From "Wired Science"
By Brandon Keim October 16, 2008 6:49:14 PMCate
gories: Chemistry
Originally considered a dud, an old volcano-in-a-bottle experiment designed to mimic conditions that may have brewed the components of life might have been right on target.
After reanalyzing the results of unpublished research conducted by Stanley Miller in 1953, chemists realized that his experiment had actually produced a wealth of amino acids — the protein foundation of life.
Miller is famed for the results of experiments on amino acid formation in a jar filled with methane, hydrogen and ammonia — his version of the primordial soup. However, his estimates of atmospheric composition were eventually considered inaccurate. The experiment became regarded as a general rather than useful example of how the first organic molecules may have assembled.
But the latest results, derived from samples found in an old box by one of Miller's former graduate students, come from a device that mimicked volcanic conditions now believed to have existed three billion years ago. The findings suggest that amino acids could have formed when lightning struck pools of gas on the flanks of volcanoes, and are a fitting coda for the late father of prebiotic chemistry.
"What's amazing is that he did it," said study co-author Jeffrey Bada, a Scripps Institute of Oceanography biochemist and Miller's former student. "All I did is have access to his extracts."
Bada stumbled across the original experiment by accident when a colleague of Miller's mentioned having seen a box of experimental samples in Miller's office. Bada, who inherited Miller's scientific possessions after his death in 2007, found the box — literally labeled "1953-1954 experiments" — in his own office.
Inside it were samples taken by Miller from a device that spewed a concentrated stream of primordial gases over an electrical spark. It was a high-powered variation on the steady-steam apparatus that earned him fame — but unlike that device, it appeared to have produced few amino acids, and was unmentioned in his landmark 1953 Science study, "A Production of Amino Acids Under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions."
But Miller didn't have access to high-performance liquid chromatography, which lets chemists break down and classify samples with once-unthinkable levels of precision. And when Bada's team reanalyzed the disregarded samples, they found no fewer than 22 amino acids, several of which were never seen by Miller in a lifetime of primordial modeling.
Perhaps amino acids first formed when the gases in Miller's device accumulated around active volcanoes, said Bada. "Instead of having global synthesis of organic molecules, you had a lot of little localized factories in the form of these volcanic islands," he said.
"The amino acid precursors formed in a plume and concentrated along tidal shores. They settled in the water, underwent further reactions there, and as they washed along the shore, became concentrated and underwent further polymerization events," explained Indiana University biochemist Adam Johnson, a co-author of the study. "And lightning" — the final catalyst in the equation — "tends to be extremely common with volcanic eruptions."
Luke Leman, a Scripps Institute biochemist who was not involved in the study, published today in Science, agreed.
"These findings add to a growing body of literature suggesting that areas near volcanoes could have been hotspots of organic chemistry on early Earth," he said.
Leman continued, "These findings will likely inspire a next generation of prebiotic chemists, much as Miller's original experimental results have inspired the field for more than fifty years."
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Who Are We? - (Part IV)
Louise Leakey asks, "Who are we?" The question takes her to the Rift Valley in Eastern Africa, where she digs for the evolutionary origins of humankind -- and suggests a stunning new vision of our competing ancestors.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Diamonds in The Origins of Life ?
Robert Roy Britt, Managing Editor
Live Science Magazine
July 26, 2008
One of the greatest mysteries in science is how life began. Now one group of researchers says diamonds may have been life's best friend.
Scientists have long theorized that life on Earth got going in a primordial soup of precursor chemicals. But nobody knows how these simple amino acids, known to be the building blocks of life, were assembled into complex polymers needed as a platform for genesis.
Diamonds are crystallized forms of carbon that predate the oldest known life on the planet. In lab experiments aimed to confirm work done more than three decades ago, researchers found that when treated with hydrogen, natural diamonds formed crystalline layers of water on the surface. Water is essential for life as we know it. Also, the tests found electrical conductivity that could have been key to forcing chemical reactions needed to generate the first birth.
When primitive molecules landed on the surface of these hydrogenated diamonds in the atmosphere of early Earth, a few billion years ago, the resulting reaction may have been sufficient enough to generate more complex organic molecules that eventually gave rise to life, the researchers say.
The research, by German scientists Andrei Sommer, Dan Zhu, and Hans-Joerg Fecht at the University of Ulm, is detailed in the Aug. 6 issue of the American Chemical Society's journal Crystal Growth & Design. Funding was provided by the Landesstiftung Baden-Wurttemberg Bionics Network.
