Category: Quantum Stuff

In 2019, Noel and her colleagues began collaborating with two theorists who had come up with an easier way of doing the experiment. They had worked out a way of setting aside one qubit that, like a canary in a coal mine, could serve as a bellwether for the state of the entire chain. The… Continue reading Physicists Observe ‘Unobservable’ Quantum Phase Transition

Scientists have recognized that memory formation is a multistage process since at least the early 1950s, in part from their studies of a patient named Henry Molaison — known for decades in the scientific literature only as H.M. Because he suffered from uncontrollable seizures that originated in his hippocampus, surgeons treated him by removing most… Continue reading The Usefulness of a Memory Guides Where the Brain Saves It

Now, with the use of not just computers but even AI, how is the notion of proof changing? We’ve moved to a different place, where computers can do some wild things. Now people say, oh, we’ve got this computer, it can do things people can’t. But can it? Can it actually do things people can’t?… Continue reading Why Mathematical Proof Is a Social Compact

Algorithms have become ubiquitous. They optimize our commutes, process payments and coordinate the flow of internet traffic. It seems that for every problem that can be articulated in precise mathematical terms, there’s an algorithm that can solve it, at least in principle. But that’s not the case — some seemingly simple problems can never be… Continue reading Alan Turing and the Power of Negative Thinking

Some event or series of events early in the history of life must have “broken the mirror,” as biochemists put it, throwing life into molecular asymmetry. Scientists have debated why life became homochiral, and whether it needed to happen or if it was purely a fluke. Were chiral preferences impressed on early life by biased… Continue reading Magnetism May Have Given Life Its Molecular Asymmetry

It’s one of the biggest cliches in crime and science fiction: An investigator pulls up a blurry photo on a computer screen and asks for it to be enhanced, and boom, the image comes into focus, revealing some essential clue. It’s a wonderful storytelling convenience, but it’s been a frustrating fiction for decades — blow… Continue reading The AI Tools Making Images Look Better

Dehaene favored the second experiment, which also involved the comprehensive decoding of brain patterns. Test subjects would be randomly exposed to faces and objects flashed on a screen while they played a distracting Tetris-like video game. Shortly after an image was shown, the game would stop and the subject would be asked whether they saw… Continue reading What a Contest of Consciousness Theories Really Proved

Through these checks — and more subtle tweaks of the iffy qubits — you can also hide a reliable qubit throughout the square block’s data-carrying qubits, not exactly here or there but sort of everywhere. As long as the iffy qubits keep the Minesweeper operations humming along smoothly, the hidden qubit stays safe and can… Continue reading New Codes Could Make Quantum Computing 10 Times More Efficient