SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the not-actual-physicists,-just-theoretical-ones? dept.
Supercomputers help link quantum entanglement to cold coffee:
Theoretical physicists from Trinity College Dublin have found a deep link between one of the most striking features of quantum mechanics -- quantum entanglement -- and thermalisation, which is the process in which something comes into thermal equilibrium with its surroundings.
Their results are published today [Friday 31st January 2020] in the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters.
We are all familiar with thermalisation -- just think how your coffee reaches room temperature over time. Quantum entanglement on the other hand is a different story.
Yet work performed by Marlon Brenes, PhD Candidate, and Professor John Goold from Trinity, in collaboration with Silvia Pappalardi and Professor Alessandro Silva at SISSA in Italy, shows how the two are inextricably linked.
Explaining the importance of the discovery, Professor Goold, leader of Trinity's QuSys group, explains:
"Quantum entanglement is a counterintuitive feature of quantum mechanics, which allows particles that have interacted with each other at some point in time to become correlated in a way which is not possible classically. Measurements on one particle affect the outcomes of measurements of the other -- even if they are light years apart. Einstein called this effect 'spooky action at a distance'."
"It turns out that entanglement is not just spooky but actually ubiquitous and in fact what is even more amazing is that we live in an age where technology is starting to exploit this feature to perform feats which were thought to be impossible just a number of years go. These quantum technologies are being developed rapidly in the private sector with companies such as Google and IBM leading the race."
But what has all this got to do with cold coffee?
Journal Reference:
Marlon Brenes, Silvia Pappalardi, John Goold, Alessandro Silva Multipartite Entanglement Structure in the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis, Physical Review Letters (DOI: doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.040605)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by rigrig on Thursday February 06 2020, @10:48AM (8 children)
Didn't read TFA, but if I remember my high school physics correctly this is a major advancement towards FTL travel (without tedious mucking about in hyperspace).
No one remembers the singer.
(Score: 4, Touché) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday February 06 2020, @12:38PM (5 children)
Thanks for this. I would have been sorely disappointment had the top comment been anything BUT this exact HHGTTG reference.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Only_Mortal on Thursday February 06 2020, @02:10PM (4 children)
But they made the classic mistake of using coffee instead of tea.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Osamabobama on Thursday February 06 2020, @05:31PM
Coffee is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. It will be fine.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 3, Informative) by choose another one on Thursday February 06 2020, @06:02PM (2 children)
They also let it go cold. It's supposed to be a nice HOT cup of tea.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday February 06 2020, @06:30PM
Oh crap, I think we just invented the anti-infinite-improbability drive. We're gonna need some testing to figure out if that makes it a finite-improbability drive or a infinite-probability one.
Either way, don't put them in the same room together.
(Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 06 2020, @10:07PM
That reminds me of my first encounter with the series, which was a German translation of the radio play. The translator obviously wanted to culturally adapt the text (tea isn't big in Germany), but obviously didn't notice that while most of the description of the infinite improbability generator was fictive, Brownian Motion was something that really exists. Which resulted in me wondering why the author would consider a well-cooled glass of beer to be the source of strong Brownian motion.
Later the puzzle was solved when I learned that the original English text used hot tea instead.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Thursday February 06 2020, @05:09PM
When I was a kid, I thought it was called Brownian Motion [wikipedia.org] because tea is brown.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12 2020, @03:25PM
My question is, is it a substance almost completely, but not quite, entirely unlike tea?