The Zen of Technology & Scientific Discovery! (& Robots)

[Kotei]

I am always enjoying these science news, thank you!

Bird flies 7,500 miles nonstop, breaking world record
Staying in the air for 11 days straight, a bar-tailed godwit flew from Alaska to New Zealand.

A bar-tailed godwit (Limosa lapponica) just flew for 11 days straight from Alaska to New Zealand, traversing a distance of 7,500 miles (12,000 kilometers) without stopping, breaking the longest nonstop flight among birds known to scientists, The Guardian reported.

Bar-tailed godwits are "big, noisy and cinnamon-colored," according to the National Audubon Society. And they are known to undertake impressive migrations between Alaska and New Zealand, flying thousands of miles without stopping. But one particular bird, driven by easterly winds that prolonged his journey, flew longer than any of his kind known to date.

The scientists tracked this particular male godwit — known as "4BBRW" for the colored identification rings on its legs, stacked blue, blue, red and then white — through its onboard satellite tag.

https://www.livescience.com/bar-tail...rd-flight.html

Depending on the definition of 'longest nonstop flight', I am torn to give these 'common swift' guys the medal.
Some staying in the air for a whole 10 months. With alternating sleep in the two brain hemispheres.

We equipped common swifts with a micro data logger with an accelerometer to record flight activity (years 1–2) and with a light-level sensor for geolocation (year 2). Our data show that swifts are airborne for >99% of the time during their 10-month non-breeding period; some individuals never settled, but occasional events of flight inactivity occurred in most individuals.

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)31063-6

Gassho,
Kotei sat/lah today.

[Jundo]

Actual film of today's touchdown on Asteroid Bennu ... some 333,633,000 kilometers (207,310,000 miles) from earth ...

https://youtu.be/lgkZQEoJKx8

Even a bar-tailed godwit can't fly so far!

Gassho, J

[Jundo]

Convergent evolution is cool ... nature keeps heading in like directions ... maybe not just here, but elsewhere in the cosmos too ...

Animals Keep Evolving Into Crabs, Which Is Somewhat Disturbing

... [There is a] long history of crabification (technically, “carcinization”) of different species over time. That means groups of crustaceans have evolved into crabs in five completely different contexts ...

So how does carcinization happen? ... Animals can evolve separately but end up evolving toward other species, too, or even spontaneously evolve the same characteristics in totally separate groups. Birds and bats can both fly using mechanical wings. Birds and mammals are both warmblooded, but both evolved from groups that were not. That crabs (both “true” and ersatz) have so densely but separately evolved the same form is highly unusual, even in a world full of these examples of strong parallel and convergent evolution. “The fact that a crab-like habitus did not evolve solely in ‘true’ crabs but also several times independently in the Anomura makes this process ideal for evolutionary research,” the researchers explain. ... It’s not just superficial shape that unifies the five evolved crab forms. The paper details neurological commonalities, shared circulatory systems, and more, while also detailing the organ and systems that differ in shape and size.

Moreover, the crab-shapedness of the groups can make it hard to trace what came about from interacting internal systems as opposed to, well, the crab shell:

“Some of the internal anatomical characters studied herein are structurally dependent on the external characters of a crab-like habitus. Since morphological coherence can also exist between internal anatomical structures, the coherence chains which can be traced back to the external characters of a crab-like habitus are relatively complex in some cases (indirect coherences).”

But, of course, hermit crabs don’t have a “habitus,” the biological term for a body shape or casing type that affects your health or biology context. And, the researchers say, majestic and extremely spiky king crabs evolved from hermit crabs. The crab wonders may never cease.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a34389129/crab-evolution-carcinization/?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits

and

https://academic.oup.com/biolinnean/article/121/1/200/3089703

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

The Sea of Tranquility is really a sea!

NASA finds water on the moon's sunlit surface for the first time

For the first time ever, scientists have identified water on the moon's sunlit surface. They also found that water is more common on the moon than previously thought, with pockets of ice hiding in shadowy regions of "eternal darkness," some as small as a penny, new studies reveal.

