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Category: physics

Physicists working with Microsoft think the universe is a self-learning computer

A team of theoretical physicists working with Microsoft today published an amazing pre-print research paper describing the universe as a self-learning system of evolutionary laws.

In other words: We live inside a computer that learns.

The big idea: Bostrom’s Simulation Argument has been a hot topic in science circles lately. We published “What if you’re living in a simulation, but there’s no computer” recently to posit a different theory, but Microsoft’s pulled a cosmic “hold my beer” with this paper.

Lab-made hexagonal diamonds stiffer than natural diamonds

Nature’s strongest material now has some stiff competition. For the first time, researchers have hard evidence that human-made hexagonal diamonds are stiffer than the common cubic diamonds found in nature and often used in jewelry.

Named for their six-sided , hexagonal diamonds have been found at some meteorite impact sites, and others have been made briefly in labs, but these were either too small or had too short of an existence to be measured.

Now scientists at Washington State University’s Institute for Shock Physics created hexagonal diamonds large enough to measure their stiffness using . Their findings are detailed in a recent paper in Physical Review B.

Mysterious Glow Caught in Our Galaxy’s Center Really Could Be Due to Dark Matter

The center of the Milky Way is mysteriously glowing.

Sure, there’s a whole bunch of stars there, along with a black hole 4 million times the mass of the Sun — but subtract the light from all that, and we’re still left with this mysterious excess gamma radiation that suffuses the region.

It’s called the Galactic Center GeV Excess (GCE), and it’s puzzled scientists since its discovery by physicists Lisa Goodenough and Dan Hooper in 2009. In data from NASA’s Fermi telescope, they found excess gamma radiation — some of the most energetic light in the Universe — and we haven’t been able to directly detect whatever is causing it.

The realization of a new type of information demon that profits from gambling strategies

Researchers at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Italy and the PICO group at Aalto University in Finland have introduced the idea of an information demon that follows a customary gambling strategy to stop non-equilibrium processes at stochastic times. The new demons they realized, which differ from the renowned Maxwell’s demon, were presented in a paper published in Physical Review Letters.

“Our research was driven by curiosity,” Gonzalo Manzano, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “We asked ourselves about the implications of processes whose fluctuations fulfill (or break) some strong properties of stochastic processes on the link between thermodynamics and information.”

The recent study by Gonzalo Manzano, Edgar Roldan and their colleagues is based on previous works investigating the link between information and thermodynamics at the stochastic level. It also draws inspiration from recent research that explored the properties of a unique family of stochastic processes known as martingales in the context of thermodynamics.

Origin of Solar-Mass Black Holes and the Connection to Dark Matter

What is the origin of black holes and how is that question connected with another mystery, the nature of dark matter? Dark matter comprises the majority of matter in the Universe, but its nature remains unknown.

Multiple gravitational wave detections of merging black holes have been identified within the last few years by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), commemorated with the 2017 physics Nobel Prize to Kip Thorne, Barry Barish, and Rainer Weiss. A definitive confirmation of the existence of black holes was celebrated with the 2020 physics Nobel Prize awarded to Andrea Ghez, Reinhard Genzel and Roger Penrose. Understanding the origin of black holes has thus emerged as a central issue in physics.

Surprisingly, LIGO has recently observed a 2.6 solar-mass black hole candidate (event GW190814, reported in Astrophysical Journal Letters 896 (2020) 2, L44). Assuming this is a black hole, and not an unusually massive neutron star, where does it come from?

Using artificial intelligence to generate 3D holograms in real-time

https://youtube.com/watch?v=NOujMHH3LAU

Holograms deliver an exceptional representation of 3D world around us. Plus, they’re beautiful. (Go ahead — check out the holographic dove on your Visa card.) Holograms offer a shifting perspective based on the viewer’s position, and they allow the eye to adjust focal depth to alternately focus on foreground and background.

Researchers have long sought to make computer-generated holograms, but the process has traditionally required a supercomputer to churn through physics simulations, which is time-consuming and can yield less-than-photorealistic results. Now, MIT researchers have developed a new way to produce holograms almost instantly — and the deep learning-based method is so efficient that it can run on a laptop in the blink of an eye, the researchers say.