The study, led by UBC Psychology Asst. Prof. Jessica Tracy with co-authors Joshua Hart, assistant professor of psychology at Union College, and UBC psychology PhD student Jason Martens, is the first of its kind to examine the implicit psychological motives that underpin one of the most heated debates in North America. Despite scientific consensus that intelligent design theory is inherently unscientific, 25 percent of high school biology teachers in the U.S. devote at least some class time to the topic of intelligent design.

“Our results suggest that when confronted with existential concerns, people respond by searching for a sense of meaning and purpose in life,” says Tracy. “For many, it appears that evolutionary theory doesn’t offer enough of a compelling answer to deal with these big questions.”

However, the study also indicated that those individuals who were inclined toward the belief in naturalism – the scientific approach that underlies evolution, but not intelligent design – showed reduced belief in intelligent design after being reminded of their own mortality. Carl Sagan, the cosmologist science writer, argued that the belief in naturalism can also provide a sense of meaning.

Tracy says, “These findings suggest that individuals can come to see evolution as a meaningful solution to existential concerns, but may need to be explicitly taught that taking a naturalistic approach to understanding life can be highly meaningful.”

So where are we in our pursuit of fitting together the theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics?

The Large Hadron Collider, the atom smasher potentially capable of producing the Higgs boson particle – a.k.a. the elusive “God Particle” – could possibly be the world’s first machine to project matter through time.

Tom Weiler of Vanderbilt University and graduate fellow Chui Man Ho theorize that if the Collider succeeds in generating the Higgs boson particle, a second particle could also be generated, called the Higgs singlet. This Higgs singlet, according to the researchers’ theory, could become transported into an extra dimension where it can easily jump forward or backward in time.

They admit their theory is a long shot, but they also acknowledge that it doesn’t violate any laws of physics or experimental constraints.

“One of the attractive things about this approach to time travel is that it avoids all the big paradoxes,” Weiler said. “Because time travel is limited to these special particles, it is not possible for a man to travel back in time and murder one of his parents before he himself is born, for example. However, if scientists could control the production of Higgs singlets, they might be able to send messages to the past or future.”

The researchers’ assumptions are based on M-theory, a “theory of everything,” which defines the basic structure of our existence and involves an eleven-dimensional universe in which the weak and strong forces and gravity are unified and ties together the five superstring theories. The M-theory includes a four-dimensional membrane floating in a multi-dimensional space-time. Though our basic building blocks of the universe are stuck to this “brane,” the singlets are believed to be beyond the basic force of the brane that would cause it to stay in one dimension.

Professor Geoff Hall from the Department of Physics at Imperial College London, who works on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, said: “We have made an important step forward in the hunt for dark matter, although no discovery has yet been made. These results have come faster than we expected because the LHC and CMS ran better last year than we dared hope and we are now very optimistic about the prospects of pinning down Supersymmetry in the next few years.”

If successful, the LHC will – among other objectives – track the hypothetical Higgs boson particle, otherwise known as the God particle, believed to be the force which turned mass into solid matter soon after the creation of the universe 13.7 billion years ago.

In Olson and Ralph’s mathematical model, a new type of quantum entanglement extends not through space, but through time. “If you use our timelike entanglement, you find that [a quantum message] moves in time, while skipping over the intermediate points,” Olson said. “There really is no difference mathematically. Whatever you can do with ordinary entanglement, you should be able to do with timelike entanglement.”

In this respect, a message from one particle can travel from the present to the future of the other particle, without existing in the time in between the two points, providing a shortcut into the future. “You can send your quantum state into the future without traversing the middle time,” said Olson, lead author of the new study.

In addition, the time of day must be in alignment for the transference to take place. “If the past detector was active at a quarter to 12:00, then the future detector must wait to become active at precisely a quarter past 12:00 in order to achieve entanglement,” suggesting such a protocol might be called “teleportation in time.”

Quantum entanglement is believed to explain a fundamental reality of our universe

Source: arxiv.org/abs/1101.2565 “Extraction Of Timelike Entanglement From The Quantum Vacuum”

“We can now calculate how, from a single electron, several hundred particles can be produced. We believe this happens in nature near pulsars and neutron stars,” said Igor Sokolov, an engineering research scientist who conducted this research along with associate research scientist John Nees, emeritus electrical engineering professor Gerard Mourou and their colleagues in France.

Using a high-energy electron beam combined with an intense laser pulse, particles and anti-particles can be produced out of nothing more than a vacuum, based on new equations developed by researchers at the University of Michigan.

The core of the research is derived from the concept that a vacuum is not exactly nothing but rather a combination of dense matter and anti-matter, which destroy each other when they come into contact under normal conditions.

To Sokolov, his work can be viewed upon from a philosophical perspective.

