Fun with Qubits

If you look at a cylindrical block from the bottom, you see a circle. If you look at it from the side you see a square.

Imagine a cylindrical block that is spinning around amazingly fast. When you look at it, it stops spinning and snaps into either a circle or a square.

This is similar to how a qubit will behave. Whereas a normal bit has a value of either one or zero. A qubit is both. A qubit has some amount of one and some amount of zero, however when you measure it the qubit will always snap into a one or zero. These measurements are probabilistic and will not be the same each time.

How do blackholes affect light?

Assuming we could get close enough to a blackhole without dying, how would it affect what the surroundings look like? How will the bending of light impact what we see?

The reddit user, entropyjump, synthesized what a blackhole would look like (before it sucked up a bunch of stuff). Watch the video and read the below description:

The youtube movie shows a simulated view of a small black hole, if it were suspended in the air about a meter away from the camera. I wrote the simulation in Python, and used a spherical panorama image available online. In the movie clip, the camera is orbiting the black hole to show what the environment looks like as light is traveling through strongly curved spacetime close to the black hole. In some movie frames, a so-called ‘Einstein ring’ can be seen: this feature appears when there is an object exactly behind the black hole as seen by the camera. Light from this object passes around all sides of the black hole on its way toward us, forming a ring around its shadow.

Although this black hole is tiny (it has a Schwarzschild radius of about 1.8 centimeters), its mass is about twice that of Earth. Such a black hole would wreak havoc on our planet if it were to come in the vicinity of Earth. So, this is just a visualization of how light would behave close to it, and not a full physical simulation of the other effects the black hole might have on its environment.

What are the practical complications of turning energy into matter?

Question:

Lets just say I had practically inifinte energy. How do I go about turning this into a stream of protons? Dont hold back on the quantum field theory. Smashing existing particles together & filtering out what we want(protons) is not a good enough answer.

Answer:

The first practical complication is that you cannot (as far as we know) create matter without also creating an equal amount of anti matter. Of course the fact that the observable universe is mostly regular matter indicates that there is some lopsidedness to this summitry and so it may be possible to find conditions that at least create slightly more matter then antimatter. Still, this is a problem that you would need to be overcome to get your pure stream of regular matter protons.

Another problem is the fact that to create particles we simply amass a very large amount of energy in a very small space and see what pops out. We have no way to command that only certain particles be created. For example, even if I amass enough energy to allow for the spontaneous creation of a pair of protons (the proton and its anti matter partner) i have no way to know if the protons are what is going to be created, or other particles whose combined mass and energy add up to the mass of the proton pair. We can only predict the frequency that certain particles will be created.

Finally, although the transformation of energy into matter and matter into energy is a common occurrence in nature, and an entire industry (the nuclear power industry) has been made possible by our understanding of the transition we still aren’t anywhere close to having a mass-energy conversion machine.

I can try and explain the conversion machine and our current methods of conversion if you want, but I think its off the topic of your question, and it looks like I’ve mad an ugly wall of text already.

If any of you reading this see something that I’ve got wrong, or want to explain in more detail please do! This is a topic I’ve been curious about for years.

Edit: I saw your post in r/physics. No, we can’t do better then smash particles together and see what comes out. Think of it this way. We don’t create matter, we simply create the conditions that allow matter to be created. The conditions that are needed are a very high concentration of energy, and the only way we have to achieve those conditions are particle collides. Unfortunately if we have enough energy to allow for the creation of a proton, then we have also allowed for the creation of many smaller particles that will need to be filtered out. So I’m sorry if smashing existing particles together & filtering out what we want is not a good enough answer, because right now its the only answer.

ikenbot: Thunderclouds Make Gamma Rays—and Shoot Out Antimatter, Too Thunderclouds emit gamma rays in powerful, millisecond-long bursts called terrestrial gamma-ray flashes, first discovered by space observatories. These bursts can also produce beams of electrons and even of antimatter that can travel halfway around the globe. All proposed explanations for the phenomena involve strong electric fields unleashing avalanches of electrons inside clouds, but none fully accounts for the sheer energies of the gamma rays. New dedicated space missions and research aircraft may solve the mystery, as well as find out if the flashes pose radiation exposure risks for airline flights.
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ikenbot:

Thunderclouds Make Gamma Rays—and Shoot Out Antimatter, Too

Thunderclouds emit gamma rays in powerful, millisecond-long bursts called terrestrial gamma-ray flashes, first discovered by space observatories.

These bursts can also produce beams of electrons and even of antimatter that can travel halfway around the globe.

All proposed explanations for the phenomena involve strong electric fields unleashing avalanches of electrons inside clouds, but none fully accounts for the sheer energies of the gamma rays.

New dedicated space missions and research aircraft may solve the mystery, as well as find out if the flashes pose radiation exposure risks for airline flights.

Painless Injections

In designing this jet-injection mechanism, the engineers relied on what’s known as a Lorentz force actuator (Image 3). The Lorentz force actuator in this case is a small permanent magnet surrounded by a coil of wires. The coil of wires, or solenoid, is part of a piston system that is separate from the permanent magnet which lies in the center. If we recall from high school physics, we know that when a current is passed through the wires of a solenoid, the solenoid becomes an electromagnet which, in turn, creates its own magnetic field. Now, if this new field is opposite that of the permanent magnet, meaning if their fields repel, then a repulsive force will be established. This force will accelerate the piston towards the nozzle, creating a sudden change in pressure which then ejects the medicine out of the nozzle.

We’ve found the Higgs Boson: What next?

Dark Matter

The LHC is about to have a $1.82 Billion upgrade to research dark matter.

TheAge reports:

It might have only just found the elusive ”God particle”, but the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN laboratory, near Geneva, is to have a $A1.82 billion upgrade at the end of the decade to investigate the mystery of dark matter.

Scientists believe dark matter holds the universe together. Yet while it is all around us, making up 84 per cent of all matter, it has never been seen as it does not produce or reflect light.

Now scientists hope that a 10-fold boost to the power of the beams of particles being smashed together inside CERN’s 27-kilometre tunnels will allow them to create and detect dark matter.

Other experiments at the laboratory will continue until the end of this year, when the collider will close for 20 months for repairs.

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