Moon Birth Mystery

A more creditable conjecture is that the earth and Moon formed at the same time and thus naturally shared the same chemistry.  This eliminates a lot of impossible impact scenarios and impossible capture scenarios as well.

Recall that planetary position is dictated by Jupiter which sets up available geodesics that the planetary orbits converge to rather rapidly.  Appropriate planets then set up housekeeping and scour their own orbit as well.

Add in my conjecture of Jupiter birthing planets because it is at a key point of rotational instability as discovered by theorists forty years ago.  Jupiter does the necessary gathering of material and then is forced to calve a planet or even a planet and its moon(s).

What makes this conjecture strangely viable it the special nature of Venus.  The surface rock is barely below molten and the planet continues to cool.  A recent genesis solves that and also explains the Red Spot on Jupiter at the same time.

It may even turn out that all our planets were birthed by Jupiter, mostly during the early stages in which the over spinning Jupiter threw out a massive rocky planet as well as a less dense gas planet at the same time.  Thus we have the separation of these two types naturally explained. 

If a planet showed up and was sucked up by Jupiter as expected, we would have a ring side seat of a planet(s) been born.

Moon's Age Revealed, and a Lunar Mystery May Be Solved

By Charles Q. Choi, Space.com Contributor   |   April 02, 2014 01:01pm ET

http://www.space.com/25331-moon-age-revealed-lunar-mystery.html

Scientists have pinned down the birth date of the moon to within 100 million years of the birth of the solar system — the best timeline yet for the evolution of our planet's natural satellite.

This new discovery about the origin of the moon may help solve a mystery about why the moon and the Earth appear virtually identical in makeup, investigators added.

Scientists have suggested the moon was formed 4.5 billion years ago by a gigantic collision between a Mars-size object named Theiaand Earth, a crash that would have largely melted the  Earth. This model suggested that more than 40 percent of the moon was made up of debris from this impacting body. (Current theory suggests that Earth experienced several giant impacts during its formation, with the moon-forming impact being the last.)

However, researchers suspected Theia was chemically different from Earth. In contrast, recent studies revealed that the moon and Earth appear very similar when it comes to versions of elements called isotopes — more so than might be suggested by the current impact model. (Isotopes of an element have differing numbers of neutrons from one another.)

"This means that at the atomic level, the Earth and the moon are identical,"study lead author Seth Jacobson, a planetary scientist at the Côte d'Azur Observatory in Nice, France, told Space.com. "This new information challenged the giant impact theory for lunar formation."

How the moon evolved

No one seriously disputed an impact as the most likely scenario for the formation of the moon, Jacobson said. However, a virtually atomically identical moon and Earth threw the exact circumstances of the collision into question, he said.

Now, by pinpointing when the moon formed, Jacobson and his colleagues could help explain why the moon and Earth are mysteriously similar. The scientists detailed their findings in the April 3 issue of the journal Nature.

Efforts to date the moon-forming impact have proposed a range of ages. Some have argued for an early event, about 30 million years after the birth of the solar system, whereas others suggested that it occurred more than 50 million years and possibly as much as 100 million years after the solar system formed.

To help solve this mystery, Jacobson and his colleagues simulated the growth of the solar system's rocky planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars — from a protoplanetary disk of thousands of planetary building blocks orbiting the sun.

By analyzing how these planets formed and grew from more than 250 computer simulations, the researchers discovered that if the moon-forming impact was early, the amount of material accreted onto Earth afterward was large. If the impact was late, the amount would then be small.

Past research had calculated the amount of material accreted onto Earth after the moon-forming impact. These estimates are based on how on how so-called highly siderophile or "iron-loving" elements such as iridium and platinum show a strong tendency to move into Earth's core. After each giant impact the nascent Earth sustained, these elements would have leached from Earth's mantle and bonded with heavy, iron-rich material destined to sink to Earth's heart.

Moon birth mystery

After the last giant impact that formed the moon, the mantle should have been almost completely stripped of iridium, platinum and their cousins. These elements are still present in the mantle, but only in small amounts, which suggests only a small amount of material accreted onto Earth after the moon-forming impact.

The researchers calculated the moon-forming impact must have occurred about 95 million years after the formation of the solar system, give or take 32 million years.

"A late moon-forming event, as suggested by our work, is very consistent with an identical Earth and moon," Jacobson said.

In addition, recent analyses propose that the impact that created the moon required a faster, more energetic collision than previously suggested. This makes sense if the impact took place relatively late with an older protoplanetary disk, as the new findings suggest.