“The basic question what is a vacuum, and what is nothing, goes beyond science,” he said. “It’s embedded deeply in the base not only of theoretical physics, but of our philosophical perception of everything — of reality, of life, even the religious question of could the world have come from nothing.”

Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore: Researchers have uncovered a fundamental link between the two defining properties of quantum physics. Stephanie Wehner of Singapore’s Centre for Quantum Technologies and the National University of Singapore and Jonathan Oppenheim of the United Kingdom’s University of Cambridge published their work today in the latest edition of the journal Science.

The result is being heralded as a dramatic breakthrough in our basic understanding of quantum mechanics and provides new clues to researchers seeking to understand the foundations of quantum theory. The result addresses the question of why quantum behavior is as weird as it is—but no weirder.

The strange behavior of quantum particles, such as atoms, electrons and the photons that make up light, has perplexed scientists for nearly a century. Albert Einstein was among those who thought the quantum world was so strange that quantum theory must be wrong, but experiments have borne out the theory’s predictions.

One of the weird aspects of quantum theory is that it is impossible to know certain things, such as a particle’s momentum and position, simultaneously. Knowledge of one of these properties affects the accuracy with which you can learn the other. This is known as the “Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.”

Another weird aspect is the quantum phenomenon of non-locality, which arises from the better-known phenomenon of entanglement. When two quantum particles are entangled, they can perform actions that look as if they are coordinated with each other in ways that defy classical intuition about physically separated particles.

Previously, researchers have treated non-locality and uncertainty as two separate phenomena. Now Wehner and Oppenheim have shown that they are intricately linked. What’s more, they show that this link is quantitative and have found an equation which shows that the “amount” of non-locality is determined by the uncertainty principle.

“It’s a surprising and perhaps ironic twist,” said Oppenheim, a Royal Society University Research Fellow from the Department of Applied Mathematics & Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge. Einstein and his co-workers discovered non-locality while searching for a way to undermine the uncertainty principle. “Now the uncertainty principle appears to be biting back.”

Non-locality determines how well two distant parties can coordinate their actions without sending each other information. Physicists believe that even in quantum mechanics, information cannot travel faster than light. Nevertheless, it turns out that quantum mechanics allows two parties to coordinate much better than would be possible under the laws of classical physics. In fact, their actions can be coordinated in a way that almost seems as if they had been able to talk. Einstein famously referred to this phenomenon as “spooky action at a distance.”

However, quantum non-locality could be even spookier than it actually is. It’s possible to have theories which allow distant parties to coordinate their actions much better than nature allows, while still not allowing information to travel faster than light. Nature could be weirder, and yet it isn’t – quantum theory appears to impose an additional limit on the weirdness.

“Quantum theory is pretty weird, but it isn’t as weird as it could be. We really have to ask ourselves, why is quantum mechanics this limited? Why doesn’t nature allow even stronger non-locality?” Oppenheim says.

The surprising result by Wehner and Oppenheim is that the uncertainty principle provides an answer. Two parties can only coordinate their actions better if they break the uncertainty principle, which imposes a strict bound on how strong non-locality can be.

“It would be great if we could better coordinate our actions over long distances, as it would enable us to solve many information processing tasks very efficiently,” Wehner says. “However, physics would be fundamentally different. If we break the uncertainty principle, there is really no telling what our world would look like.”

How did the researchers discover a connection that had gone unnoticed so long? Before entering academia, Wehner worked as a ‘computer hacker for hire’, and now works in quantum information theory, while Oppenheim is a physicist. Wehner thinks that applying techniques from computer science to the laws of theoretical physics was key to spotting the connection. “I think one of the crucial ideas is to link the question to a coding problem,” Wehner says. “Traditional ways of viewing non-locality and uncertainty obscured the close connection between the two concepts.”

Wehner and Oppenheim recast the phenomena of quantum physics in terms that would be familiar to a computer hacker. They treat non-locality as the result of one party, Alice, creating and encoding information and a second party, Bob, retrieving information from the encoding. How well Alice and Bob can encode and retrieve information is determined by uncertainty relations. In some situations, they found that and a third property known as “steering” enters the picture.

Wehner and Oppenheim compare their discovery to uncovering what determines how easily two players can win a quantum board game: the board has only two squares, on which Alice, can place a counter of two possible colors: green or pink. She is told to place the same colour on both squares, or to place a different color on each. Bob has to guess the color that Alice put on square one or two. If his guess is correct, Alice and Bob win the game. Clearly, Alice and Bob could win the game if they could talk to each other: Alice would simply tell Bob what colors are on squares one and two. But Bob and Alice are situated so far apart from each other that light – and thus an information-carrying signal – does not have time to pass between them during the game.