Scientists have been finding signs of water on the moon since 2009 and, in 2018, confirmed the presence of water ice on the lunar surface. Now, researchers in two new studies have detected water at one of the largest crater formations on a sunlit surface on the moon and also found that the lunar surface could be harboring plentiful patches of secret ice in "cold traps," regions of permanently shadowed spots on the moon.

... Previous work identifying water on the moon was based on a spectral signature, the distinct "barcode" that scientists use to identify materials, which is reflected as a function of wavelength. But that data doesn't distinguish between water and hydroxyl (the OH molecule) bound to minerals on the lunar surface.

... The researchers found that this water exists at around 100 to 400 parts per million. The scientists suggest that this water is likely "sandwiched" between grains on the lunar surface, which protects it from the environment.

... In fact, Hayne's team found that a whopping 15,000 square miles (40,000 square kilometers) of the lunar surface could potentially hold water. That's more than twice the area scientists previously earmarked for water ice on the moon.

... this new finding could prove monumental in humanity's plans to not only return astronauts to the moon (NASA hopes to do that by 2024 with its Artemis program), but also to create long-term human encampments on the lunar surface as a proving ground and jumping-off point to Mars.

"If we're right, water is going to be more accessible for drinking water, for rocket fuel, everything that NASA needs water for," Hayne said in the same statement. "Astronauts may not need to go into these deep, dark shadows … They could walk around and find one [cold trap] that's a meter wide and that might be just as likely to harbor ice."

https://www.livescience.com/water-on...discovery.html

https://youtu.be/iUA04651iVk

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

This is one of the clearest explanations I have heard of Sir Roger Penrose's vision of a cyclic (even that is not really the right word, because it still implies something outside, before or after, the cycle) universe. I would just summarize, and maybe add a point or two ...

He says that eventually, after very very long sweeps of time, the black holes will basically gobble up all the matter of the universe, and often each other, then (Steven Hawking's idea) just fade away ...

(Jundo: Of course, remember that "incredibly, incredibly long" measures of time are a subjective measure to us humans, and nobody but us is holding a stop watch to the cosmos. When we people are not around, there is no real way to say that the entire history of the universe is "long" or "short" because nobody to experience it and give an subjective measure, and the whole history of the universe is thus much the same as the blink of an eye)

... After the black holes fade, all that is left are massless photons ... and because they are massless, pure energy, they are basically timeless (simply beyond time, because time is always a measure of change in something with mass like the hands of a clock) and infinite in expanse because traveling at the speed of light ... The photons are so infinite, not only beyond time but beyond a locatable mass, that they may be said to be beyond fixed location too, thus "everywhere" or "beyond where" ...

(Jundo: I would simply note that we humans are living in a universe within which, as Einstein reminds us, mass = energy, thus basically photons which have slowed down and taken the form of mass for a time, thus even our universe of moving clocks is still this "beyond time" aspect based on photons in other guise ... time is also ultimately timeless ... )

A big bang is so hot that it basically has the same effect as infinitely cold photons, with the big bang being a singularity that has so much energy that it is also beyond time and place, also not measurable (because nothing outside it to compare, thus neither "big" nor "small"), and such pure energy that it is "everywhere" or "beyond where" ...

Penrose then identifies these two, both beyond time and "where," as being a single phenomenon ... the infinite of the infinitely hot is the infinite of the infinitely cold, somehow beyond "hot" and "cold." (Penrose believes his idea also explains the creation of so-called "dark matter" somehow).

https://youtu.be/YTttUigXulk

(Jundo: In my view, this is an elegant idea, although it does not explain the mystery of why you and I happen to find ourselves conscious and alive as these most personal "you and me" bodies in this universe which seems incredibly fine tuned to permit us to be conscious and alive as this particular you and me ... as the particular products of a finely balanced physics and chemistry and all events of history which led right to our births ... when, if one thinks about it, this universe could have done without this particular "you and me," and even a whole ensemble of universes could have done without any "you and me" whatsoever to start with, let alone other conscious life or any kind of life at all, let along this particular "you and me.")

