Lifeboat Foundation

As the world’s political and business leaders gathered at Davos, it fell to a professor from the University of Bristol to reveal to them the full implications of a ‘fourth industrial revolution’.

Professor Jeremy O’Brien, director of the Centre for Quantum Photonics at the University of Bristol, addressed some of the most powerful people in the world yesterday at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland – to tell them just how rapidly quantum computers could change the world.

Part of the European Research Council (ERC) Ideas Lab delegation, Professor O’Brien has been actively involved with the WEF over the past few years and recently took on the role of co-chair of the Global Future Council on Computing. Last year he presented a talk on working towards a quantum computer discussing the future of computing and how new fields of computer sciences are paving the way for the next digital revolution.

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(Phys.org)—Physicists have proposed that violations of energy conservation in the early universe, as predicted by certain modified theories of quantum mechanics and quantum gravity, may explain the cosmological constant problem, which is sometimes referred to as “the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics.”

The physicists, Thibaut Josset and Alejandro Perez at the University of Aix-Marseille, France, and Daniel Sudarsky at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, have published a paper on their proposal in a recent issue Physical Review Letters.

“The main achievement of the work was the unexpected relation between two apparently very distinct issues, namely the accelerated expansion of the universe and microscopic physics,” Josset told Phys.org. “This offers a fresh look at the cosmological constant problem, which is still far from being solved.”

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A sixteen-year-old student from Terenure College has created a highly-encrypted solution that is resistant against quantum computers.

It will be amazing how this advances with Quantum.

Once injected into the body, a new material can repeatedly release small bursts of local anesthetic when zapped by low-intensity, near-infrared light for one minute (Nano Lett. 2016, DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.6b03588). The material’s developers, who have tested it in rats, say the on-demand system could make pain management safer and more effective, and give patients more control.

More on the completion of phase 1 testing of by the Chinese on their Quantum Satellite as they have kicked their second phase that includes hacking.

Five space exploration projects to begin during 13th Five-Year Plan

Micius, the world’s first quantum satellite, has successfully completed four months of in-orbit tests since China launched it on Aug 16, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has announced.

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Se in Si —

Back to the future: Silicon may work for quantum computing.

The qualities of hydrogen and skill with silicon make for bright qubit future.

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The PBR theorem is another theorem of quantum mechanics, which could go alongside Bell’s Theorem and the Kochen-Specker Theorem. I wrote this explanation in 2011, before the paper was officially published in Nature. Since then, it’s been recognized as a moderately important theorem, and it has been named after its three authors (Pusey, Barrett, and Rudolph). But at the time I didn’t really know whether it would become important.

There’s a new paper on arxiv called “The quantum state cannot be interpreted statistically “. It has a theorem which proves that, given a few basic assumptions, the quantum state (ie the wavefunction) must be real, rather than a merely statistical object. Nature has an article which mostly just harps on how “seismic” the paper is.

Nature (correction: the article’s author, not Nature itself) compares its importance to Bell’s Theorem, which is a very important result indeed from 1964. Bell’s theorem proved that if there were “hidden variables” underneath the quantum state, then entangled particles must be communicating with each other faster than light. I’ve explained Bell’s theorem in the past.

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According to quantum mechanics, a vacuum isn’t empty at all. It’s actually filled with quantum energy and particles that blink in and out of existence for a fleeting moment — strange signals that are known as quantum fluctuations.

For decades, there had only ever been indirect evidence of these fluctuations, but back in 2015, researchers claimed to have detected the theoretical fluctuations directly. And now the same team says they’ve gone a step further, having manipulated the vacuum itself, and detecting the changes in these strange signals in the void.

We’re entering the territory of high-level physics here, but what’s really important in this experiment is that, if these results are confirmed, the researchers might have just unlocked a way to observe, probe, and test the quantum realm without interfering with it.

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Nice; ReRam with multi-state processing and reliable storage.

Short of full blown molecular computers or universal quantum computers or optical computers memristors have the most potential for a hardware change to dramatically boost the power and capabilities of computers. The boost to computer power could be nearly a million times by fully leveraging memristors. It would likely be more like a thousand times with more near to mid term usage of memristors.

Memristors (aka ReRAM) could become computer memory that is over 10 times denser than Flash or DRAM in two dimensions. Memristors like flash would be nonvolatile memory that would not need power for retain memory. Memristors are created from nanowire lattices which could be stacked in three dimensions. Memristors have also previously been shown to behave like brain synapses which could be used for computer architectures that emulate the human brain for neuromorphic computing. Now there is work on multistate memristors that perform computation. This means that eventually processing and memory could be tightly integrated.

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