(From an article in The Daily Telegraph newspaper by Roger Highfield)
Quantum computers could become a reality very soon, opening up some fantastic possibilities - including teleportation, says Richard Gray
It might be the science of the very small, but quantum computing is on the verge of solving some giant problems. For more than 30 years, physicists have dreamed of harnessing the power of atoms to produce computers that would far outstrip the capabilities of the silicon microchips used in today's PCs.
These machines would have the ability to perform calculations that would take normal computers millions of years, while carrying out a vast number of tasks simultaneously. They promise to make as big an impact on information technology as the transistor.
Despite the dazzling potential of such technology, quantum computers have remained little more than a possibility on paper. Building a quantum computer has proven far more challenging than the theory, leading scientists to doubt whether they would ever find a practical purpose.
But the world's foremost experts in the field are now revising their predictions and believe that we could see quantum computers within years.
Their excitement has been fed by experiments that demonstrated some of the practical uses of quantum computers, showing that it will at last be possible to turn the theory into reality.
"A few years ago, I would have said that quantum computing would be of little use for anything practical," says Professor Anton Zeilinger, a quantum physicist at Vienna University, who is regarded as one of the godfathers of quantum computing.
"But now I am far more optimistic. It has been a huge surprise for those of us in the field. I believe that in 20 years at the most, quantum computers will be used in everyday life on people's desktops."
The power of quantum computers rests in the strange way that matter behaves at the atomic and sub-atomic levels. Particles at this scale, such as electrons and the nuclei of atoms, adhere to laws that are outside the normal realms of physics
In the quantum world, a particle can be in two places at once. It can even be in two different states at the same time, either as a particle or as a wave of radiation.
It is a mind-boggling concept, but physicists believe that, by harnessing the unique ability of small particles, quantum computers could carry out many calculations simultaneously.
Traditional computers shuffle information in the form of binary numbers, the digits 1 and 0, which are remembered by the "on" and "off" positions of tiny switches, or "bits", on the circuit boards. Quantum computers use atoms and subatomic particles as the switches that perform the memory and processing tasks.
The difference is that in quantum computing, the switches can be "on" and "off" at the same time. This means the basic component, the "qubit", can be involved in multiple calculations, while its strange properties also allow such computers to skip the step-by-step operations that current PCs use.
Quite how much more powerful this could make a quantum computer has still to be seen, but some scientists have estimated that even a very simple 30-qubit computer would be around 1,000 times faster than most desktop PCs.
The benefits of having this kind of technology at your fingertips are becoming clear. The first is speed - by crunching through excruciatingly complex calculations in seconds such powerful computers can open up new uses for technology.
Information would no longer need to be carefully logged in structured databases in order to be easily found, as it does now. Instead of searching the internet for key words attached to images and video - which is how YouTube or Google work - quantum computers would be able to search for the images and video themselves.
"Take a telephone book as an example," explains Prof Zeilinger. "If you know the name of someone you are looking for, it is relatively easy to find their phone number. On the other hand, if you only have the phone number, searching for the person's name is extremely difficult, as you have to go through every entry and check it. That is what traditional computers would have to do.
"A quantum computer can search through unsorted data like this with great ease because of its ability to perform the complex algorithms needed."
The field of video gaming could also be transformed. By exploiting the multiple states of qubits, quantum video game consoles could generate a truly random aspect to gameplay, producing a more realistic experience. They could also generate new types of games that rely upon betting against which state the qubits will take.
Quantum computing, however, also has some worrying implications for security. With the ability to carry out difficult calculations on large numbers, quantum computers would be able to crack one of the cornerstones of computer security - cryptography. Conventional computers struggle with the difficult calculations needed to break codes: to test all of the possible answers in a "brute force" attack would take far too much time and processing power. But a quantum computer that tried the different answers simultaneously could easily defeat this security.
This has worried many in the financial and business sectors, where confidentiality and protection against hackers is crucial. Some companies have begun offering new types of security, called quantum cryptography, as an ultra-secure way of sending information.
As well as providing a new way of generating the secret keys needed to unlock encoded information, the technique also allows the detection of eavesdroppers by exploiting another quirk of the quantum world - that when you try to look at a quantum particle, it will alter its state.