Of course, the Buddha and the Zen Masters teach us not to worry about it too much, just to chop wood and fetch water (made of matter) and not to cause too much trouble for the time (however long) we find ourselves here whatever the reason.

(Sorry I ran long, also a subjective measure of matter in time)

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Life on Saturn!

Or more specifically, signs of a molecule that can be a precursor to complex molecules, which might be a step toward DNA ... or not ... on Saturn's moon ...

... and the atmosphere is full of methane, but so was the early earth!

Unusual molecule found in atmosphere on Saturn's moon Titan

Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is the only moon in our solar system that has a thick atmosphere. It's four times denser than Earth's. And now, scientists have discovered a molecule in it that has never been found in any other atmosphere.

The particle is called cyclopropenylidene, or C3H2, and it's made of carbon and hydrogen. This simple carbon-based molecule could be a precursor that contributes to chemical reactions that may create complex compounds. And those compounds could be the basis for potential life on Titan.

The molecule was first noticed as researchers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array of telescopes in Chile. This radio telescope observatory captures a range of light signatures, which revealed the molecule among the unique chemistry of Titan's atmosphere.

... Cyclic molecules are crucial because they form the backbone rings for the nucleobases of DNA, according to NASA. ...

... Titan also has Earth-like liquid bodies on its surface, but the rivers, lakes and seas are made of liquid ethane and methane, which form clouds and cause liquid gas to rain from the sky. Researchers also believe Titan has an internal liquid water ocean. ...

... "We're trying to figure out if Titan is habitable," said Rosaly Lopes, a senior research scientist and Titan expert at JPL, in a statement. "So we want to know what compounds from the atmosphere get to the surface, and then, whether that material can get through the ice crust to the ocean below, because we think the ocean is where the habitable conditions are."

... Understanding the organic material sitting on Titan's surface could reveal more about Earth's history. Early on, our planet's atmosphere was dominated by methane rather than oxygen. In fact, early Earth and Titan could be very similar.

... Titan will be explored by NASA's Dragonfly mission in the future. Dragonfly will launch in 2026 and reach Titan in 2034.
The Mars rover-size drone will fly through Titan's thick atmosphere to visit an impact crater, where researchers believe that important ingredients for life mixed together when something hit Titan in the past, possibly tens of thousands of years ago.

... "We think of Titan as a real-life laboratory where we can see similar chemistry to that of ancient Earth when life was taking hold here," said Melissa Trainer, a NASA Goddard astrobiologist and Dragonfly mission deputy principal investigator, in a statement.

https://us.cnn.com/2020/10/28/world/...rnd/index.html

https://youtu.be/GlwzLPytW9A

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Was your great great grandma a rock from space??

'Fireball' meteorite that crashed in Michigan holds extraterrestrial organic compounds

A meteorite that landed on a frozen lake in 2018 contains thousands of organic compounds that formed billions of years ago and could hold clues about the origins of life on Earth.

... An international team of researchers then examined a walnut-size piece of the meteorite "while it was still fresh," scientists reported in a new study. Their analysis revealed more than 2,000 organic molecules dating to when our solar system was young; similar compounds may have seeded the emergence of microbial life on our planet, the study authors reported.

... In fact, there was so little terrestrial weathering that the fragment brought to Chicago's Field Museum looked like it had been collected in space, said study co-author Jennika Greer, a doctoral candidate in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, and a resident graduate student at The Field Museum.

When space rocks enter the atmosphere at speeds of several miles per second, the air around them becomes ionized. Extreme heat melts away up to 90% of the meteor, and the rock that survives atmospheric passage becomes encased in a 1-millimeter-thick fusion crust of melted glass, said lead study author Philipp Heck, a curator of meteorites at the Field Museum and an associate professor at the University of Chicago.

