F = {P} ∪ {F_i | i ∈ I}

V_P = {v_i | i ∈ J}

v_i = |v_i| * u_i

What if life naturally evolves towards time-travel as it begins to understand the geometry of the universe? What if the way to travel more than one direction in time lies in our ability to perceive time in the first place? That’s biological, universal, measurable, and therefore quantifiable – and so far, most things we can quantify, we can manipulate.

Physicists have struggled to understand the nature of time since the field began. But a new theoretical study suggests time could be an illusion woven at the quantum level.

Time may not be a fundamental element of the universe but rather an illusion emerging from quantum entanglement, a new study suggests.

Time is a thorny problem for physicists; its inconsistent behavior between our best theories of the universe contributes to a deadlock preventing researchers from finding a "theory of everything," or a framework to explain all of the physics in the universe.

But in the new study, researchers suggest they may have found a clue to solving that problem: by making time a consequence of quantum entanglement, the weird connection between two far-apart particles. The team published their findings May 10 in the journal Physical Review A.

"There exists a way to introduce time which is consistent with both classical laws and quantum laws, and is a manifestation of entanglement," first author Alessandro Coppo, a physicist at the National Research Council of Italy, told Live Science. "The correlation between the clock and the system creates the emergence of time, a fundamental ingredient in our lives."

Article continues at LiveScience

My cat needed to be euthanised last month, and I just received her ashes. They came with a round black sticker. What’s the purpose of this sticker?

They mentioned my chosen urn was suitable for sprinkling cremains (I don’t plan to do that) – maybe it’s related to that?

Thanks.

A team from TU Dortmund University recently succeeded in producing a highly durable time crystal that lived millions of times longer than could be shown in previous experiments. By doing so, they have corroborated an extremely interesting phenomenon that Nobel Prize laureate Frank Wilczek postulated around ten years ago and which had already found its way into science fiction movies.

The results have been published in Nature Physics.

Paper abstract – Robust continuous time crystal in an electron–nuclear spin system:

Abstract Crystals spontaneously break the continuous translation symmetry of free space. Analogously, time crystals lift translational invariance in time. Here we demonstrate a robust continuous time crystal in an electron–nuclear spin system of a semiconductor tailored by tuning the material composition. Continuous, time-independent external driving of the sample produces periodic auto-oscillations with a coherence time exceeding hours. Varying the experimental parameters reveals wide ranges in which the time crystal remains stable. At the edges of these ranges, we find chaotic behaviour with a lifted periodicity corresponding to the melting of the crystal. The time crystal state enables fundamental studies of nonlinear interactions and has potential applications as a precise on-chip frequency standard.

Back in Apollo, we had a feature where you could long-press on mobile and save a screenshot with options to include usernames, number and levels of parents, and original post, amongst other things. Those were the ones I used. I also remember there was a checkbox for watermark, which defaulted to on, and which I never touched but always respected, because it never condescended to me.

Anyway, I used that feature so much that there was no Apollo without it before the ensittification.

As a user experience designer, Apollo had done a lot right that the big tech names had been doing wrong, and I’d floundered on Lemmy until the Voyager team started from that foundation.

I appreciate everything this team has done for me, but I do miss this feature. It seemed aimed straight at me, so I almost hate to bring it up, but it was beautiful and I loved it.

(I’m sorry for not saying this on Git, but I just can’t right now)

eta: you guys are the best. I love everything you’ve done. <3

This only works by phone. Be nice, but firm. Don’t be satisfied with their first answer – make them escalate you to the retention department. They’re often authorised to give much larger discounts because it’s cheaper for them to retain customers than to recruit new ones.

Removed works include Saul Bellow’s ‘Herzog’ and ‘Black, White and Jewish’; no individual reasoning given for books' removal.

….

The purge of books from Orange County Public Schools, in Orlando, over the course of the past semester is the latest consequence of a conservative movement across the country — and strongest in Florida — to rid public and school libraries of materials deemed offensive. While the vast majority of such challenged and removed books involve race, gender and sexuality, several Jewish books have previously been caught in the dragnet.

Article continues…

Removed works include Saul Bellow’s ‘Herzog’ and ‘Black, White and Jewish’; no individual reasoning given for books' removal.

JTA – A global bestseller by a Jewish Holocaust victim; a novel by a beloved and politically conservative Jewish American writer; a memoir of growing up mixed-race and Jewish; and a contemporary novel about a high-achieving Jewish family are among the nearly 700 books a Florida school district removed from classroom libraries this year in fear of violating state laws on sexual content in schools.

