When two microscopic systems are entangled, their properties are linked to each other irrespective of the physical distance between the two. Manipulating this uniquely quantum phenomenon is what allows for quantum cryptography, communication, and computation. While parallels have been drawn between quantum entanglement and the classical physics of heat, new research demonstrates the limits of this comparison. Entanglement is even richer than we have given it credit for.
When two microscopic systems are entangled, their properties are linked to each other irrespective of the physical distance between the two. Manipulating this uniquely quantum phenomenon is what allows for quantum cryptography, communication, and computation. While parallels have been drawn between quantum entanglement and the classical physics of heat, new research demonstrates the limits of this comparison. Entanglement is even richer than we have given it credit for.
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Undergoing a brush with death may sound terrifying. But people who have had a near-death experience (NDE) typically report feeling peace, comfort, and calm throughout the ordeal.
Perhaps it’s the brain’s way of coming to terms with its mortality. Or perhaps something more complex is going on.
Scientists have several theories to explain some of the surprising sensations associated with NDEs, such as physiological changes in the brain as brain cells die.
But a lot about NDEs remains a mystery, in part, because it’s practically impossible to study in real-time, said Dr. Bruce Greyson, a professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia and co-founder of the International Association of Near-Death Studies.
Researchers must rely on anecdotes, memory recall, and in some cases, animal studies to understand how brains change from a NDE and what it could mean for future medicine.
NDEs can trigger a lot of peculiar sensations, including feeling like you’re floating above your body or an out-of-body experience.
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When it comes to describing NDEs, there are two sides to the coin: what’s physically happening to you versus what you’re perceiving on a psychological level.
Physically, NDEs are typically associated with extremely painful events, including a head injury, heart attack, or respiratory arrest.
But psychologically, the brain tends to shut down the sensation of pain — or at least the memory of it.
For example, Julia Nicholson — a former CEO, executive leadership expert, and business consultant — said that she saw the faces of her loved ones vividly flash before her eyes, one by one, during a near-fatal car crash in 1980.
“I don’t remember feeling any pain until I arrived at the hospital,” she recently told Newsweek.
Seeing loved ones — deceased or living — is common among NDEs, as is seeing a bright light at the end of a tunnel.
Other people have reported more corporeal sensations like that of leaving their body, floating above it, feeling physically drawn into that tunnel with the light at the end of it, or having a spiritual encounter with a supreme being, aliens, or lost loved ones.
And all the while, during these other-worldly experiences, people rarely report having felt fear or pain — it’s usually an overwhelming sense of calm and love.
Some of these phenomena can’t be explained by science — at least not yet. But in 2022 the NDE research community received something it had never witnessed before: the brain scan of a dying man.
And it unveiled some secrets that, up to that point, scientists could only speculate.
Shown here is an EEG cap that helps researchers measure brain activity. The man shown here is not the man who died during an EEG scan.
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In 2016, a then-87-year-old man was connected to an electroencephalogram, or EEG, when he unexpectedly had a heart attack and died. Researchers later published the results in Frontiers of Aging Neuroscience.
An EEG measures electrical signals that the brain produces in order to help diagnose or examine certain neurological conditions like seizures and memory loss.
Sure enough, doctors were monitoring the man for a series of recent seizures when his heart suddenly stopped beating.
In the paper, researchers reported that during the 15 seconds leading up to the man’s heart attack, the EEG scan revealed high-frequency brainwaves called gamma oscillations, which are thought to play a role in creating and retrieving memories.
“It is very hard to make claims with one case … but what we can claim is that we have signals just before death and just after the heart stops like those that happen in the healthy human when they dream or memorize or meditate,” lead study author Dr. Ajmal Zemmar told Insider’s Anna Medaris.
Of course, these scans are of a man seconds before death and not exactly equivalent to an NDE, where the person survives. However, such activity may help explain why people see memory flashbacks or faces of people they know during an NDE, Greyson said.
Moreover, EEG scans of people attempting to remember their NDE also provide more clues to what an NDE does to the human brain.
The temporal lobe, highlighted here, is responsible for language and visual memory, among other things.