"Older disks tend to be dynamically more active, since there are fewer bodies left in the disk to distribute energy amongst," Jacobson said.

These new findings raise an interesting new puzzle. While they suggest the moon and the Earth formed together nearly 100 million years after the solar system arose, evidence from meteorites from Mars suggests that the Red Planet formed as little as a few million years after the solar system was born.

"This means that Earth and Mars formed over dramatically different timescales, with Mars forming much faster than the Earth," Jacobson said. "How can this be? Is it just a matter of size? Location? What about Mercury and Venus? Did they grow on similar timescales to the Earth or on timescales more similar to Mars? I think these are some of the really important questions that we, as a community of planetary scientists, will be addressing in the future."

Total Death Experiences

This was the obvious next step in this line of research.  Train mediums to become careful interviewers and proceed to compare reports.  Thus we have here the report of a passing spirit from well before our current understanding of Near Death Experience or NDE.  That they continue to report the same information is excellent news.

If anything we gain more clarity because it appears to be a much richer experience than one in which it is known the person dying will be returning.

While most folks are struggling to believe that this is real, the actual science is moving ahead smartly and well it should.  The challenge is to develop mind to mind protocols that allow significant information transfer.  This proving to not be a small diffiuculty.

Total Death Experiences

Posted by Greg at 06:38, 23 Apr 2014

http://dailygrail.com/Essays/2014/4/Total-Death-Experiences

The following excerpt is from Stop Worrying! There Probably is an Afterlife, which looks into the evidence for the survival of consciousness beyond death. The book is available right now as an eBook download and in paperback format.

NDEs and Communication Through Mediums

After days of struggle against the disease that had struck him down, Dr. Horace Ackley could take no more. All of a sudden, he felt himself gradually rising from his body, with the distinct feeling that he had been divided, though the parts retained a tenuous connection of some sort. As the organs within his physical body ceased functioning, the feeling of being divided came to an abrupt halt, and he found himself whole again. Except he now appeared to be in a position slightly above his lifeless physical body, looking down on it and those who had been in the room with him. Then, without warning…

…the scenes of my whole life seemed to move before me like a panorama; every act seemed as though it were drawn in life size and was really present: it was all there, down to the closing scenes. So rapidly did it pass, that I had little time for reflection. I seemed to be in a whirlpool of excitement; and then, just as suddenly as this panorama had been presented, it was withdrawn, and I was left without a thought of the past or future to contemplate my present condition.

Dr. Ackley realized that he must have died, and was gratified to learn that it seemed a rather pleasant experience. “Death is not so bad a thing after all,” he said to himself, “and I should like to see what that country is that I am going to, if I am a spirit.” His only regret, looking down on the whirl of activity in the room, was that he was unable to inform his friends that he lived on, to set their minds and hearts at ease. At this point, two ‘guardian spirits’ appeared before Dr. Ackley, greeting him by name before leading him from the room into an area where a number of ‘spirits’ whom he was familiar with had assembled.

You may well be saying to yourself “ho-hum, another stock-standard near-death experience”. You might guess that Dr. Ackley then woke up in his resuscitated body and told an NDE researcher about his experience. But if you did, you would be wrong. Dr. Horace Ackley truly did die that day, never to return to this life. The report that you read above was an account of his death, allegedly given by him through a spirit medium – one Samuel Paist of Philadelphia. And what makes it truly remarkable is that it was written down by Paist in his book A Narrative of the Experience of Horace Abraham Ackley, M.D., and published in 1861 – more than a century before the near-death experience had come to the attention of researchers and the general public. And yet Paist/Ackley tells of an OBE shortly after death, a “panoramic” life review (the exact word "panoramic" is used, just as in many other NDEs), and being greeted by spirits who subsequently guided him to an afterlife realm!

The after-death narrative of Dr. Horace Ackley is not an isolated instance. More than a decade before the publication of Raymond Moody’s Life After Life – the book that started the modern fascination with near-death experiences – another scientist had already investigated and written at length on the topic. In a pair of relatively obscure books – The Supreme Adventure (1961) and Intimations of Immortality (1965) – Dr. Robert Crookall cited numerous examples of what he called “pseudo-death,” noting the archetypal elements that Moody would later bring to the public’s attention as the near-death experience. What’s more however, Crookall also compared these tales of ‘pseudo-death’ with accounts of the dying process as told by ‘communicators’ through mediums – and found a number of these same recurring elements, well before they became public knowledge through Moody’s Life After Life.