That surviving fragment inside the glassy crust is a pristine record of the rock's geochemistry in space. And despite a fiery fall to Earth, after the vaporized external layers are carried away, rocky meteorites such as this one are very, very cold when they land, Heck told Live Science.

... The meteorite held 2,600 organic, or carbon-containing compounds, the researchers reported in the study. Because the meteorite was mostly unchanged since 4.5 billion years ago, these compounds likely are similar to the ones that other meteorites brought to a young Earth, some of which "might have been incorporated into life," Heck said.

The transformation from extraterrestrial organic compounds into the first microbial life on Earth is "a big step" that is still shrouded in mystery, but evidence suggests that organics are common in meteorites — even in thermally metamorphosed meteorites such as the one that landed in Michigan, he added. Meteor bombardment was also more frequent for a young Earth than it is today, "so we are pretty certain that the input from meteorites into the organic inventory on Earth was important," for seeding life, Heck said.

https://www.livescience.com/fireball-meteorite-organic-compounds.html

Put this old family portrait over the fireplace ...



Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

A brief description of the AMAZING technology behind the new Covid-19 vaccines and, seemingly, for HIV and countless other viruses in the future. Worth a listen ...

https://youtu.be/9Vrd9Ip9BDM

Also ... here's to the scientists ...

A Turkish-German husband-and-wife team have emerged as frontrunners in the race to market a vaccine against coronavirus, which would be an extraordinary achievement.

Turkish-born Ugur Sahin, 55, is CEO of German biotech firm BioNTech. He co-founded it with his wife and fellow board member Özlem Türeci, 53, and his former teacher, Prof Christoph Huber, an Austrian cancer expert. ...

... Prof Sahin and Dr Türeci are immunotherapy specialists, whose efforts were previously focused on cancer patients: they used messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules to trigger the production of certain proteins in cells, which could then train the immune system to attack cancer cells.

The role of mRNA in sending genetic instructions to cells could, Prof Sahin realised, be adapted to the fight against coronavirus. The idea is to trick the immune system with viral proteins, so that antibodies can then attack the virus.

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/behind-pfizers-covid-vaccine-a-husband-wife-dream-team-2322869

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

The headline says it all ...

Did life come drifting through the cosmos, bacteria hitchhiking on meteors? ...

This bacterium survived on the outside of the Space Station for an entire year

[Humans can't] survive in the naked space outside the protection of the ISS [International Space Station], where UV radiation, vacuum, huge temperature fluctuations, and microgravity are all imminent threats.

So, it's quite a feat that a species of bacterium first found in a can of meat, Deinococcus radiodurans, was still alive and kicking after a year spent living on a specially designed platform outside the pressurized module of the ISS.

Researchers have been investigating these mighty microbes for a while; back in 2015, an international team set up the Tanpopo mission on the outside of the Japanese Experimental Module Kibo, to put hardy bacterial species to the test.

Now, D. radiodurans has passed with flying colors.

... This isn't the longest time D. radiodurans has been kept in these conditions – back in August we wrote about a sample of the bacterium being left up there for three whole years.

But the team weren't trying for a world record, instead they were trying to uncover what makes D. radiodurans just so good at surviving in these extreme conditions.

... This kind of study helps us understand whether bacteria could survive other worlds, and maybe even the journey between them, which will become more and more important as we humans and the germs we bring with us begin to travel farther than our Moon into the Solar System, and one day maybe even beyond.

"These investigations help us to understand the mechanisms and processes through which life can exist beyond Earth, expanding our knowledge on how to survive and adapt in the hostile environment of outer space," said University of Vienna biochemist Tetyana Milojevic.

https://www.livescience.com/bacteriu...e-station.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jakuden]

The headline says it all ...

Did life come drifting through the cosmos, bacteria hitchhiking on meteors? ...



Gassho, J

STLah

Maybe they are what the space tardigrades eat.