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When people recall an NDE, the brain “shows increased activity in many different parts,” Greyson said, “such as those associated with memory, vision, hearing, and emotion.”
In particular, the temporal lobe, which is responsible for helping process sound and encode memories, is thought to be associated with out-of-body experiences and memory flashbacks during NDEs, said Dr. David San Filippo, an associate professor at National Louis University and a near-death experience researcher.
“That has led some people to believe that near-death experiences are simply biological, chemical reactions to the brain dying,” San Filippo said.
To that point, a study in rats suggested that the overwhelmingly positive experience people report with NDEs may be linked to a flood of serotonin the brain releases. This may be the brain’s way of gradually preparing the body for death by inducing feelings of euphoria and pain relief, San Filippo said.
While animal studies can offer clues, they’re not an analog to what may be happening in a human and therefore more research is warranted on this topic, Greyson said.
Some researchers think NDEs are just as much spiritual as they might be biological.
Across different age groups and among people in different countries, reports of NDEs are strikingly similar, especially in regards to encountering a spiritual deity or feeling part of something bigger than life on earth, San Filippo said.
“We hear the same story. It might differ based on cultural or spiritual beliefs, but it is essentially the same,” San Filippo said. “That leads us to believe that a near-death experience is a transpersonal experience happening outside of the brain.”
Understanding more about NDEs could help both terminally ill patients and their loved ones through stressful and uncertain times.
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While researching NDEs is a challenge because they’re hard to predict, as researchers come to better understand these phenomena, it could inform new therapies and treatments for people facing terminal illnesses, and their loved ones.
For example, San Filippo said that people in his studies who have had an NDE and recall feeling calm and comforted during the experience report that they no longer fear death.
“If we can learn more about what causes a positive near-death experience that is comfortable and peaceful, we could possibly develop a powerful therapy for people who are in turmoil or struggling,” Rasouli said.
Rasouli added that it could make the concepts of death and dying “become less mysterious and subsequently, less frightening” for us all.
“I think people benefit from hearing stories of NDEs and are comforted by the idea that death is a process and the pain ends,” San Filippo said.
Known as the “god molecule” to psychedelics enthusiasts, N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is said to produce vivid and strangely similar hallucinations for many who take it.
Now, a new extended-state version of the powerful drug may help psychonauts stay there longer than ever before. Among their eccentric goals: to see — and document — whether people are actually entering a shared alternate dimension when they take the stuff.
As The New Republic reports, the Colorado-based psychedelics startup Medicinal Mindfulness is currently seeking approval from the Food and Drug Administration to study what it’s calling DMTx, an extended-state, intravenous drip version of DMT that will induce in users trips far longer than the roughly five-to-ten minute experiences the drug typically provides.
DMT carries with it a ton of intriguing qualities, including that studies suggest our brains produce the drug naturally and that those who have taken it often experience variations on the same theme: entering what seems to be another plane or dimension replete with its own ethereal beings, sometimes referred to as “machine elves,” who are there to welcome them.
While the overwhelming majority of people who’ve taken DMT report a positive experience, the relatively short trip length means that any contact people claim to have with these beings tends not to last too long — confusingly, however, aficionados frequently report that those short trips feel like hours.
With DMTx, however, Medicinal Mindfulness is hoping to lengthen the trip via IV drip to hours or even days, which would, they hypothesize, make it last for an untold amount of time on the other side.
As of now, DMT is legal only for specific, government-approved research purposes in the US, though states like New York and Colorado are looking to legalize it further as researchers and New Age types continue to praise its therapeutic and spiritual uses.
As David McQueen, the cofounder of the Center for Medicinal Mindfulness and key organizer of the DMTx program, told TNR that some of the experiments the group hopes to achieve following FDA approval will look into whether two people hooked to IV drips in different rooms would be able to communicate inside the trip — all, of course, under medical supervision.
To be clear, that finding would be astonishingly surprising, and suggest that what we think we know about reality and consciousness is deeply incomplete. In other words, it would be trippy as hell.
As unlikely as that would be though, we’ll certainly be watching.
More on psychedelics: Former CEO Sues Company That Fired Him for Microdosing LSD in an Investor Meeting
The post Startup Trying to Test Whether People on DMT Experience a Shared Alien Universe appeared first on Futurism.