For example, Crookall showed that, according to ostensibly dead ‘communicators’ talking through mediums, the newly-deceased are usually met by other deceased loved ones: “Usually friends or relatives take the newly-dead man in charge”. This of course may not be considered a surprising thing for a medium to say – it’s probably what most people would expectantly hope for upon entering the spirit realm. But the common elements continue, and include some of the more idiosyncratic features of the NDE. For instance, Crookall noted that, as with the case of Dr. Ackley above, communicators often declare through mediums that “in the early stages of transition, they experienced a panoramic review of their past lives”. In one case the communicator recounted that shortly after death “the scenes of the past life” are revealed; another said that upon ‘waking’ his “entire life unreeled itself”. A dead communicator by the name of Scott told medium Jane Sherwood that his thoughts “raced over the record of a whole long lifetime”, while another communicator said that he saw “clearer and clearer the events of my past life pass, in a long procession, before me.” Crookall even discovered a reference in ancient texts to the experience of dying which agreed with the above accounts: the great Greek philosopher Pythagoras (circa 500 BCE) taught that at the time of death, the soul “sees, over and over again, its earthly existence, the scenes succeeding one another with startling clearness”.

Considering how many near-death experiencers say the life review is a personal ‘judgement day’, with feelings of right and wrong accompanying each action and scene, it is fascinating to note the recurring motif that accompanies this aspect, as told to mediums by ‘dead’ communicators. “I saw my life unfold before me in a procession of images. One is faced with the effects emotionally of all one’s actions”, said a communicator quoted in a 1929 book. “Each incident brings with it the feelings not only of oneself alone but of all those others who were affected by the events”, according to another communicator. And again, this account given by a medium, from 1928: “Like everyone who passes over, he had been through the whole of his past life, re-living his past actions in every detail. All the pain he had given to people he experienced himself, and all the pleasure he had given he received back again”. Given the similarities to some of the NDE accounts mentioned earlier, we must remind ourselves here that this is the apparent testimony from deceased communicators, speaking through mediums, not accounts of near-death experiencers – and well before the elements of the archetypal NDE were well known. And yet the parallels are extraordinary.

Beyond the meeting with the familiar dead, and the past life review, Crookall’s research also found that mediumistic communicators regularly make note of the out-of-body experience component. For example, one communicator noted that he “seemed to rise up out of my body”. According to another, “I was not lying in the bed, but floating in the air, a little above it. I saw the body, stretched out straight”. Furthermore, they also describe the familiar element of traveling through a tunnel! “I saw in front of me a dark tunnel,” said one communicator, before travelling through it and then stepping “out of the tunnel into a new world”. Another communicator noted that they remembered “a curious opening, as if one had passed through subterranean passages and found oneself near the mouth of a cave… The light was much stronger outside”. And once through the ‘tunnel’, the environment is once again familiar to anyone who has perused a catalogue of NDEs: “I was with ‘B’ [her son, killed in the War]: he took me to a world so brilliant that I can’t describe it”.

The common elements are compelling. For anyone familiar with the NDE literature, these reports through mediums are startlingly similar to the accounts of near-death experiencers – and yet Crookall collected them years before the archetype of the NDE became common knowledge. And not only do they seem to offer support for the validity of the near-death experience, they also hint that there may well be more to the much-maligned subject of mediumship.

Lessons About Longevity From a 256-Year-Old

This is the second time around on this story.  It has been reworked by this writer and some fresh information is available.    The scrutiny that it received is noteworthy and should really have flushed out deliberate substitution.  By that I mean mr Li taking on the identity of a revered earlier practitioner with whom he shared knowledge.  Yet that is exactly were an investigation would go.

So it is appropriate to accept the proposition as possible and false hood unproven.  This at least allows us to read the material and investigate his life lessons.

Check my interpolations

Lessons About Longevity From a 256-Year-Old

By Christine Lin, Epoch Times | April 8, 2014

Last Updated: April 8, 2014 7:15 am

Mr. Li Qing Yun (1677–1933) died at the age of 256 years old. He had 24 wives, and lived through nine emperors in the Qing Dynasty. (Public Domain)

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/270979-lessons-about-longevity-from-a-256-year-old/

Keep a quiet heart, sit like a tortoise, walk sprightly like a pigeon and sleep like a dog.

According to legend, Mr. Li Qing Yun (1677–1933) was a Chinese medicine physician, herbal expert, qigong master, and tactical consultant. He was said to have lived through nine emperors in the Qing Dynasty to be 256 years old.

His May 1933 obituary in Time Magazine, titled “Tortoise-Pigeon-Dog,” revealed Li’s secrets of longevity: “Keep a quiet heart, sit like a tortoise, walk sprightly like a pigeon and sleep like a dog.”