By encoding messages in quantum states, an eavesdropper who tries to intercept the message will change its state - so the sender and receiver can tell if it has been tinkered with. One of the key tests of the method was carried out in Britain - to a pub in Malvern. Prof Zeilinger did another demonstration in a Viennese sewer for an Austrian bank.
As the threat posed by internet viruses and hackers to people's personal computers increases, quantum cryptography could become a standard feature of desktop computers to ensure safe internet communication.
Professor Seth Lloyd, a quantum mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believes this property of quantum computing has opened up another new possibility, that is of growing concern to internet users.
His research has revealed a way of using quantum computing to keep personal information private. Currently, internet sites and search engines can keep large amounts of information about people's computer and search practices.
"If you use what I am calling quantum private queries, it would allow you to ask a question of a search engine like Google, but keep your own information private. If they try to keep your information, you will know about it. It will allow computer users to know no one else is snooping on their information," said Professor Lloyd.
Among the breakthroughs that have brought the prospect of a quantum computer closer is the ability to harness a process called "entanglement", in which two particles become connected so that the fate and movements of one depends on the other.
In the Newton Medal Lecture this month, Professor Zeilinger told the Institute of Physics that these entangled particles could provide a valuable tool in communicating between quantum computers.
His team has managed to set a new record for the distance over which they entangled two particles - around 90 miles apart, on two of the Canary Islands. It could mean that quantum computers could use entanglement to send and receive information.
Professor David Deutsch, a physicist at the University of Oxford who is one of the main pioneers of quantum computing, said he was more hopeful than ever that they would become everyday devices. Another new technique, which splits the quantum computation into two phases, had changed the way scientists thought quantum computers would have to be built.
"I used to say that quantum computers would be built in several decades," he said, "but now I think it will be more like years. This particular technique is going to make it drastically easier to make them as it brings tremendous improvements in efficiency.
"I now expect to see simple quantum computers in only a matter of years."
THE QUANTUM CCOMPUTER EFFECT
• Typical personal computers calculate 64 bits of data at a time. A 64- qubit quantum computer would be about 18 billion billion times faster.
• A working quantum computer could be so mind-bogglingly powerful that it would solve in seconds certain problems that would take the fastest supercomputer millions of years to complete.
• Consumers, credit card companies and high-tech firms rely on cryptography to protect sensitive information. The basis for encryption systems is that computers would need thousands of years to factor a large number, making it very difficult to do. But a QC could break the most complicated encryption in hours.
• One of the more bizarre properties of QCs was identified by a team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They presented the first demonstration of "counterfactual computation", inferring information about an answer, even though the computer itself did not run.
• Quantum computers could also take advantage of another quantum property, teleportation. Teleportation allows information about one particle to be transmitted to another particle some distance away. A quantum computer could use teleportation instead of wires to move bits around inside itself.
• Quantum computation has captured the imagination of the scientific community, recasting some of the most puzzling aspects of quantum physics - once pondered by Einstein, Schrödinger and others - in the context of advancing computer science.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Stephen Hawking's New Theory of The Origin of The Universe
(From an Article in The Daily Telegraph on June 26, 2008 by Roger Highfield, Science Editor)
Prof Stephen Hawking has come up with a new idea to explain why the Big Bang of creation led to the vast cosmos that we can see today.
The new theory believes original estimates of Big Bang expansion are wrong
Astronomers can deduce that the early universe expanded at a mind-boggling rate because regions separated by vast distances have similar background temperatures.
They have proposed a process of rapid expansion of neighboring regions, with similar cosmic properties, to explain this growth spurt which they call inflation.
But that left a deeper mystery: why did inflation occur in the first place?
Now New Scientist reports that an answer has been proposed by Prof Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University, working with Prof Thomas Hertog of the Astroparticle and Cosmology Laboratory in Paris.
Prof Hawking is best known for his attempts to combine theories of the very small, quantum theory, and that of gravity and the very big, general relativity, into a new theory, called quantum gravity.
Quantum mechanics is awash with strange ideas and can shed new light on inflation, which came in the wake of when the universe itself was around the size of an atom.