An international team of physicists has cooked up with a new theory that could allow for objects to travel faster than the speed of light — and while they say it wouldn’t technically violate the laws of physics, it would lead to phenomena so mind-bending that it’d make the end of “Interstellar” look normal.
To wit, according to ScienceAlert‘s analysis of the team’s new paper in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, travelers moving faster than the speed of light would “experience” multiple timelines at once.
How, you might ask? Through a “1+3 space-time” framework, which flips the idea of three spatial dimensions and one time dimension in favor of three time dimensions and a single spatial dimension.
“The other three dimensions are time dimensions,” said coauthor Andrzej Dragan from the University of Warsaw in Poland in statement about the work. “From the point of view of such an observer, the particle ‘ages’ independently in each of the three times.”
Does that make any sense from our puny human perspective? We’re honestly not sure.
But it is a mind-bending exploration of an exotic what-if, not to mention yet another example of researchers playing around with the decidedly “Star Trek” concept of faster-than-light travel. An added bonus? In theory, the scientists say, the framework might even help reconcile Einstein’s theory of relativity with quantum mechanics, two sets of rules in physics that have yet to play nicely after many decades.
“This new definition preserves Einstein’s postulate of constancy of the speed of light in vacuum even for superluminal observers,” Dragan said in the statement. “Therefore, our extended special relativity does not seem like a particularly extravagant idea.”
Look, it sounds very cool. But then again, so did “Tenet” — and we all saw how that one turned out.
More on quantum physics: Physicist Says the Laws of Physics Don’t Actually Exist
The post Traveling Faster Than Light Would Mean Experiencing Multiple Timelines Simultaneously appeared first on Futurism.
Quantum telepathy, laser-based time crystals, a glow from empty space and an “unreal” universe—these are the most awesome (and awfully hard to understand) results from the subatomic realm we encountered in 2022
The majority of physicists live under the assumption of a strict and immutable set of laws that govern the universe — but not all.
“What we often call laws of physics are really just consistent mathematical theories that seem to match some parts of nature,” theoretical physicist Sankar Das Sarma writes in the beginning of a must-read new column in New Scientist column. These laws of physics are meant to describe our shared reality, even if they “evolve as our empirical knowledge of the universe improves.”
“Here’s the thing,” Sarma continues. “Despite many scientists viewing their role as uncovering these ultimate laws, I just don’t believe they exist.”
Prior to Albert Einstein’s groundbreaking — and ultimately unfinished — attempts to create a theory of everything, and all the leaps in fields like quantum mechanics that followed, the physicist argues, such an assertion wouldn’t have seemed outlandish.
Indeed, Sarma says he finds it “amazing” that humans “can make sense of some aspects of the universe through the laws of physics” at all.
“As we discover more about nature, we can hone our descriptions of it, but it is never-ending,” he writes. “Like peeling an infinite onion, the more we peel, the more there is to peel.”
Pointing to the concept of the multiverse, or an infinite number of universes, Sarma ponders how humans could have such hubris as to imagine that the apparent rules that seem to govern our reality would apply in every universe.
Raising a theoretical argument, Sarma adds that even in the face of a theory as substantial as quantum mechanics, which he describes as being “more like a set of rules that we use to express our laws rather than being an ultimate law itself,” there remain too many mysteries and variables to ever consider this so-called fundamental theory sacrosanct.
“It is difficult to imagine that a thousand years from now physicists will still use quantum mechanics as the fundamental description of nature,” he continues. “Something else should replace quantum mechanics by that time just as quantum mechanics itself replaced Newtonian mechanics.”
What that replacement may be, Sarma declines to speculate. But he nevertheless sees “no particular reason that our description of how the physical universe seems to work should reach the pinnacle suddenly in the beginning of the 21st century and become stuck forever at quantum mechanics.”
“That would,” he adds, “be a truly depressing thought!”
More on physics: Those Headlines About Scientists Building a Wormhole Are Total Nonsense, People
The post Physicist Says the Laws of Physics Don’t Actually Exist appeared first on Futurism.
