Quantum, Strings and Antimatter

I'm fascinated with quantum and particle physics. Granted, I don't understand much. I understand as much as popular science books teach. In a different life (and with a smarter brain), I'd love to have been a scientist. Even my current WIP (ending now - yay) is about quantum physics and hence the connection to writing. To my writing anyways. But that would explain why I try to follow important developments in the fields.

Three developments caught my attention this past week. To see if I can understand them, I'll try to very briefly explain them here. And if I can explain them here without giving anyone a headache and more so, with people actually understanding, I'd be more confident I've also done it in my novel.

I'll start with quantum computers. The future of computers is quantum computers. These computers will take advantage of one of quantum physics wonders - particle entanglement. The entanglement is a bizarre characteristics of the particles which allows them to correlate to one another instantly, thus transferring information instantly as well. This will allow quantum computers to operate millions times faster than regular supercomputers.
This week's breakthrough has to do with overcoming the distances at which this entanglement happens.

Second is string theory. Without getting into it (I doubt I could even if I tried), string theory is a theory that was devised by scientists to explain contradictions between quantum physics and general relativity theory. This week, from string theory, another explanation to the beginning of the universe was put forth. The interesting point to me is that the prevalent Big Bang explanation suggests that time existed before the Big Bang, however, this new string theory-based explanation suggests that time started with a Big Bang-like event.

Finally, antimatter. Once, when I talked about art, I mentioned aesthetics. Scientists, like artists, like aesthetics. They've always liked theories that contributed to an aesthetic design of the world. Aesthetics in science comes mostly in the form of symmetry and one of the puzzling problems was the apparent lack of symmetry between matter and antimatter in the universe. This week's discovery brought scientists closer to the supersymmetry theory when they made a discovery about particles that oscillate between the two states (matter and antimatter) and how often they do that.

So that's it. Hope it wasn't too boring.

Categories: science, quantum, physics, writing