is back in action after over three years in hiatus. CERN shut the accelerator down for maintenance and upgrade work that was extended due to delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, it's ready to smash particles for various research projects throughout its third run that's scheduled to last until 2026. In fact, two beams of protons had already circulated in opposite directions around the 27-kilometer collider as of April 22nd at 12:16 CEST (6:16AM Eastern Time).
It's just a start, however: The beams contained a relatively small number of protons and circulated at 450 billion electronvolts. The LHC team will ramp up the energy and intensity of the beams until the accelerator can perform collisions at a record energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts.
Mike Lamont, CERN's Director for Accelerators and Technology, said:
"The machines and facilities underwent major upgrades during the second long shutdown of CERN's accelerator complex. The LHC itself has undergone an extensive consolidation programme and will now operate at an even higher energy and, thanks to major improvements in the injector complex, it will deliver significantly more data to the upgraded LHC experiments."
Research teams using the accelerator for their studies are expecting to be able to perform a lot more collisions — one, in particular, is expecting a 50 times increase — thanks to the upgrade. The more powerful LHC will allow scientists to study the Higgs boson more closely and to resume their hunt for a particle that proves the existence of dark matter with a more capable tool at hand.
At the moment, dark matter is but a hypothetical form of matter that's believed to be five times more prevalent than its ordinary counterpart. It's invisible, doesn't reflect or emit light, and all attempts at looking for it have so far been unsuccessful. LHC researchers have narrowed down the regions where the particle may be hidden, though, and the upgraded accelerator could bring us closer to its discovery. To note, CERN previously approved plans to build a more powerful $23 billion super-collider that's 100 km in circumference, but its construction isn't expected to begin until 2038.
Gene Roddenberry was a man ahead of his time, accurately predicting the development of fantastical gadgets like flip phones, tablet computers, Bluetooth and bionic eyes — even tractor beams. But one technology Roddenberry called for in the 1960s has yet to make it off the screen: teleportation. It's not only that "we just don't have enough power," as Scotty would say, we also lack the fundamental knowledge base to make it a reality. For now, at least. In their latest book, Frequently Asked Questions about the Universe, Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson delve into this and a host of other quandaries facing humanity — from whether there's an afterlife, why aliens haven't made contact with us yet, or if our observable existence is actually a computer simulation.
If your dream of teleportation is to be here in one moment, and then be in a totally different place the next moment, then we are sad to tell you right off the bat that this is impossible. Unfortunately, physics has some pretty hard rules about anything happening instantaneously. Anything that happens (an effect) has to have a cause, which in turn requires the transmission of information. Think about it: in order for two things to be causally related to each other (like you disappearing here and you appearing somewhere else), they have to somehow talk to each other. And in this universe, everything, including information, has a speed limit.
Information has to travel through space just like everything else, and the fastest anything can travel in this universe is the speed of light. Really, the speed of light should have been called the “speed of information” or “the universe’s speed limit.” It’s baked into relativity and the very idea of cause and effect, which are at the heart of physics.
Even gravity can’t move faster than light. The Earth doesn’t feel gravity from where the Sun is right now; it feels gravity from where the Sun was eight minutes ago. That’s how long it takes information to travel the ninety-three million miles between here and there. If the Sun disappeared (teleporting off for its own vacation), the Earth would continue in its normal orbit for eight minutes before realizing that the Sun was gone.
So the idea that you can disappear in one place and reappear in another place instantly is pretty much out of the question. Something has to happen in between, and that something can’t move faster than light.
Fortunately, most of us aren’t such sticklers when it comes to the definition of “teleportation.” Most of us will take “almost instantly” or “in the blink of an eye” or even “as fast as the laws of physics will allow” for our teleportation needs. If that’s the case, then there are two options for making a teleportation machine work:
1. Your teleportation machine could transmit you to your destination at the speed of light.
2. Your teleportation machine could somehow shorten the distance between where you are and where you want to go.
Option #2 is what you might call the “portal” type of teleportation. In movies, it would be the kind of teleportation that opens up a doorway, usually through a wormhole or some kind of extradimensional subspace, that you step through to find yourself somewhere else. Wormholes are theoretical tunnels that connect points in space that are far away, and physicists have definitely proposed the existence of multiple dimensions beyond the three we are familiar with.
Sadly, both of these concepts are still very much theoretical. We haven’t actually seen a wormhole, nor do we have any idea how to open one or control where it leads. And extra dimensions aren’t really something you can move into. They only represent extra ways in which your particles might be able to wiggle.
Much more interesting to talk about is Option #1, which, as it turns out, might actually be something we can do in the near future.
Getting There at Light Speed
If we can’t appear in other places instantly, or take shortcuts through space, can we at least get there as fast as possible? The top speed of the universe, three hundred million meters per second, is plenty fast to cut your commute down to a fraction of a second and make trips to the stars take years instead of decades or millennia. Speed-of-light teleportation would still be awesome.
