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description=Nigel Calder takes the pulse of science, as the author of Magic Universe and Einstein s Universe. He checks predictions of the past half-century, to see how they worked out. And his hand is on the brow of frenzied climatology, as a co-author of The Chilling Stars: A Cosmic View of Climate Change.;

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h the end of the permian bio productivity was high the chief victims of this die off were warm water creatures including gigantic bivalves and rugose corals why it s tagged as astrobiology so what you may wonder is the most life enhancing supernova rate without wanting to sound like voltaire s dr pangloss it s probably not very far from the average rate for the past few hundred million years nor very different from what we have now biodiversity and bio productivity are both generous at present svensmark has commented not in the paper itself on a closely related question where s the best place to live in the galaxy too many supernovae can threaten life with extinction although they came before the time range of the present paper very severe episodes called snowball earth have been blamed on bursts of rapid star formation i ve tagged the paper as astrobiology because we may be very lucky in our location in the galaxy other regions may be inhospitable for advanced forms of life because of too many supernovae or too few astronomers searching for life elsewhere speak of a goldilocks zone in planetary systems a planet fit for life should be neither too near to nor too far from the parent star we re there in the solar system sure enough we may also be in a similar goldilocks zone of the milky way and other galaxies with too many or too few supernovae may be unfit for life add to that the huge planetary collision that created the earth s disproportionately large moon and provided the orbital stability and active geology on which life relies and you may suspect that astronomically at least dr pangloss was right everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds don t fret about the diehards if this blog has sometimes seemed too cocky about the svensmark hypothesis it s because i ve known what was in the pipeline from theories observations and experiments long before publication since 1996 the hypothesis has brought new successes year by year and has resisted umpteen attempts to falsify it new additions at the level of microphysics include a previously unknown reaction of sulphuric acid as in a recent preprint on a vastly different scale svensmark s present supernova paper gives us better knowledge of the shape of the milky way galaxy a mark of a good hypothesis is that it looks better and better as time passes with the triumph of plate tectonics diehard opponents were left redfaced and blustering in 1960 you d not get a job in an american geology department if you believed in continental drift but by 1970 you d not get the job if you didn t that s what a paradigm shift means in practice and it will happen sometime soon with cosmic rays in climate physics plate tectonics was never much of a political issue except in the communist bloc there the immobility of continents was doctrinally imposed by the soviet academy of sciences an analagous diehard doctrine in climate physics went global two decades ago when the intergovernmental panel on climate change was conceived to insist that natural causes of climate change are minor compared with human impacts don t fret about the diehards the glory of empirical science is this no matter how many years decades or sometimes centuries it may take in the end the story will come out right 99 comments 3a news and comments 3b the svensmark hypothesis tagged astrobiology bio productivity biodiversity carbon dioxide cinderella zone climate climate physics cloud cover continental drift cosmic rays downlaps dr pangloss evolution flood basalt event fossil record gorgonopsia guadalupian extinction henrik svensmark ipcc life on earth marine invertebrates mesozoic era milky way galaxy mnras monthly notices of the royal astronomical society net primary productivity npp nutrient exhaustion open star clusters oxygen palaeobiology palaeoclimatology palaeozoic era paradigm shift permian period permo triassic event photosynthesis plate tectonics pleiades royal astronomical society sea level solar system soviet academy of sciences intergovernmental panel on climate change superanoxic ocean supernova rate supernovae therapsid permalink posted by calderup quantum computing forges ahead 08 03 2012 updating magic universe so what s a majorana fermion then a news item in today s nature reminds me that last week it was all happening with quantum computing at a meeting of the american physical society ibm announced a breakthrough in the technology predicting practical computers of unimaginable power within 10 or 15 years and in nature eugenie samuel reich discusses what seems to be a discovery of cosmic importance by a team in delft announced at the aps meeting i ll sum up two strands of progress in a brief update in magic