By quantum lore, when a particle of light travels from A to B, it does not take one path but explores every one simultaneously, with the more direct routes being used more heavily.
This is called a sum over histories and Prof Hawking and Prof Hertog propose the same thing for the cosmos.
In this theory, the early universe can be described by a mathematical object called a wave function and, in a similar way to the light particle, the team proposed two years ago that this means that there was no unique origin to the cosmos: instead the wave function of the universe embraced a multitude of means to develop.
This is very counter intuitive: they argued the universe began in just about every way imaginable (and perhaps even some that are not). Out of this profusion of beginnings, like a blend of a God’s eye view of every conceivable kind of creation, the vast majority of the baby universes withered away to leave the mature cosmos that we can see today.
But, like any new idea, there were problems. The professors found that they could not explain the rapid expansion - inflation - of the universe, evidence of which is left behind all around us in what is called the cosmic microwave background, in effect the echo of the big bang, a relic of creation that can be measured with experiments on balloons and on space probes.
Now, in a paper in Physical Review Letters with Prof James Hartle of the University of California, Santa Barbara, they realized that their earlier estimates of inflation were wrong because they had not fully thought through the connection between, on the one hand, their theoretical predictions and, on the other, our observations of the echo.
At first, they found that the most probable history of the cosmos had only undergone "a little bit of inflation at the beginning, contradicting the observations," said Prof Hertog. Now, after a correction to take account of how the data we have on inflation is based on only a view of a limited volume of the universe, they find that the wave function does indeed predict a long period of inflation.
"This proposal, with volume weighting, can explain why the universe inflated," Prof Hawking tells New Scientist. By taking into account that we have a parochial view of the cosmos, the team has come up with a radical new take on cosmology.
Most models of the universe are bottom-up, that is, you start from well-defined initial conditions of the Big Bang and work forward. However, Prof Hertog and Prof Hawking say that we do not and cannot know the initial conditions present at the beginning of the universe. Instead, we only know the final state - the one we are in now.
Their idea is therefore to start with the conditions we observe today - like the fact that at large scales one does not need to adopt quantum lore to explain how the universe (it behaves classically, as scientists say) - and work backwards in time to determine what the initial conditions might have looked like.
In this way, they argue the universe did not have just one unique beginning and history but a multitude of different ones and that it has experienced them all.
The new theory is also attractive because it fits in with string theory - the most popular candidate for a "theory of everything."
String theory allows the existence of an" unimaginable multitude of different types of universes in addition to our own," but it does not provide a selection criterion among these and hence no explanation for why our universe is, the way it is", says Prof Hertog.
"For this, one needs a theory of the wave function of the universe."
And now the world of cosmology has one. The next step is to find specific predictions that can be put to the test, to validate this new view of how the cosmos came into being.
Prof Stephen Hawking has come up with a new idea to explain why the Big Bang of creation led to the vast cosmos that we can see today.
The new theory believes original estimates of Big Bang expansion are wrong
Astronomers can deduce that the early universe expanded at a mind-boggling rate because regions separated by vast distances have similar background temperatures.
They have proposed a process of rapid expansion of neighboring regions, with similar cosmic properties, to explain this growth spurt which they call inflation.
But that left a deeper mystery: why did inflation occur in the first place?
Now New Scientist reports that an answer has been proposed by Prof Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University, working with Prof Thomas Hertog of the Astroparticle and Cosmology Laboratory in Paris.
Prof Hawking is best known for his attempts to combine theories of the very small, quantum theory, and that of gravity and the very big, general relativity, into a new theory, called quantum gravity.
Quantum mechanics is awash with strange ideas and can shed new light on inflation, which came in the wake of when the universe itself was around the size of an atom.
By quantum lore, when a particle of light travels from A to B, it does not take one path but explores every one simultaneously, with the more direct routes being used more heavily.
This is called a sum over histories and Prof Hawking and Prof Hertog propose the same thing for the cosmos.
In this theory, the early universe can be described by a mathematical object called a wave function and, in a similar way to the light particle, the team proposed two years ago that this means that there was no unique origin to the cosmos: instead the wave function of the universe embraced a multitude of means to develop.