To do that, you might imagine a machine that somehow takes your body and then pushes it at the speed of light to your destination. Unfortunately, there’s a big problem with this idea, and it’s that you’re too heavy. The truth is that you’re too massive to ever travel at the speed of light. First, it would take an enormous amount of time and energy just to accelerate all the particles in your body (whether assembled or broken up somehow) to speeds that are close to the speed of light. And second, you would never get to the speed of light. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve been dieting or working on your CrossFit; nothing that has any mass can ever travel at the speed of light.
Particles like electrons and quarks, the building blocks of your atoms, have mass. That means that it takes energy to get them moving, a lot of energy to get them moving fast, and infinite energy to reach the speed of light. They can travel at very high speeds, but they can never achieve light speed.
That means that you, and the molecules and particles that make up who you are right now, would never actually be able to teleport. Not instantaneously, and not at the speed of light. Transporting your body somewhere that quickly is never going to happen. It’s just not possible to move all the particles in your body fast enough.
But does that mean teleportation is impossible? Not quite!
There is one way it can still happen, and that’s if we relax what “you” means. What if we didn’t transport you, your molecules or your particles? What if we just transmitted the idea of you?
You Are Information
One possible way to achieve speed-of-light teleportation is to scan you and send you as a beam of photons. Photons don’t have any mass, which means they can go as fast as the universe will allow. In fact, photons can only travel at the speed of light (there’s no such thing as a slow-moving photon).*
Here’s a basic recipe for speed-of-light teleportation:
Step #1: Scan your body and record where all your molecules and particles are.
Step #2: Transmit this information to your destination via a beam of photons.
Step #3: Receive this information and rebuild your body using new particles.
Is this possible? Humans have made incredible progress in both scanning and 3D printing technologies. These days, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can scan your body down to a resolution of 0.1 millimeters, which is about the size of a brain cell. And scientists have used 3D printers to print increasingly more complicated clusters of living cells (known as “organoids”) for testing cancer drugs. We’ve even made machines (using scanning tunneling microscopes) that can grab and move individual atoms. So it’s not hard to imagine that one day we might be able to scan and then print whole bodies.
The real limitation, though, might not be technological but philosophical. After all, if someone made a copy of you, would it actually be you?
Remember, there’s nothing particularly special about the particles that make up your body right now. All particles of a given type are the same. Every electron is perfectly identical to every other electron, and the same is true for quarks. Particles don’t come out of the universe factory with personalities or any sort of distinguishing features. The only difference between any two electrons or any two quarks is where each of them is and what other particles they’re hanging out with.*
But how much would a copy of you still be you? Well, it depends on two things. The first is the resolution of the technology that scans and prints you. Can it read and print your cells? Your molecules? Your atoms, or even your individual particles?
The even bigger question is how much your “you-ness” depends on the tiny details. What level of detail does it take for the copy to still be considered you? It turns out that this is an open question, and the answer might depend on how quantum your sense of self is.
You see gears in action and they’re pretty easy to fathom. Metal wheels with interlocking teeth – rotate one wheel and the other wheel rotates in the opposite direction. Change the size of one wheel and it affects the speed at which the other wheel rotates. That’s basically how any simple gearbox on an automobile/bicycle works, translating rotations from a motor or your feet into rotating wheels. What happens when you replace the teeth with magnets? The video above wonderfully explains how gears can work without the mechanical action of interlocking teeth… in fact, they can work without even touching each other! These magnetic gears are pretty interesting and whimsical to look at!
YouTuber Magnetic Games shows how these gears work by putting them together from scratch. With 3 3D-printed wheels, the apparatus comes to life. One wheel holds 32 magnets (16 on each side), while the other houses 8 magnets (4 on each side). A third stationary wheel comes with bolts attached in each hole (helping the magnetic attraction pass from one wheel to another), and the apparatus is set up with the wheels on a common axle.
Rotating one wheel causes the other to turn in the opposite direction. The wheel with more magnets rotates at a slower pace, while the wheel with less magnets rotates with a higher speed (sort of like a larger gear and smaller gear). Obviously, the magnetic resistance isn’t comparable to the physical resistance of metal gears (you couldn’t really use these in a car or bicycle), but it DOES highlight a unique relationship between gears and magnets – something I knew nothing of until now! Plus, think about it this way, less physical contact = less wear-and-tear…
Inspired by the laws of nature, the Rippling Table from conceptual furniture maker Mousarris represents a single moment frozen in time. In this case, the ripples caused by a water droplet hitting a body of water. You may recall Mousarris previously from their Inception inspired table. Obviously, my secret lair demands both of them now.
The steel and resin table measures 120cm (~47″) in diameter and can allegedly seat eight people comfortably, presumably in equally fancy chairs, because if you’re going to buy a Rippling Table I doubt you accent it with cheap folding chairs.
For anybody seriously interested, you have to contact Mousarris for the price, which in layman’s terms means it probably costs a small fortune. Do you think when you have to contact a company for a product’s price, they try to guess just how rich you are to see how much they can get out of you for it? Because when I called Mousarris about this table they just hung up on me for calling collect.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) will open up access to more data from Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. Under an updated policy, data will be released around five years after it's collected and CERN hopes to release the f...