The equivalent to a wormhole in spacetime has been created on a quantum processor. Researchers in the US used an advanced quantum teleportation protocol to open the wormhole and send quantum signals through it. By studying the dynamics of the transmitted quantum information, the team gained insights into gravitational dynamics. The experiment could be further developed to explore quantum gravity or string theory.
A wormhole is a bridge in spacetime that connects two different locations. While wormholes are consistent with Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, they have not been observed by physicists. Unlike wormholes in science fiction, they are not traversable – meaning things cannot pass through them.
Although general relativity forbids travelling through a wormhole, it is theorized that exotic matter – matter with negative energy density and negative pressure – could open a wormhole and make it traversable. But these theories are difficult to test, even if one could create a wormhole in a lab.
But physics has a trick up its sleeve – in the form of the quantum teleportation of information between two entangled particles. This process occurs instantaneously and therefore emulates the process of sending quantum information through a gravitational wormhole. In both cases, however, it is not possible to communicate faster than the speed of light because a subluminal signal is required to decode the information.
Quantum entanglement plays an important role in quantum computing, therefore a quantum processors is the ideal experimental device to explore the similarities between quantum teleportation and wormholes. In this scenario, quantum bits – or qubits – on the quantum processor are entangled with each other and teleportation is the equivalent of the qubit travelling through a wormhole.
Now Maria Spiropulu at Caltech, Daniel Jafferis at Harvard University and colleagues have done such an experiment. Their aim was to create a system that has the right ingredients for the type of teleportation that resembles a wormhole.
An important challenge that they first had to overcome is that it appeared that a large number of qubits would be needed to perform the experiment properly – many more qubits than are available in today’s quantum processors. To solve this problem, the researchers used machine learning to work out the minimum number of qubits required and how they should be coded to set up the quantum teleportation protocol. They discovered that they could create the wormhole dynamics on nine qubits with 164 two-qubit gates on a Google Sycamore quantum processor.
In their experiment the researchers showed that they could keep a wormhole open for a sufficient amount of time by applying negative energy shockwaves, which came in the form of special pulses of quantum fields. They then studied the dynamics of the quantum information that was sent through. Signals that travel through a wormhole experience a series of scrambling and unscrambling, with the quantum information exiting the wormhole intact.
On the Sycamore processor, they measured how much quantum information passed from one side to the other, when applying a negative versus a positive energy shockwave. And because only negative energy shockwaves would open up the wormhole, they found that only these shockwaves allowed signals to pass through. Overall, the information passing through the wormhole had key signatures of a traversable wormhole. This constitutes a step towards probing gravitational physics using quantum processors and could lead to the development of powerful testbeds to study ideas of string theory and quantum gravity.
Juan Maldacena at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, US, who was not involved in the research, describes the work as an interesting first step in trying to create complex quantum systems that can have an emergent spacetime description. He thinks the result is important because it is a demonstration that allows us to experimentally test some of the theoretical ideas about the connection between quantum mechanics and emergent spacetime geometry. He says the research’s biggest achievement is that it has reproduced a kind of quantum teleportation that is inspired by gravitational problems.
Team member Daniel Jafferis believes that there are many additional protocols and new ideas to explore and he expects more “gravity experiments” to be performed by quantum computers in the future. He thinks that some of these will require much larger quantum computers or much deeper circuits, but that others are well-suited for near-term experimentation.
“One of the things we would like to do next is to realize somewhat larger systems and try to observe more detailed structure of the emergent wormholes and their gravitational dynamics”, he tells Physics World.
Edward Witten, also at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and not involved in research, says that Jafferis and colleagues have done a nice job of describing a simplified version of the quantum teleportation protocol, which might be practical experimentally. He calls this experiment – or in general the presumed improvements that would then be possible – a “milestone” in developing control over microscopic quantum systems. He states that even though such an experiment would certainly not give the sort of information that comes from physics experiments such as LIGO or the Large Hadron Collider, success with future experiments would confirm the validity of quantum mechanics in a rather subtle situation and also confirm that the theory has been analysed correctly.
The research is described in Nature.
The post Quantum teleportation opens a ‘wormhole in spacetime’ appeared first on Physics World.
Scientists used a quantum computer to explore the ultimate escape route from a black hole.