Gassho
Jakuden
SatToday/LAH

[Jundo]

Ah, the subtle interconnection of all things (tentatively) ....

Supernova explosions may have helped shape Earth's climate history

The evidence is tentative but intriguing.

Star explosions may have played a greater role in Earth's climate history than scientists thought.

Nearby supernovas have left a series of possible fingerprints in the tree-ring record here on Earth over the past 40,000 years, potentially disrupting our planet's climate multiple times over this span, a new study reports.

"These are extreme events, and their potential effects seem to match tree-ring records," study author Robert Brakenridge, a senior research associate at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in a statement.

Brakenridge compiled a list of 18 supernovas — violent explosions that mark the deaths of certain kinds of stars — that occurred within about 4,900 light-years of Earth. He then compared the estimated timing of these cosmic events with spikes in carbon-14, as observed in the tree-ring record.

Carbon-14 is a radioactive isotope of carbon that contains eight neutrons in its atomic nucleus instead of the usual six. Carbon-14 is rare on Earth, and it doesn't occur here naturally without some outside influence — namely, high-energy radiation streaming in from deep space, which can convert some of the "normal" carbon in our atmosphere to carbon-14 (which explains why this isotope is also known as radiocarbon).

... The amount of radiocarbon is not always steady, however. Scientists have spotted spikes in the tree-ring record, which have generally been attributed to powerful flares from our own sun. But Brakenridge suspected that supernovas could be involved, so he investigated a possible link.

And he found a tantalizing but tentative one: Eight of the closest supernovas on his list occurred around the same time as a brief radiocarbon spike. The association was especially strong for four supernovas, including one 13,000 years ago that ended the life of a star in the Vela constellation about 815 light-years from Earth.

Shortly after that explosion, radiocarbon levels shot up briefly by about 3% in Earth's atmosphere, Brakenridge found.

...

He's not the only scientist to suggest that supernovas may have significantly affected life on Earth. Other studies have postulated that nearby star explosions have caused or contributed to some mass extinctions, by altering our planet's atmosphere and causing climatic shifts.

https://www.livescience.com/supernov...tmosphere.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Extinct!? I swear that a few are living under our kitchen sink!

The fascinating saga of "The End of the Trilobites." The bites finally bit that dust.

What did trilobites go extinct?
These armored animals survived for 270 million years.

Trilobites are weird creatures — they look like giant swimming potato bugs wearing helmets, and lived on Earth for a whopping 270 million years. These armored invertebrates, whose species once numbered in the thousands, thrived in the oceans as they scavenged and dug for food, and even managed to survive two mass extinctions.

But about 252 million years ago, trilobites disappeared from the fossil record. What finally wiped out this class of resilient bottom dwellers?

The trilobite's disappearance coincided with the end-Permian extinction (also known as the Permian-Triassic extinction), the third and the most devastating mass extinction event. Volcanic eruptions in Siberia spewed enormous amounts of lava for around 2 million years, according to Melanie Hopkins, an associate curator of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. These fiery eruptions sent trillions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, triggering ocean acidification, which in turn made it very difficult for marine animals to survive, according to a 2010 paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Up to 95% of marine species succumbed to the end-Permian extinction, also known as the Great Dying, including the trilobites.

The trilobites, however, had already started a downward spiral toward extinction by that point. "By the time you get to this mass extinction, there aren't that many trilobites around," Hopkins told Live Science. That's because environmental and evolutionary changes had whittled away at this class of creatures.

Hopkins studies the changes in trilobite body shape and size over time, and how these factors affected their survival. When trilobites first emerged at the beginning of the Cambrian period (541 million to 485 million years ago), they were extremely diverse, potentially because there weren't that many competitors, Hopkins said. Trilobite adaptations during the early Cambrian were mainly related to growth and development, such as variations in how many segments or limbs they had.