Another theory, called panspermia, holds that life on Earth arrived from space, as organisms rained down inside tiny meteors or giant comets.
The new research does not conclusively determine how life began, but it lends support to one possible way.
"Hydrogenated diamond advances to the best of all possible origin-of-life platforms," the researchers contend.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
The Poetry of Science vs. Myths of Creation
The following quotation from the Richard Dawkins Foundation´s Mission Statement, at http://richarddawkinsfoundation.org, deserves wider publication:
"....A recent Gallup poll concluded that nearly 50% of the American public believes the universe is less than 10,000 years old. Nearly half the population, in other words, believes that the entire universe, the sun and solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy, and all the billions of other galaxies, all began after the domestication of the dog. They believe this because they rate a particular bronze age origin myth more highly than all the scientific evidence in the world. It is only one of literally thousands of such myths from around the world, but it happened, by a series of historical accidents, to become enshrined in a book – Genesis – which, by another series of historical accidents, has been translated and disseminated to almost every home in the land plus – infuriatingly – every hotel room. Even before science told us the true story of the origin of the world and the evolution of life, there was no reason to believe the Jewish origin myth any more than the origin myths of the Yoruba or the Kikuyu, the Yanomamo or the Maori, the Dogon or the Cherokee. Now, in the 21st century as we approach Darwin’s bicentenary, the fact that half of Americans take Genesis literally is nothing less than an educational scandal.
The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America. I am one of those scientists who feels that it is no longer enough just to get on and do science. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organized ignorance. We even have to go out on the attack ourselves, for the sake of reason and sanity. But it must be a positive attack, for science and reason have so much to give. They are not just useful, they enrich our lives in the same kind of way as the arts do. Promoting science as poetry was one of the things that Carl Sagan did so well, and I aspire to continue his tradition. ....."
"....A recent Gallup poll concluded that nearly 50% of the American public believes the universe is less than 10,000 years old. Nearly half the population, in other words, believes that the entire universe, the sun and solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy, and all the billions of other galaxies, all began after the domestication of the dog. They believe this because they rate a particular bronze age origin myth more highly than all the scientific evidence in the world. It is only one of literally thousands of such myths from around the world, but it happened, by a series of historical accidents, to become enshrined in a book – Genesis – which, by another series of historical accidents, has been translated and disseminated to almost every home in the land plus – infuriatingly – every hotel room. Even before science told us the true story of the origin of the world and the evolution of life, there was no reason to believe the Jewish origin myth any more than the origin myths of the Yoruba or the Kikuyu, the Yanomamo or the Maori, the Dogon or the Cherokee. Now, in the 21st century as we approach Darwin’s bicentenary, the fact that half of Americans take Genesis literally is nothing less than an educational scandal.
The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America. I am one of those scientists who feels that it is no longer enough just to get on and do science. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organized ignorance. We even have to go out on the attack ourselves, for the sake of reason and sanity. But it must be a positive attack, for science and reason have so much to give. They are not just useful, they enrich our lives in the same kind of way as the arts do. Promoting science as poetry was one of the things that Carl Sagan did so well, and I aspire to continue his tradition. ....."
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Algae-based Biofuel
(Adapted from an Article By Nick Hodge in the Green Chip Review, July 1st. 2008)
When the price of oil rises just one dollar, the Pentagon's fuel expenses climb an astounding $130 million. So the $50 rise in oil prices over the past six months has taken over a half billion dollar toll on the U.S. government.
Obviously the massive machinery needed to transport troops and equipment by air, land and sea is the reason for the military's high fuel use. But just how much does the Defense Department—the government's largest consumer of petroleum products—spend on fuel?
According to Lt. Col. Brian Maka, "we anticipate over the next three months that the increase in fuel costs for the department [will be] $1.2 billion." With a fuel bill like that, it is certain that the Pentagon is going to use its huge R&D resources to look for alternative fuels, including algae biofuels.
In fact, back in February, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) held a joint summit with outside experts to to discuss a variety of issues related to algae biofuel production for jet fuel.
So let's take some time to explore the basic economies, capacities and companies associated with algae biofuel production.
Problems with Current Fuels and Biofuels
In order to determine the benefits of algae oil, we first have to identify some of the problems that it could solve. Many of these issues are well-known, but they're certainly worthy of repetition.
The most obvious is a shortage of petroleum reserves and supplies increasingly being attributed to peak oil. And then there's the rapidly rising price of petroleum, which has gone up 90% in the past year—and is constantly breaking new highs.
What's more, the U.S. has a serious energy security problem. We consume 20.7 million barrels per day (bpd), while importing 12.4 million bpd—leaving us 60% dependent on petroleum imports.