This is very counter intuitive: they argued the universe began in just about every way imaginable (and perhaps even some that are not). Out of this profusion of beginnings, like a blend of a God’s eye view of every conceivable kind of creation, the vast majority of the baby universes withered away to leave the mature cosmos that we can see today.
But, like any new idea, there were problems. The professors found that they could not explain the rapid expansion - inflation - of the universe, evidence of which is left behind all around us in what is called the cosmic microwave background, in effect the echo of the big bang, a relic of creation that can be measured with experiments on balloons and on space probes.
Now, in a paper in Physical Review Letters with Prof James Hartle of the University of California, Santa Barbara, they realized that their earlier estimates of inflation were wrong because they had not fully thought through the connection between, on the one hand, their theoretical predictions and, on the other, our observations of the echo.
At first, they found that the most probable history of the cosmos had only undergone "a little bit of inflation at the beginning, contradicting the observations," said Prof Hertog. Now, after a correction to take account of how the data we have on inflation is based on only a view of a limited volume of the universe, they find that the wave function does indeed predict a long period of inflation.
"This proposal, with volume weighting, can explain why the universe inflated," Prof Hawking tells New Scientist. By taking into account that we have a parochial view of the cosmos, the team has come up with a radical new take on cosmology.
Most models of the universe are bottom-up, that is, you start from well-defined initial conditions of the Big Bang and work forward. However, Prof Hertog and Prof Hawking say that we do not and cannot know the initial conditions present at the beginning of the universe. Instead, we only know the final state - the one we are in now.
Their idea is therefore to start with the conditions we observe today - like the fact that at large scales one does not need to adopt quantum lore to explain how the universe (it behaves classically, as scientists say) - and work backwards in time to determine what the initial conditions might have looked like.
In this way, they argue the universe did not have just one unique beginning and history but a multitude of different ones and that it has experienced them all.
The new theory is also attractive because it fits in with string theory - the most popular candidate for a "theory of everything."
String theory allows the existence of an" unimaginable multitude of different types of universes in addition to our own," but it does not provide a selection criterion among these and hence no explanation for why our universe is, the way it is", says Prof Hertog.
"For this, one needs a theory of the wave function of the universe."
And now the world of cosmology has one. The next step is to find specific predictions that can be put to the test, to validate this new view of how the cosmos came into being.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Classical Music With Shining Eyes
Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it -- and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections.
Value of Not Overthinking a Decision
Get Out of Your Own Way
Studies Show the Value of Not Overthinking a Decision
June 27, 2008; Page A9 of The Wall Street Journal
Fishing in the stream of consciousness, researchers now can detect our intentions and predict our choices before we are aware of them ourselves. The brain, they have found, appears to make up its mind 10 seconds before we become conscious of a decision -- an eternity at the speed of thought.
Their findings challenge conventional notions of choice.
"We think our decisions are conscious," said neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, who is pioneering this research. "But these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. This doesn't rule out free will, but it does make it implausible."
Through a series of intriguing experiments, scientists in Germany, Norway and the U.S. have analyzed the distinctive cerebral activity that foreshadows our choices. They have tracked telltale waves of change through the cells that orchestrate our memory, language, reason and self-awareness.
In ways we are only beginning to understand, the synapses and neurons in the human nervous system work in concert to perceive the world around them, to learn from their perceptions, to remember important experiences, to plan ahead, and to decide and act on incomplete information. In a rudimentary way, they predetermine our choices.
How do you best make up your mind? Are you better off when you sleep on a decision? What does this mean for our sense of choice and free will?
To probe what happens in the brain during the moments before people sense they've reached a decision, Dr. Haynes and his colleagues devised a deceptively simple experiment, reported in April in Nature Neuroscience. They monitored the swift neural currents coursing through the brains of student volunteers as they decided, at their own pace and at random, whether to push a button with their left or right hands.
In all, they tested seven men and seven women from 21 to 30 years old. They recorded neural changes associated with thoughts using a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and analyzed the results with an experimental pattern-recognition computer program.
While inside the brain scanner, the students watched random letters stream across a screen. Whenever they felt the urge, they pressed a button with their right hand or a button with their left hand. Then they marked down the letter that had been on the screen in the instant they had decided to press the button.