But during the Ordovician Period, starting around 485 million years ago, competition and predation came more into play than it had before. At this time "a lot of [trilobite] adaptation is clearly related to ecology," Hopkins said. Some trilobites developed different eye positioning, harder exoskeletons or the ability to roll into a ball. These adaptations, paleontologists suspect, made trilobites more successful on the increasingly competitive ocean floor. And in the long run, these pressures could have constrained the trilobites' recovery from the coming mass extinctions.


Then came the world's first mass extinction: the Ordovician-Silurian extinction around 444 million years ago, caused by a global cooling and a decrease in sea levels, according to the Department of Earth Science at the University of Southern California. The number of trilobites species, once in the thousands, dropped into the hundreds, according to the American Museum of Natural History. Although food webs and ecosystems remained intact, the trilobites "never quite diversify or reach the numbers they achieved previously," Hopkins said. Escalating competition in their ocean habitats may be what kept them from a full rebound.

The second mass extinction, the Late Devonian, hit the trilobites starting around 375 million years ago. The Late Devonian extinction was slower and the cause less specific than the one before and after it. It's harder to study because it happened over a long interval, Hopkins said, but it likely led to a slowing of evolution and diversification. Though the direct cause is less clear, the effect of the second extinction on the trilobites was profound. Entire orders — in biology animals are categorized into orders, families, groups and, finally, species — went extinct. After the second extinction, there was only one family remaining in the class Trilobita: the Proetidae.

"That's all that was left," Hopkins said.

It's unclear what made Proetidae so resilient. They were relatively simple creatures compared with some of the more massive and monstrous trilobites that have existed. By the third extinction, the end-Permian, the competition, predators and environmental changes had flipped the odds against the ancient Proetida. They couldn't withstand the global warming events set in motion by the volcanic eruptions. ...

https://www.livescience.com/why-trilobites-went-extinct.html

Let us dedicate our Zazen sitting today, and offer Metta for the trilobites.

https://youtu.be/wjibmVcvtoE

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Another point where science and Buddhism may meet: Is "friendliness" a key to survival and evolution as much, or more than, competition? Yet friendliness also is a double-edged sword sometimes if we are not careful ...

For most of the approximately 300,000 years that Homo sapiens have existed, we have shared the planet with at least four other types of humans. All of these were smart, strong, and inventive. But around 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens made a cognitive leap that gave us an edge over other species. What happened?

Since Charles Darwin wrote about “evolutionary fitness,” the idea of fitness has been confused with physical strength, tactical brilliance, and aggression. In fact, what made us evolutionarily fit was a remarkable kind of friendliness, a virtuosic ability to coordinate and communicate with others that allowed us to achieve all the cultural and technical marvels in human history. Advancing what they call the “self-domestication theory,” Brian Hare, professor in the department of evolutionary anthropology and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University and his wife, Vanessa Woods, a research scientist and award-winning journalist, shed light on the mysterious leap in human cognition that allowed Homo sapiens to thrive.

But this gift for friendliness came at a cost. Just as a mother bear is most dangerous around her cubs, we are at our most dangerous when someone we love is threatened by an “outsider.” The threatening outsider is demoted to sub-human, fair game for our worst instincts. Hare’s groundbreaking research, developed in close coordination with Richard Wrangham and Michael Tomasello, giants in the field of cognitive evolution, reveals that the same traits that make us the most tolerant species on the planet also make us the cruelest.

https://youtu.be/YaeA8qx4qrc

Gassho, J

[Jundo]

I still get goose bumps. There is "no place to go, nothing to achieve" in this universe, and yet ... let us also reach for the stars!

https://youtu.be/b7gOdS43ezI

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

First, let us remember, and note the passing, of a wondrous bit of technology ... done in by a simple engineering failure ...

Arecibo radio telescope, an icon of astronomy, is lost

The National Science Foundation (NSF) will decommission Arecibo Observatory's massive radio dish after damage has made the facility too dangerous to repair, the agency announced today (Nov. 19).