universe the last section of the story called bits and qubits the digital world and its quantum shadow looming reads so far towards quantum computers for a second revolution in information technology the experts looked to the spooky behaviour of electrons and atoms known in quantum theory by 2002 physicists in australia had made the equivalent of shannon s relays of 65 years earlier but now the switches offered not binary bits but qubits pronounced cue bits they raised hopes that the first quantum computers might be operating before the first decade of the new century was out whereas electric relays and their electronic successors in microchips provide the simple on off true false 1 0 options expressed as bits of information the qubits in the corresponding quantum devices will have many possible states in theory it is possible to make an extremely fast computer by exploiting ambiguities that are present all the time in quantum theory if you re not sure whether an electron in an atom is in one possible energy state or in the next higher energy state permitted by the physical laws then it can be considered to be both states at once in computing terms it represents both 1 and 0 at the same time two such ambiguities give you four numbers 00 01 10 and 11 which are the binary number equivalents of good old 0 1 2 and 3 three ambiguities give eight numbers and so on until with fifty you have a million billion numbers represented simultaneously in the quantum computer in theory the machine can compute with all of them at the same time such quantum spookiness spooks the spooks the world s secret services are still engaged in the centuries old contest between code makers and code breakers there are new concepts called quantum one time pads for a supposedly unbreakable cipher but some experts suspect that a powerful enough quantum computer could crack anything who knows what developments may be going on behind the scenes like the secret work on digital computing by alan turing at bletchley park in england during the second world war the australians were up front about their intentions they simply wanted to beat the rest of the world in developing a practical machine for the sake of the commercial payoff it would bring the centre for quantum computer technology was founded in january 2000 with federal funding and with participating teams in the universities of new south wales queensland and melbourne the striking thing was the confidence of project members about what they were attempting a widespread opinion at the start of the 20th century held that quantum computing was beyond practical reach for the time being it was seen as requiring exquisite delicacy in construction and operation with the ever present danger that the slightest external interference or mismanagement could cause the whole multiply parallel computation to cave in like a mistimed soufflé the qubit switches developed in australia consist of phosphorus atoms implanted in silicon using a high energy beam aimed with high precision phosphorus atoms can sustain a particular state of charge for longer than most atoms thereby reducing the risk of the soufflé effect a pair of phosphorus atoms together with a transistor for reading out their state constitutes one qubit unveiling the first example at a meeting in london robert clark of new south wales said this was thought to be impossible just a few years ago update march 2012 subject to confirmation of the majorana fermion ten years later when many others had joined in a prolonged experimental quest for quantum computing ibm researchers at yorktown height s claimed to be within sight of a practical device within 10 or 15 years dogging all the experimenters was a problem called decoherence would the qbits survive long enough to be checked for possible errors in 2012 matthias steffen of ibm told a reporter in 1999 coherence times were about 1 nanosecond last year coherence times were achieved for as long as 1 to 4 microseconds with our new techniques we ve achieved coherence times of 10 to 100 microseconds we need to improve that by a factor of 10 to 100 before we re at the threshold where we want to be but considering that in the past ten years we ve increased coherence times by a factor of 10 000 i m not scared then it would be a matter of scaling up from devices handling one or two qbits to an array with say 250 qubits that would contain more ordinary bits of information than there are atoms in the entire universe and it would be capable of performing millions of computations simultaneously no existing code could withstand its probing which probably explains why the us army funded ibm s work ettore majorana cern image a by product of quantum computing research was the discovery of a new particle in the cosmos in 1937 the italian physicist ettore majorana adapted a theory by the british paul dirac to predict a particle that is its own antiparticle a very strange item indeed it would be electrically neutral and exhibit peculiar behaviour a team led by leo kouwenhoven at delft university of technology in the netherland tested experimentally a