Studying the brain behavior leading up to the moment of conscious decision, the researchers identified signals that let them know when the students had decided to move 10 seconds or so before the students knew it themselves. About 70% of the time, the researchers could also predict which button the students would push.
Is your freedom of choice an illusion?
Your brain knows what you're going to do 10 seconds before you are aware of it, neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes and his colleagues reported recently in Nature Neuroscience.
Last year In the journal Current Biology, the scientists reported they could use brain wave patterns to identify your intentions before you revealed them.
Their work builds on a landmark 1983 paper in the journal Brain by the late Benjamin Libet and his colleagues at the University of California in San Francisco, who found out that the brain initiates free choices about a third of a second before we are aware of them.
Together, these findings support the importance of the unconscious in shaping decisions. Psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis and his co-workers at the University of Amsterdam reported in the journal Science that it is not always best to deliberate too much before making a choice.
Nobel laureate Francis Crick -- co-discoverer of the structure of DNA -- tackled the implications of such cognitive science in his 1993 book The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul.
With co-author Giulio Tononi, Nobel laureate Gerald Edleman explores his biology-based theory of consciousness in A Universe Of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination.
"It's quite eerie," said Dr. Haynes.
Other researchers have pursued the act of decision deeper into the subcurrents of the brain.
In experiments with laboratory animals reported this spring, Caltech neuroscientist Richard Anderson and his colleagues explored how the effort to plan a movement forces cells throughout the brain to work together, organizing a choice below the threshold of awareness. Tuning in on the electrical dialogue between working neurons, they pinpointed the cells of what they called a "free choice" brain circuit that in milliseconds synchronized scattered synapses to settle on a course of action.
"It suggests we are looking at this actual decision being made," Dr. Anderson said. "It is pretty fast."
And when those networks momentarily malfunction, people do make mistakes. Working independently, psychologist Tom Eichele at Norway's University of Bergen monitored brain activity in people performing routine tasks and discovered neural static -- waves of disruptive signals -- preceded an error by up to 30 seconds. "Thirty seconds is a long time," Dr. Eichele said.
Such experiments suggest that our best reasons for some choices we make are understood only by our cells. The findings lend credence to researchers who argue that many important decisions may be best made by going with our gut -- not by thinking about them too much.
Dutch researchers led by psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis at the University of Amsterdam recently found that people struggling to make relatively complicated consumer choices -- which car to buy, apartment to rent or vacation to take -- appeared to make sounder decisions when they were distracted and unable to focus consciously on the problem.
Moreover, the more factors to be considered in a decision, the more likely the unconscious brain handled it all better, they reported in the peer-reviewed journal Science in 2006. "The idea that conscious deliberation before making a decision is always good is simply one of those illusions consciousness creates for us," Dr. Dijksterhuis said.
Does this make our self-awareness just a second thought?
All this work to deconstruct the mental machinery of choice may be the best evidence of conscious free will. By measuring the brain's physical processes, the mind seeks to know itself through its reflection in the mirror of science.
"We are trying to understand who we are," said Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, "by studying the organ that allows you to understand who you are."
Studies Show the Value of Not Overthinking a Decision
June 27, 2008; Page A9 of The Wall Street Journal
Fishing in the stream of consciousness, researchers now can detect our intentions and predict our choices before we are aware of them ourselves. The brain, they have found, appears to make up its mind 10 seconds before we become conscious of a decision -- an eternity at the speed of thought.
Their findings challenge conventional notions of choice.
"We think our decisions are conscious," said neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, who is pioneering this research. "But these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. This doesn't rule out free will, but it does make it implausible."
Through a series of intriguing experiments, scientists in Germany, Norway and the U.S. have analyzed the distinctive cerebral activity that foreshadows our choices. They have tracked telltale waves of change through the cells that orchestrate our memory, language, reason and self-awareness.
In ways we are only beginning to understand, the synapses and neurons in the human nervous system work in concert to perceive the world around them, to learn from their perceptions, to remember important experiences, to plan ahead, and to decide and act on incomplete information. In a rudimentary way, they predetermine our choices.
How do you best make up your mind? Are you better off when you sleep on a decision? What does this mean for our sense of choice and free will?