And while crop-based biofuels initially offered a glimpse of relief, their contribution to rising fuel prices (even though drought, lower yields and higher demand are the main causes) has led first generation biofuels to essentially be labeled the fourth member of the Axis of Evil.
But what most don't realize is that rising food prices also hurt crop-based biofuels producers, who obviously have to pay higher prices for their feedstocks like corn and soy oil. Soy oil prices, one of biodiesel refiners' favorite feedstocks, have risen more than 35% in the past six months.
So more and more, the industry is realizing that crop-based biodiesel is not the most promising avenue, what with unstable prices and their limited capacity. NREL, for example, deemed that the entire U.S. soybean crop could only provide about 2.5 billion gallons per year (bgy) of biodiesel. And worldwide production of biodiesel from all oilseed crops can only yield 13 bgy.
That's less than a drop in the bucket when you consider U.S. diesel demand alone is 60 bgy. So at the end of the day it's a food vs. fuel issue, not on a cost basis—food prices are going to rise anyway—but on an availability basis.
Benefits of Algae Biofuels
Significant production of algae biofuels could solve a great deal of those problems.
That's because algae, or microalgae, has a much higher productivity potential than crop-based biofuels.
Here's a chart showing various feedstocks and their potential oil yield per acre. (note: g/m2/day is the harvest rate of the algae and % TAG is the percentage of triglycerides)
These high yields can be attributed to algae's high growth rate, which is often monitored in hours instead of days, and has inputs of only land, sunlight, water, carbon dioxide (potential for carbon credits) and nutrients.
And while deriving fuel oil from algae has been cost prohibitive in the past, oil on its way to $150 per barrel or higher certainly makes it an attractive alternative.
Plus, the algae growth cycle can actually be used as a carbon sequestration mechanism because carbon dioxide is the primary input required by algae to grow. In fact, if the U.S. were to derive all its diesel from algae (60 bgy), the growth of that algae could displace 56% of U.S. power plant emissions.
Growing algae is also very water efficient. Producing enough to make 60 bgy of biodiesel could require as little as 16 trillion gallons of water. To put that in perspective, we use 4,000 trillion gallons of water per year to grow corn in the U.S.
The best part is, algae can grow in brackish, saline and wastewater, further reducing the amount of freshwater needed to grow it. And the nutrients in wastewater actually feed the algae, making it possible to cultivate at any one of the 5,100 wastewater treatment facilities nationwide.
And the benefits go on.
*No one country (or host of hostile countries) has a monopoly on algae production or the algae production equipment.
*Algae can grow in temperatures ranging from below freezing to 158 degrees Fahrenheit.
*It is not in direct competition with food crops.
*There are a multitude of algae biofuel value-added byproducts like syngas, high-protein animal feeds, agricultural fertilizers, biopolymers (plastic), glycerin and even ethanol and jet fuel.
Investing in Algae Biofuel Companies
There have been limited investment opportunities so far in the algae biofuel arena despite all its promise and potential. So far, it's been sort of a throw it at the wall and see what sticks kind of strategy.
This is so because of the fair amount of companies pursuing the technology, all are keeping their methods and processes under lock and key, with an eye to profits from the huge potential for algae-oil to replace much of present petroleum consumption.
Here's a list of some companies involved in algae growth, harvesting and algae biofuel production:
* GreenShift Corporation
* Nanoforce Inc.
* Valcent Products Inc.
* Green Star Products
* OriginOil, Inc.
* PetroSun Inc.
But don't let the presence of all these tiny companies fool you. This is a legitimate technology also being pursued by such giants as Royal Dutch Shell.
When the price of oil rises just one dollar, the Pentagon's fuel expenses climb an astounding $130 million. So the $50 rise in oil prices over the past six months has taken over a half billion dollar toll on the U.S. government.
Obviously the massive machinery needed to transport troops and equipment by air, land and sea is the reason for the military's high fuel use. But just how much does the Defense Department—the government's largest consumer of petroleum products—spend on fuel?
According to Lt. Col. Brian Maka, "we anticipate over the next three months that the increase in fuel costs for the department [will be] $1.2 billion." With a fuel bill like that, it is certain that the Pentagon is going to use its huge R&D resources to look for alternative fuels, including algae biofuels.
In fact, back in February, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) held a joint summit with outside experts to to discuss a variety of issues related to algae biofuel production for jet fuel.
So let's take some time to explore the basic economies, capacities and companies associated with algae biofuel production.