The purge of books from Orange County Public Schools, in Orlando, over the course of the past semester is the latest consequence of a conservative movement across the country — and strongest in Florida — to rid public and school libraries of materials deemed offensive. While the vast majority of such challenged and removed books involve race, gender and sexuality, several Jewish books have previously been caught in the dragnet.

Article continues…

Misinformation was extremely popular in 2023, as bad science often made global headlines. Learn the truth behind these 10 dubious stories.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• While there have been huge scientific advances in a wide variety of aspects of physics and astronomy, there have also been wild headlines that do not reflect at all what's true in this Universe.
• No, we haven't found a room-temperature superconductor, overturned the expanding Universe or Big Bang, discovered that the cosmos is twice as old as we thought, or discovered alien technology on the seafloor.
• There has been a lot of fiction permeating science news this year, and the frustrating thing is that these untrue stories are posing as actual facts.

Here are 10 lies you may want to learn the actual truth behind.

[Article continues…]

Misinformation was extremely popular in 2023, as bad science often made global headlines. Learn the truth behind these 10 dubious stories.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• While there have been huge scientific advances in a wide variety of aspects of physics and astronomy, there have also been wild headlines that do not reflect at all what's true in this Universe.
• No, we haven't found a room-temperature superconductor, overturned the expanding Universe or Big Bang, discovered that the cosmos is twice as old as we thought, or discovered alien technology on the seafloor.
• There has been a lot of fiction permeating science news this year, and the frustrating thing is that these untrue stories are posing as actual facts.

Here are 10 lies you may want to learn the actual truth behind.

[Article continues…]

Excess oxygen is actually harmful to humans, but all the climate warnings are about losing oxygen, not nitrogen edit: but when we look for habitable planets, our focus is ‘oxygen rich atmosphere’, not ‘nitrogen rich’, and in medical settings, we’re always concerned about low oxygen, not nitrogen.

Deep sea divers also use a nitrogen mix (nitrox) to stay alive and help prevent the bends, so nitrogen seems pretty important.

It seems weird that our main focus is oxygen when our main air intake is nitrogen. What am I missing?

edit: my climate example was poor and I think misleading. Added a better example instead.

In the movies, time travelers typically step inside a machine and—poof—disappear. They then reappear instantaneously among cowboys, knights or dinosaurs. What these films show is basically time teleportation.

Scientists don’t think this conception is likely in the real world, but they also don’t relegate time travel to the crackpot realm. In fact, the laws of physics might allow chronological hopping, but the devil is in the details.

[…]

If a person were to hang out near the edge of a black hole, where gravity is prodigious, Goldberg says, only a few hours might pass for them while 1,000 years went by for someone on Earth. If the person who was near the black hole returned to this planet, they would have effectively traveled to the future. “That is a real effect,” he says. “That is completely uncontroversial.”

Going backward in time gets thorny, though (thornier than getting ripped to shreds inside a black hole). Scientists have come up with a few ways it might be possible, and they have been aware of time travel paradoxes in general relativity for decades. Fabio Costa, a physicist at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, notes that an early solution with time travel began with a scenario written in the 1920s. That idea involved massive long cylinder that spun fast in the manner of straw rolled between your palms and that twisted spacetime along with it. The understanding that this object could act as a time machine allowing one to travel to the past only happened in the 1970s, a few decades after scientists had discovered a phenomenon called “closed timelike curves.”

“A closed timelike curve describes the trajectory of a hypothetical observer that, while always traveling forward in time from their own perspective, at some point finds themselves at the same place and time where they started, creating a loop,” Costa says. “This is possible in a region of spacetime that, warped by gravity, loops into itself.”

“Einstein read about closed timelike curves and was very disturbed by this idea,” he adds. The phenomenon nevertheless spurred later research.

Science began to take time travel seriously in the 1980s. In 1990, for instance, Russian physicist Igor Novikov and American physicist Kip Thorne collaborated on a research paper about closed time-like curves. “They started to study not only how one could try to build a time machine but also how it would work,” Costa says.

[Article continues…]

This is very strange and I’m sorry for multiple issues in one day, but I just switched to my inbox and it’s all someone else’s account.

I’m @lillypip but my inbox currently shows someone else’s account. I won’t post it here, but I have screenshots if a Voyager Dev wants to see them.