To probe what happens in the brain during the moments before people sense they've reached a decision, Dr. Haynes and his colleagues devised a deceptively simple experiment, reported in April in Nature Neuroscience. They monitored the swift neural currents coursing through the brains of student volunteers as they decided, at their own pace and at random, whether to push a button with their left or right hands.
In all, they tested seven men and seven women from 21 to 30 years old. They recorded neural changes associated with thoughts using a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and analyzed the results with an experimental pattern-recognition computer program.
While inside the brain scanner, the students watched random letters stream across a screen. Whenever they felt the urge, they pressed a button with their right hand or a button with their left hand. Then they marked down the letter that had been on the screen in the instant they had decided to press the button.
Studying the brain behavior leading up to the moment of conscious decision, the researchers identified signals that let them know when the students had decided to move 10 seconds or so before the students knew it themselves. About 70% of the time, the researchers could also predict which button the students would push.
Is your freedom of choice an illusion?
Your brain knows what you're going to do 10 seconds before you are aware of it, neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes and his colleagues reported recently in Nature Neuroscience.
Last year In the journal Current Biology, the scientists reported they could use brain wave patterns to identify your intentions before you revealed them.
Their work builds on a landmark 1983 paper in the journal Brain by the late Benjamin Libet and his colleagues at the University of California in San Francisco, who found out that the brain initiates free choices about a third of a second before we are aware of them.
Together, these findings support the importance of the unconscious in shaping decisions. Psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis and his co-workers at the University of Amsterdam reported in the journal Science that it is not always best to deliberate too much before making a choice.
Nobel laureate Francis Crick -- co-discoverer of the structure of DNA -- tackled the implications of such cognitive science in his 1993 book The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul.
With co-author Giulio Tononi, Nobel laureate Gerald Edleman explores his biology-based theory of consciousness in A Universe Of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination.
"It's quite eerie," said Dr. Haynes.
Other researchers have pursued the act of decision deeper into the subcurrents of the brain.
In experiments with laboratory animals reported this spring, Caltech neuroscientist Richard Anderson and his colleagues explored how the effort to plan a movement forces cells throughout the brain to work together, organizing a choice below the threshold of awareness. Tuning in on the electrical dialogue between working neurons, they pinpointed the cells of what they called a "free choice" brain circuit that in milliseconds synchronized scattered synapses to settle on a course of action.
"It suggests we are looking at this actual decision being made," Dr. Anderson said. "It is pretty fast."
And when those networks momentarily malfunction, people do make mistakes. Working independently, psychologist Tom Eichele at Norway's University of Bergen monitored brain activity in people performing routine tasks and discovered neural static -- waves of disruptive signals -- preceded an error by up to 30 seconds. "Thirty seconds is a long time," Dr. Eichele said.
Such experiments suggest that our best reasons for some choices we make are understood only by our cells. The findings lend credence to researchers who argue that many important decisions may be best made by going with our gut -- not by thinking about them too much.
Dutch researchers led by psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis at the University of Amsterdam recently found that people struggling to make relatively complicated consumer choices -- which car to buy, apartment to rent or vacation to take -- appeared to make sounder decisions when they were distracted and unable to focus consciously on the problem.
Moreover, the more factors to be considered in a decision, the more likely the unconscious brain handled it all better, they reported in the peer-reviewed journal Science in 2006. "The idea that conscious deliberation before making a decision is always good is simply one of those illusions consciousness creates for us," Dr. Dijksterhuis said.
Does this make our self-awareness just a second thought?
All this work to deconstruct the mental machinery of choice may be the best evidence of conscious free will. By measuring the brain's physical processes, the mind seeks to know itself through its reflection in the mirror of science.
"We are trying to understand who we are," said Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, "by studying the organ that allows you to understand who you are."