Mr. Li is said to have had quite unusual habits in his daily living. He did not drink hard liquor or smoke and ate his meals at regular times. He was a vegetarian and frequently drank wolfberry (also known as goji berry) tea. [ this is clearly unusual for his time and place – arclein]

He slept early and got up early. When he had time, he sat up straight with his eyes closed and hands in his lap, at times not moving at all for a few hours. [ this is straight forward meditation and the time length suggests a skilled practitioner –arclein ]

In his spare time, Li played cards, managing to lose enough money every time for his opponent’s meals for that day. Because of his generosity and levelheaded demeanor, everyone liked to be with him. [ I like him already.  This way he vigorously exercised his brain and maintained a happy social group, there is a really good lesson here – arclein ]

Mr. Li spent his whole life studying Chinese herbs and discovering the secrets of longevity, traveling through provinces of China and as far as Thailand to gather herbs and treat illnesses.

While it is unclear whether Li actually lived as long as is believed, what little we know of his habits fit with modern science’s findings about longevity.

Research

Dan Buettner, author of “The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest,” researches the science of longevity. In his book and in a 2009 TED talk, he examined the lifestyle habits of four geographically distinct populations around the world.

All of these groups—Californian Adventists, Okinawans, Sardinians, and Costa Ricans—live to be over 100 years of age at a far greater rate than most people, or they live a dozen years longer than average. He calls the places where these groups live “blue zones.”

According to Buettner’s research, all blue-zone groups eat a vegetable-based diet. The group of Adventists in Loma Linda, California, eat plenty of legumes and greens as mentioned in the Bible. Herders living the in the highlands of Sardinia eat an unleavened whole grain bread, cheese from grass-fed animals, and a special wine.

Buettner found that low-calorie diets help in extending life, as demonstrated by a group of healthy elderly Okinawans who practice a Confucian rule of stopping eating when one is 80 percent full. [ I now practice an eighteen hour fast on Monday, Wednesday and Fridays and am trying to figure out how to remove most meat from my diet,   This has led to a weight reset of negative fifty pounds – arclein ]

Perhaps Li’s wolfberry tea played a crucial part in his health. After hearing Li’s story, medical researchers from Britain and France conducted an in-depth study of wolfberry and found that it contains an unknown vitamin called “Vitamin X,” also known as the “beauty vitamin.” Their experiments confirmed that wolfberry inhibits the accumulation of fat and promotes new liver cells, lowers blood glucose and cholesterol, and so on.

Wolfberry performs a role of rejuvenation: It activates the brain cells and endocrine glands; enhances the secretion of hormones; and removes toxins accumulated in the blood, which can help maintain a normal function of body tissues and organs.

Meditation

Researchers have found numerous benefits to regular meditation. Neuroscientists at the University of Massachusetts Medical School asked two groups of stressed-out high-tech employees to either meditate over eight weeks or live as they normally do.

They found that the meditators “showed a pronounced shift in activity to the left frontal lobe,” reads a 2003 Psychology Today article. “This mental shift decreases the negative effects of stress, mild depression, and anxiety. There is also less activity in the amygdala, where the brain processes fear.”

Meditation also reduces brain shrinkage due to aging and enhances mood.

Aside from meditation, Buettner found that regularly scheduled downtime undoes inflammation, which is a reaction to stress. The Adventists in California strictly adhere to their 24-hour Sabbath and spend the time reflecting, praying, and enjoying their social circles.

Community

Buettner also found that community is a huge factor in the longevity of blue-zone groups. Typical Okinawans have many close friends, with whom they share everything. Sardinian highlanders have a reverence for the elderly not found in modern Western societies. The Adventists put family first. [ I whole heartedly support this obvious regime we need it and it supports my own agenda in community formation – arclein ]

A sense of belonging and having healthy friends and family encourage the individual to live healthily as well.

In “Outliers,” Malcolm Gladwell examined a group of Italians called the Rosetans, who migrated to an area west of Bangor, Pennsylvania. Across the board, they had lower incidents of heart disease and generally lived long, healthy lives. After experiments, it was determined that their secret was not genetics or even diet (41 percent of their diet came from fat).

“The Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world,” Gladwell wrote. “The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills.” 

Purposeful Living

In his travels, Buettner came across a common theme among blue-zone groups: None of them had the concept of retirement. As it turns out, to keep going makes it easier to keep going.

[curiously, I have rejected the whole concept of retirement my entire life as simply inappropriate. – arclein ]

Purposeful living into the sunset years is a mantra to the Okinawans and Sardinians. In those groups, Buettner met centenarian men and women who continued to climb hills, build fences, fish, and care for great-great-great-great grandchildren.