suggestion from 2010 about how to create a pair of these particles at a very low temperature and in a magnetic field you touch a superconductor with an extremely fine semiconducting wire as the signature of the presence of majorana fermions confirmed by the experimental team the resistance in the wire becomes very low at zero voltage the majorana particle opened a new route to quantum computing because of its special ability to remember if it swaps places with a sibling it was expected to be particularly resistant to the decoherence that plagued other techniques so the delft discovery promised a new research industry references steffen quoted by alex knapp in forbes 28 february 2012 http www forbes com sites alexknapp 2012 02 28 ibm paves the way towards scalable quantum computing ibm press release 28 february 2012 http www 03 ibm com press us en pressrelease 36901 wss nature news 8 march 2012 http www nature com news a solid case for majorana fermions 1 10174 nature news 28 feb 2012 http www nature com news quest for quirky quantum particles may have struck gold 1 10124 a suggestion from 2010 paper by lutchyn et al in prl available at arxiv 1002 4033v2 3 comments 1a magic universe tagged alex knapp american physical society bits decoherence delft university of technology ettore majorana eugenie samuel reich forbes ibm leo kouwenhoven lutchyn et al magic universe majorana fermion matthias steffen nature magazine qbits quantum computing us army permalink posted by calderup climate physics 101 03 03 2012 climate change news and comments sorry folks cosmic rays really are in charge on this blog and others most comments about my previ ous post yet another trick of cosmic rays have been friendly thank you but some people still want to dismiss all the meticulous experimental observational and theoretical work of henrik svensmark and his colleagues in the danish national space institute by saying there is simply no link between cosmic rays and the climate having written two books on the subject and still engaged with it i could in rebuttal flood this post with evidence of many kinds on time scales from days to millennia or longer i ll content myself with just one pair of graphs spanning 50 years they re from a 2007 report by svensmark and the institute s director eigil friis christensen and they re based on a european space agency project called isac the carbon dioxide boys and girls would die for a match of cause and effect of this quality cosmic ray intensity is in red and upside down so that 1991 was a minimum not a maximum fewer cosmic rays mean a warmer world and the cosmic rays vary with the solar cycle the blue curve shows the global mean temperature of the mid troposphere as measured with balloons and collated by the uk met office hadat2 in the upper panel the temperatures roughly follow the solar cycle the match is much better when well known effects of other natural disturbances el niño north atlantic oscillation big volcanoes are removed together with an upward trend of 0 14 deg c per decade the trend may be partly due to man made greenhouse gases but the magnitude of their contribution is debatable from 2000 to 2011 mid tropospheric temperatures have remained pretty level like those of the surface despite the continuing increase in the gases in flat contradiction to the warming predicted by the intergovernmental panel on climate change meanwhile the sun is lazy cosmic ray counts are high and the oceans are cooling reference svensmark h and friis christensen e reply to lockwood and fröhlich the persistent role of the sun in climate forcing danish national space center scientific re port 3 2007 48 comments 3a news and comments tagged carbon dioxide climate change climate physics cosmic rays cosmic rays and climate danish national space institute eigil friis christensen el niño european space agency global temperatures greenhouse gases hadat2 henrik svensmark intergovernmental panel on climate change isac north atlantic oscillation ocean cooling solar cycle troposphere uk met office volcanoes permalink posted by calderup yet another trick of cosmic rays 01 03 2012 climate change news and comments in the climax to the danes experiments cloud seeds flout the theories near to the end of the story that starts with stars exploding in the galaxy and ends with extra clouds gathering a small but important paragraph was missing till now from experiments in copenhagen reported in 2006 and reconfirmed in 2011 in aarhus and geneva cern cloud cosmic rays coming from old supernovas can indeed make molecular clusters a few millionths of a millimetre wide floating in the air but can these aerosols really grow nearly a million times in mass to be large enough to become cloud condensation nuclei on which water droplets can form as required by henrik svensmark s cosmic theory of climate change opponents pointed out that theoretical models said no the growth of additional aerosols would be blocked by a resulting shortage of condensable gases like sulphuric acid in the atmosphere not for the first time an unexpected trick that mother nature had up her sleeve is rev...