Monday, June 23, 2008
How Engineers Learn From Evolution
Insects and animals have evolved some amazing skills -- but, as Robert Full notes, many animals are actually over-engineered. The trick is to copy only what's necessary. He shows how human engineers can learn from animals' tricks.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Latest Assault On Darwin
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| OPINION | June 21, 2008 Editorial: Louisiana's Latest Assault on Darwin A Louisiana bill on the teaching of evolution implies that there are valid competing scientific theories to evolution, when there are not. |
In the 1980s, Louisiana passed an infamous “Creationism Act” that prohibited the teaching of evolution unless it was accompanied by instruction in “creation science.” That effort to gain essentially equal time for creationism was slapped down by the United States Supreme Court as an unconstitutional endorsement of religion. State legislators, mimicking scattered efforts elsewhere, responded with a cagier, indirect approach.
The new bill doesn’t mention either creationism or its close cousin, intelligent design. It explicitly disavows any intent to promote a religious doctrine. It doesn’t try to ban Darwin from the classroom or order schools to do anything. It simply requires the state board of education, if asked by local school districts, to help create an environment that promotes “critical thinking” and “objective discussion” about not only evolution and the origins of life but also about global warming and human cloning, two other bêtes noires of the right. Teachers would be required to teach the standard textbook but could use supplementary materials to critique it.
That may seem harmless. But it would have the pernicious effect of implying that evolution is only weakly supported and that there are valid competing scientific theories when there are not. In school districts foolish enough to head down this path, the students will likely emerge with a shakier understanding of science.
As a biology major at Brown University, Mr. Jindal must know that evolution is the unchallenged central organizing principle for modern biology. As a rising star on the conservative right, mentioned as a possible running mate for John McCain, Mr. Jindal may have more than science on his mind. In a television interview, he seemed to say that local school boards should decide what is taught and that it would be wrong to teach only evolution or only intelligent design.
If Mr. Jindal has the interests of students at heart, the sensible thing is to veto this Trojan horse legislation.
Friday, June 20, 2008
New Solar Energy System
A new type of solar energy collector concentrates the sun into a beam that could melt steel. Researchers say the device could revolutionize global energy production.
MIT students this week successfully tested a prototype of what may be the most cost-efficient solar power system in the world, as shown on this clip from LiveScience.com (with my apologies for the annoying ads.)
LiveScience.com gives the following details:
The prototype is a 12-foot-wide mirrored dish was made from a lightweight frame of thin, inexpensive aluminum tubing and strips of mirror. It concentrates sunlight by a factor of 1,000 to produce steam.
"This is actually the most efficient solar collector in existence," said Doug Wood, an inventor based in Washington state who patented key parts of the dish's design - the rights to which he has signed over to a team of students at MIT.
To test the prototype this week, MIT mechanical engineering Spencer Ahrens put a plank of wood in the beam an generated an almost instant puff of smoke.
The thing does more than burn wood, of course. At the end of a 12-foot aluminum tube rising from the center of the dish is a black-painted coil of tubing that has water running through it. When the dish is pointing directly at the sun, the water in the coil flashes immediately into steam.
Ahrens and his teammates have started a company, RawSolar, to hopefully mass produce the dishes. They could be set up in huge arrays to provide steam for industrial processing, or for heating or cooling buildings, as well as to hook up to steam turbines and generate electricity, according to an MIT statement. Once in mass production, such arrays should pay for themselves within two years or so with the energy they produce, the students figure.
Wood, the inventor, said the students built the dish and improved on his design.
"They really have simplified this and made it user-friendly, so anybody can build it," he said.
Wood said small dishes work best because it requires much less support structure and costs less for a given amount of collection area.
"I've looked for years at a variety of solar approaches, and this is the cheapest I've seen," said MIT Sloan School of Management lecturer David Pelly, in whose class the project first took shape last fall. "And the key thing in scaling it globally is that all of the materials are inexpensive and accessible anywhere in the world."
However, among the comments on this article there's this:
red2erni wrote:
Not quite up to what I expect from MIT. Also when you report that something is patented, like aspects of this contraption, you should tell the truth. It takes years for a patent to be granted these days and I doubt that there is anything here without a ton of prior art. At best there is a patent application or a provisional application. You should respect the USPTO for what it is and actually does (or does not do which is the majority case).
Now for the jelly filling; not so great a revolution here! They got the simple part ok, but not the durable part. The parabolic dishes they are up against are 20 year or more durable. Check out
% reflectivity after 20-30 years in the desert. The aluminum sheet metal here isn't a good mirror even when new and wouldn't stand up one year. Also, what could a bunch of bright kids think they are going to do with that steamm hose on the ground? At least I'd expect an improved Sterling engine! But no, of course that would require a ridgid mirror with much better confocal quality that floppy sheet metal.