I think I can reply to people from there (the buttons seem to work, but I won’t do it for obvious reasons).

Not sure if this is a Voyager or Lemmy issue, but it’s very seriously weirding me out.

e: it’s not even the same server. My account is on lemmy.ca and my inbox is someoneelse@kbin.social (not the actual account, obviously).

e2: my inbox isn’t that person’s inbox, it’s their outbox. All the content is from them, not to them. I’ve never interacted with this person to my knowledge.

e3: I was wrong: I HAVE interacted with them. A few hours ago, I messaged them to say a link they commented was broken. I didn’t recognise the name until I tried to message them as recommended in the comments here. I can’t message them now; it just hangs.

e4: restarting the app didn’t help, but rebooting my phone fixed it. Maybe it was a caching issue? Like I said, it was showing what was in their public profile (comments and posts), perhaps my inbox was stuck showing that? Anyway, it’s fixed now, so it seems like a caching issue, probably?

I’ve only noticed this in the past few days. Not sure if it’s a new issue, but I feel I wasn’t getting this before last week. (Eta: I’m on the latest update) Most Lemmy image links in comments are doing this now.

Sorry if it’s been posted already; I tried searching and didn’t see anything.

Thank you for all your hard work – I LOVE Voyager! ❤️

Becoming an astronaut is a fairly romanticized career path, but there are a lot of less-than-romantic aspects to working 50 miles or more above the Earth’s surface. Case in point: just being in zero G makes the human body do all sorts of embarrassing things.

A new story from the New York Times exhaustedly points out that living in space comes with all sorts of “bodily indignities” which should give even the most eager potential space explorer pause. It turns out, it’s not just deadly radiation or muscle loss due to weightlessness astronauts traveling to spots in our own solar system will have to put with:

> In microgravity, however, the blood volume above your neck will most likely still be too high, at least for a while. This can affect the eyes and optic nerves, sometimes causing permanent vision problems for astronauts who stay in space for months, a condition called spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome. It also causes fluid to accumulate in nearby tissues, giving you a puffy face and congested sinuses. As with a bad cold, the process inhibits nerve endings in the nasal passages, meaning you can’t smell or taste very well. (The nose plays an important role in taste.) The I.S.S. galley is often stocked with wasabi and hot sauce.

> These sensory deficits can be helpful in some respects, though, because the I.S.S. tends to smell like body odor or farts. You can’t shower, and microgravity prevents digestive gases from rising out of the stew of other juices in your stomach and intestines, making it hard to belch without barfing. Because the gas must exit somehow, the frequency and volume (metric and decibel) of flatulence increases.

> Other metabolic processes are similarly disturbed. Urine adheres to the bladder wall rather than collecting at the base, where the growing pressure of liquid above the urethra usually alerts us when the organ is two-thirds full. “Thus, the bladder may reach maximum capacity before an urge is felt, at which point urination may happen suddenly and spontaneously,” according to “A Review of Challenges &amp; Opportunities: Variable and Partial Gravity for Human Habitats in L.E.O.,” or low Earth orbit. This is a report that came out last year from the authors Ronke Olabisi, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of California, Irvine, and Mae Jemison, a retired NASA astronaut. Sometimes the bladder fills but doesn’t empty, and astronauts need to catheterize themselves.

Link to NYT article (paywalled)

Link to study paper: Nonclassical Advantage in Metrology Established via Quantum Simulations of Hypothetical Closed Timelike Curves

Abstract:

We construct a metrology experiment in which the metrologist can sometimes amend the input state by simulating a closed timelike curve, a worldline that travels backward in time. The existence of closed timelike curves is hypothetical. Nevertheless, they can be simulated probabilistically by quantum-teleportation circuits. We leverage such simulations to pinpoint a counterintuitive nonclassical advantage achievable with entanglement. Our experiment echoes a common information-processing task: A metrologist must prepare probes to input into an unknown quantum interaction. The goal is to infer as much information per probe as possible. If the input is optimal, the information gained per probe can exceed any value achievable classically. The problem is that, only after the interaction does the metrologist learn which input would have been optimal. The metrologist can attempt to change the input by effectively teleporting the optimal input back in time, via entanglement manipulation. The effective time travel sometimes fails but ensures that, summed over trials, the metrologist’s winnings are positive. Our Gedankenexperiment demonstrates that entanglement can generate operational advantages forbidden in classical chronology-respecting theories.