News Revisited

Every time I read about a study that tries to explain some quirk of quantum mechanics or gravity by using more dimensions I get a little smirk on my face.  I just can’t help it.  It seems to me that a lot of theories  (such as parts of string theory) are based on people just making crap up and saying, well that sort of works as long as we tweak these values over here and adjust those formulas over there and insert this new constant here.  Ok, yes, they could very well be right.  Yes, they are far smarter than me and know way more.  I’m not saying that I don’t think there aren’t other dimensions.  It just twists my brain when I see people inventing new dimensions to solve a problem.  While it may be absolutely logical to do so it seems like a bit of a cop out to me unless your theory is testable or at least based on some real evidence.

The latest example is a possible explanation of dark energy.  Dark energy is that force we can’t seem to identify that is pushing the universe apart.  So, what is it?  I don’t know.  NewScientist reports Brian Greene and Janna Levin of Columbia University in New York have sketched out a possible solution involving quantum vibrations contained within 0.01 millimeter sized dimensions.  The most interesting thing about this idea, unlike so many others, though is that it should be testable.  According to their theory gravity would become stronger at distances of less than 0.01 millimeter.  So, if they are right we should be able to tell.  So far they have demonstrated that gravity is not any stronger in the 0.1 millimeter range so they are getting close.  It’ll be interesting to see where this leads.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has demonstrated that entangled photons remain entangled even when one of the pair travels 144km (~89 miles) through the Earth’s atmosphere reports EurekAlert.

They used a specially built quantum optical terminal at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma in the Canary Islands to generate entangled pairs of photons and then sent one of each pair on its way toward the ESA’s one meter telescope on Tenerife about 89 miles away while holding onto the other photon from each pair for comparison.  The photons made the journey while maintaining their entanglement.  This means that it is possible to use quantum encryption for communication with satellites.

ScienceDialy reports scientists at National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), NTT Corp. in Japan, and Stanford University have successfully transmitted quantum keys over a 200 kilometer fiber-optic link.  They say one key to this achievement was low noise, ultra fast, superconducting, single-photon detectors developed in Russia.  Looks like quantum cryptology is coming…

Science Daily reports scientists at the Paul Drude Institute for Solid State Electronics (PDI) in Berlin have manipulated flux quanta (the smallest possible magnetic fields) in well defined ways using acoustic waves.  This may open new ways of processing data instead of relying on eletrons which cannot really be pinned down or electron spin orientation which is not permanent.