What I'd really expect from MIT or from a forward looking, informed forum such as this might one day become, is a breakthrough low cost, flexible dielelectric (pure oxide) front surface mirror that could be coated onto milar with no metal in it, 100% reflectivity and a ~ 500 year lifetime. Oh and also have it make parts per million ozone at the mirror surface and clean the dirt off of itself - which has been demonstrated with a phase of titanium oxide which could be the last layer at the surface of the mirror!! Now that technology has several issued real patents and can't get funded. The reason for good, real, new technology not getting funded isn't that oil companies bury it. The real story is much more interesting and should be what is reported on Yahoo if anyone in the media had half a brain.
red2erni
MIT students this week successfully tested a prototype of what may be the most cost-efficient solar power system in the world, as shown on this clip from LiveScience.com (with my apologies for the annoying ads.)
LiveScience.com gives the following details:
The prototype is a 12-foot-wide mirrored dish was made from a lightweight frame of thin, inexpensive aluminum tubing and strips of mirror. It concentrates sunlight by a factor of 1,000 to produce steam.
"This is actually the most efficient solar collector in existence," said Doug Wood, an inventor based in Washington state who patented key parts of the dish's design - the rights to which he has signed over to a team of students at MIT.
To test the prototype this week, MIT mechanical engineering Spencer Ahrens put a plank of wood in the beam an generated an almost instant puff of smoke.
The thing does more than burn wood, of course. At the end of a 12-foot aluminum tube rising from the center of the dish is a black-painted coil of tubing that has water running through it. When the dish is pointing directly at the sun, the water in the coil flashes immediately into steam.
Ahrens and his teammates have started a company, RawSolar, to hopefully mass produce the dishes. They could be set up in huge arrays to provide steam for industrial processing, or for heating or cooling buildings, as well as to hook up to steam turbines and generate electricity, according to an MIT statement. Once in mass production, such arrays should pay for themselves within two years or so with the energy they produce, the students figure.
Wood, the inventor, said the students built the dish and improved on his design.
"They really have simplified this and made it user-friendly, so anybody can build it," he said.
Wood said small dishes work best because it requires much less support structure and costs less for a given amount of collection area.
"I've looked for years at a variety of solar approaches, and this is the cheapest I've seen," said MIT Sloan School of Management lecturer David Pelly, in whose class the project first took shape last fall. "And the key thing in scaling it globally is that all of the materials are inexpensive and accessible anywhere in the world."
However, among the comments on this article there's this:
red2erni wrote:
Not quite up to what I expect from MIT. Also when you report that something is patented, like aspects of this contraption, you should tell the truth. It takes years for a patent to be granted these days and I doubt that there is anything here without a ton of prior art. At best there is a patent application or a provisional application. You should respect the USPTO for what it is and actually does (or does not do which is the majority case).
Now for the jelly filling; not so great a revolution here! They got the simple part ok, but not the durable part. The parabolic dishes they are up against are 20 year or more durable. Check out
% reflectivity after 20-30 years in the desert. The aluminum sheet metal here isn't a good mirror even when new and wouldn't stand up one year. Also, what could a bunch of bright kids think they are going to do with that steamm hose on the ground? At least I'd expect an improved Sterling engine! But no, of course that would require a ridgid mirror with much better confocal quality that floppy sheet metal.
What I'd really expect from MIT or from a forward looking, informed forum such as this might one day become, is a breakthrough low cost, flexible dielelectric (pure oxide) front surface mirror that could be coated onto milar with no metal in it, 100% reflectivity and a ~ 500 year lifetime. Oh and also have it make parts per million ozone at the mirror surface and clean the dirt off of itself - which has been demonstrated with a phase of titanium oxide which could be the last layer at the surface of the mirror!! Now that technology has several issued real patents and can't get funded. The reason for good, real, new technology not getting funded isn't that oil companies bury it. The real story is much more interesting and should be what is reported on Yahoo if anyone in the media had half a brain.
red2erni
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