The announcement came as scientists awaited a verdict about the fate of the iconic observatory after damage to the complex cabling supporting a 900-ton science platform suspended over the dish.

...

Over the years, Arecibo Observatory has revealed new details about our planet's ionosphere, the solar system and worlds beyond it.
Observations made by the telescope helped discover the first binary pulsar in 1974 (which led to the 1993 Nobel Prize in physics), supported NASA's Viking mission, produced the first radar maps of Venus' surface and spotted the first exoplanet in 1992. More recently, Arecibo detected organic molecules in a distant galaxy and discovered the first repeating fast radio burst.

"Over its lifetime, Arecibo Observatory has helped transform our understanding of the ionosphere, showing us how density, composition and other factors interact to shape this critical region where Earth's atmosphere meets space," said Michael Wiltberger, head of NSF's Geospace Section, in a statement.
Fortunately, archival data from the telescope will be migrated to servers outside of the danger zone, continuing the tradition of research and discovery by the telescope for years to come.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/19/w...rnd/index.html

And from quasars, now to quanta ...

Physicists discover the 'Kings and Queens of Quantumness'

... Now, for the first time, physicists have found a way to mathematically define the degree of quantumness that anything — be it particle, atom, molecule or even a planet — exhibits. The result suggests a way to quantify quantumness and identify "the most quantum states" of a system, which the team calls the "Kings and Queens of Quantumness."

In addition to furthering our understanding of the universe, the work could find applications in quantum technologies such as gravitational wave detectors and ultra-precise measurement devices. ...

... "[A]ccording to quantum mechanics, everything is quantum mechanical," Aaron Goldberg, a physicist at the University of Toronto in Canada and lead author of the new paper, told Live Science. "Just because you don't see these strange things every day doesn't mean they aren't there."

What Goldberg means is that classical objects like billiard balls are secretly quantum systems, so there exists some infinitesimally small probability that they will, say, tunnel through the side of a pool table. This suggests that there is a continuum, with "classicalness" on one end and "quantumness" on the other.

A little while back, one of Goldberg's co-authors, Luis Sanchez-Soto of the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain, was giving a lecture when a participant asked him what would be the most quantum state a system could be in. "That triggered everything," Sanchez-Soto told Live Science.

Previous attempts at quantifying quantumness always looked at specific quantum systems, like those containing particles of light, and so the outcomes couldn't necessarily be applied to other systems that included different particles like atoms. Goldberg, Sanchez-Soto and their team searched instead for a generalized way of defining extremes in quantum states.

So what exactly does it mean for something to be "the most quantum?" Here is where the work gets tricky, since it is highly mathematical and difficult to easily visualize.

But Pieter Kok, a physicist at the University of Sheffield in England, who was not involved in writing the new paper, suggested a way to get some grasp on it. One of the most basic physical systems is a simple harmonic oscillator — that is, a ball on the end of a spring moving back and forth, Kok told Live Science.

A quantum particle would be on the classical extreme if it behaved like this ball and spring system, found at specific points in time based on the initial kick it received. But if the particle were to be quantum mechanically smeared out so that it had no well-defined position and was found throughout the pathway of the spring and ball, it would be in one of these quantum extreme states.

Despite their peculiarity, Kok considers the results quite useful and hopes they will find widespread application. Knowing that there is a fundamental limit where a system is acting the most quantum it can is like knowing that the speed of light exists, he said.

"It puts constraints on things that are complicated to analyze," he added.

Goldberg said that the most readily apparent applications should come from quantum metrology, where engineers attempt to measure physical constants and other properties with extreme precision. Gravitational wave detectors, for example, need to be able to measure the distance between two mirrors to better than 1/10,000th the size of an atomic nucleus. Using the team's principles, physicists might be able to improve on this impressive feat.

But the findings could also help researchers in fields such as fiber optical communications, information processing and quantum computing. "There are probably many applications that we haven't even thought about," Goldberg said, excitedly.
https://www.livescience.com/quantify...antumness.html

Gassho, J

STLah