If they can’t talk, they won’t always win, but by measuring on quantum particles, they can win the game more often than any strategy which doesn’t rely on quantum theory. However, the uncertainty principle prevents them from doing any better, and even determines how often they lose the game.

The finding bears on the deep question of what principles underlie quantum physics. Many attempts to understand the underpinnings of quantum mechanics have focused on non-locality. Wehner thinks there may be more to gain from examining the details of the uncertainty principle. “However, we have barely scratched the surface of understanding uncertainty relations,” she says.

The breakthrough is future-proof, the researchers say. Scientists are still searching for a quantum theory of gravity and Wehner and Oppenheim’s result concerning non-locality, uncertainty and steering applies to all possible theories – including any future replacement for quantum mechanics.

As Hogan explains in a recent issue of Fermilab’s symmetry magazine, the holometer will be “the most sensitive measurement ever made of spacetime itself.”

While interferometers have been used for more than 100 years, the key to the holometer is achieving extreme precision at high frequencies. The holometer will be seven orders of magnitude more precise than any atomic clock in existence over very short time intervals.

Any detected high-frequency noise could be the jitter of spacetime itself, or “holographic noise.” The noise is expected to have a frequency of a million cycles per second, which is a thousand times higher than what the human ear can hear. If the experiment does find this holographic noise, it would be the first glimpse beyond our three-dimensional illusion and into the universe’s true two-dimensional nature at the Planck scale.

PhysOrg.com: Results from one of the detectors in the Large Hadron Collider experiment indicated that “some of the particles are intimately linked in a way not seen before in proton collisions,” the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said on its website.

The phenomenon showed up as a “ridge-like structure” on computer mapping graphs based on data from billions of proton collisions in the 3.9-billion-euro (5.2-billion-dollar) machine.

The 27-kilometer (16.8-mile) circular particle accelerator buried under the French-Swiss border is recreating powerful but microscopic bursts of energy that mimic conditions close to the Big Bang that created the universe.

The CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) detector, one of six experiments around the accelerator, is designed to search for for the elusive and so far theoretical Higgs Boson, commonly nicknamed the “God Particle.”

It is also aimed at shedding light on components of dark matter, the mysterious invisible void that makes up 26 percent of the universe.

Imperial College London: The sun’s activity has recently affected the Earth’s atmosphere and climate in unexpected ways, according to a new study published today in the journal Nature

The Sun’s activity has recently affected the Earth’s atmosphere and climate in unexpected ways, according to a new study published today in the journal Nature. The study, by researchers from Imperial College London and the University of Colorado, shows that a decline in the Sun’s activity does not always mean that the Earth becomes cooler.

It is well established that the Sun’s activity waxes and wanes over an 11-year cycle and that as its activity wanes, the overall amount of radiation reaching the Earth decreases. Today’s study looked at the Sun’s activity over the period 2004-2007, when it was in a declining part of its 11-year activity cycle.

Although the Sun’s activity declined over this period, the new research shows that it may have actually caused the Earth to become warmer. Contrary to expectations, the amount of energy reaching the Earth at visible wavelengths increased rather than decreased as the Sun’s activity declined, causing this warming effect.

Following this surprising finding, the researchers behind the study believe it is possible that the inverse is also true and that in periods when the Sun’s activity increases, it tends to cool, rather than warm, the Earth. This is based on what is already known about the relationship between the Sun’s activity and its total energy output.

Overall solar activity has been increasing over the past century, so the researchers believe it is possible that during this period, the Sun has been contributing a small cooling effect, rather than a small warming effect as had previously been thought.

Professor Joanna Haigh, the lead author of the study who is Head of the Department of Physics and member of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London, said: “These results are challenging what we thought we knew about the Sun’s effect on our climate. However, they only show us a snapshot of the Sun’s activity and its behaviour over the three years of our study could be an anomaly.

“We cannot jump to any conclusions based on what we have found during this comparatively short period and we need to carry out further studies to explore the Sun’s activity, and the patterns that we have uncovered, on longer timescales. However, if further studies find the same pattern over a longer period of time, this could suggest that we may have overestimated the Sun’s role in warming the planet, rather than underestimating it.”

Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, the Director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London, added: “We know that the Earth’s climate is affected both by human activity and by natural forces and today’s study improves our understanding of how the Sun influences our climate. Studies like this are vital for helping us to create a clear picture of how our climate is changing and through this, to work out how we can best protect our planet.”

The researchers used satellite data and computer modelling to analyse how the spectrum of radiation and the amount of energy from the Sun has been changing since 2004. Instruments on the SORCE satellite have been measuring the Sun’s energy output at many different wavelengths. The researchers fed the data from SORCE into an existing computer model of the Earth’s atmosphere and compared their results with the results obtained using earlier, less comprehensive, data on the solar spectrum.