Problems with Current Fuels and Biofuels
In order to determine the benefits of algae oil, we first have to identify some of the problems that it could solve. Many of these issues are well-known, but they're certainly worthy of repetition.
The most obvious is a shortage of petroleum reserves and supplies increasingly being attributed to peak oil. And then there's the rapidly rising price of petroleum, which has gone up 90% in the past year—and is constantly breaking new highs.
What's more, the U.S. has a serious energy security problem. We consume 20.7 million barrels per day (bpd), while importing 12.4 million bpd—leaving us 60% dependent on petroleum imports.
And while crop-based biofuels initially offered a glimpse of relief, their contribution to rising fuel prices (even though drought, lower yields and higher demand are the main causes) has led first generation biofuels to essentially be labeled the fourth member of the Axis of Evil.
But what most don't realize is that rising food prices also hurt crop-based biofuels producers, who obviously have to pay higher prices for their feedstocks like corn and soy oil. Soy oil prices, one of biodiesel refiners' favorite feedstocks, have risen more than 35% in the past six months.
So more and more, the industry is realizing that crop-based biodiesel is not the most promising avenue, what with unstable prices and their limited capacity. NREL, for example, deemed that the entire U.S. soybean crop could only provide about 2.5 billion gallons per year (bgy) of biodiesel. And worldwide production of biodiesel from all oilseed crops can only yield 13 bgy.
That's less than a drop in the bucket when you consider U.S. diesel demand alone is 60 bgy. So at the end of the day it's a food vs. fuel issue, not on a cost basis—food prices are going to rise anyway—but on an availability basis.
Benefits of Algae Biofuels
Significant production of algae biofuels could solve a great deal of those problems.
That's because algae, or microalgae, has a much higher productivity potential than crop-based biofuels.
Here's a chart showing various feedstocks and their potential oil yield per acre. (note: g/m2/day is the harvest rate of the algae and % TAG is the percentage of triglycerides)
Oil Yield in Crop Gallons/Acre Corn 18 Cotton 35 Soybean 48 Mustard Seed 61 Sunflower 102 Rapeseed/Canola 127 Jatropha 202 Oil Palm 635 Algae (10g./m2/day At 15% TAG) 1,200 Algae (50g./m2/day At 50% TAG) 10,000
These high yields can be attributed to algae's high growth rate, which is often monitored in hours instead of days, and has inputs of only land, sunlight, water, carbon dioxide (potential for carbon credits) and nutrients.
And while deriving fuel oil from algae has been cost prohibitive in the past, oil on its way to $150 per barrel or higher certainly makes it an attractive alternative.
Plus, the algae growth cycle can actually be used as a carbon sequestration mechanism because carbon dioxide is the primary input required by algae to grow. In fact, if the U.S. were to derive all its diesel from algae (60 bgy), the growth of that algae could displace 56% of U.S. power plant emissions.
Growing algae is also very water efficient. Producing enough to make 60 bgy of biodiesel could require as little as 16 trillion gallons of water. To put that in perspective, we use 4,000 trillion gallons of water per year to grow corn in the U.S.
The best part is, algae can grow in brackish, saline and wastewater, further reducing the amount of freshwater needed to grow it. And the nutrients in wastewater actually feed the algae, making it possible to cultivate at any one of the 5,100 wastewater treatment facilities nationwide.
And the benefits go on.
*No one country (or host of hostile countries) has a monopoly on algae production or the algae production equipment.
*Algae can grow in temperatures ranging from below freezing to 158 degrees Fahrenheit.
*It is not in direct competition with food crops.
*There are a multitude of algae biofuel value-added byproducts like syngas, high-protein animal feeds, agricultural fertilizers, biopolymers (plastic), glycerin and even ethanol and jet fuel.
Investing in Algae Biofuel Companies
There have been limited investment opportunities so far in the algae biofuel arena despite all its promise and potential. So far, it's been sort of a throw it at the wall and see what sticks kind of strategy.
This is so because of the fair amount of companies pursuing the technology, all are keeping their methods and processes under lock and key, with an eye to profits from the huge potential for algae-oil to replace much of present petroleum consumption.
Here's a list of some companies involved in algae growth, harvesting and algae biofuel production:
* GreenShift Corporation
* Nanoforce Inc.
* Valcent Products Inc.
* Green Star Products
* OriginOil, Inc.
* PetroSun Inc.
But don't let the presence of all these tiny companies fool you. This is a legitimate technology also being pursued by such giants as Royal Dutch Shell.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Will the Quantum Computer kill the PC?
(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.
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.
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.
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