Interestingly, none of these centenarians exercise purposely as we Westerners who go to the gym do. “They simply live active lives that warrant physical activity,” Buettner said. They all walk, cook, and do chores manually, and many of them garden.  [ what I miss  most is my own garden today just for the natural exercise  - arclein ]

Based on an article about Li Qing Yun from Kan Zhong Guo (Secret China).

Dolphin Whistle Instantly Translated by Computer

We are starting to see clear progress in understanding sound based animal communication.  Yet most of what we see suggests that this is mostly limited to warnings and signaling at a distance.  With the dolphin we see some playfulness as well.

At least it is movement coming after decades of scant progress.

I also think that our core paradigm is wrong.  I now conjecture that with animals we are dealing with a lot of mind to mind communication while sound is reserved for distance signaling.  If we can properly prove that, all this work is actually counterproductive.  It may be possible to ask them what they mean with their sounds.

The more interesting problem is the crow.  That may well be a working group mind.  That needs to be closely studied against the above conjecture to see if it is creditable.

Dolphin whistle instantly translated by computer

26 March 2014 by Hal Hodson

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129624.300

Software has performed the first real-time translation of a dolphin whistle – and better data tools are giving fresh insights into primate communication too

IT was late August 2013 and Denise Herzing was swimming in the Caribbean. The dolphin pod she had been tracking for the past 25 years was playing around her boat. Suddenly, she heard one of them say, "Sargassum".

"I was like whoa! We have a match. I was stunned," says Herzing, who is the director of the Wild Dolphin Project. She was wearing a prototype dolphin translator called Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry (CHAT) and it had just translated a live dolphin whistle for the first time.

It detected a whistle for sargassum, or seaweed, which she and her team had invented to use when playing with the dolphin pod. They hoped the dolphins would adopt the whistles, which are easy to distinguish from their own natural whistles – and they were not disappointed. When the computer picked up the sargassum whistle, Herzing heard her own recorded voice saying the word into her ear.

As well as boosting our understanding of animal behaviour, the moment hints at the potential for using algorithms to analyse any activity where information is transmitted – including our daily activities (see "Scripts for life").

"It sounds like a fabulous observation, one you almost have to resist speculating on. It's provocative," says Michael Coen, a biostatistician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Herzing is quick to acknowledge potential problems with the sargassum whistle. It is just one instance and so far hasn't been repeated. Its audio profile looks different from the whistle they taught the dolphins – it has the same shape but came in at a higher frequency. Brenda McCowan of the University of California, Davis, says her experience with dolphin vocalisations matches that observation.

Thad Starner at the Georgia Institute of Technology and technical lead on the wearable computer Google Glass, built CHAT for Herzing with a team of graduate students. Starner and Herzing are using pattern-discovery algorithms, designed to analyse dolphin whistles and extract meaningful features that a person might miss or not think to look for. As well as listening out for invented whistles, the team hopes to start trying to figure out what the dolphins' natural communication means, too.

McCowan says it's an exciting time for the whole field of animal communication. With better information-processing tools, researchers can analyse huge data sets of animal behaviour for patterns.

Coen is already doing something like this with white-cheeked gibbons. Using similar machine-learning techniques to those used by Starner and McCowan, he has found 27 different fundamental units in gibbon calls.

McCowan, meanwhile, has recently modelled the behaviour of rhesus macaques at the National Primate Research Center in California. The idea is to predict when the macaques would descend into the violent social unrest known as "cage war" that often leads to the death of the alpha family.

Her team started collecting data, making 37,000 observations of key signs of dominance, subordination and affiliation over three years. Among other things, their analysis showed that cage stability improved if new young adult males were introduced now and again as they seemed to grow into "policing" roles. "You had to look at the data," McCowan says. "It wasn't something a human could see."

Terrence Deacon, an anthropologist and neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, explains that some pattern of repetition is a basic requirement when information is transmitted. In other words, if Herzing's dolphins or McCowan's macaques are exchanging information, if their behaviour is not just random, meaningless noise, then there must be some discoverable patterns. Information theory can find out what those pattern are, which parts of a whistle are important, helping behaviourists figure out what animals are communicating.

The first results from Starner and Herzing's work on dolphin communication-processing are due to be presented at the speech and signal processing conference in Florence, Italy, in May. Last summer's work was cut short because the team lost the dolphin pod, but they did make some progress. Starner's algorithms discovered eight different components in a sample of 73 whistles. It's still preliminary, but they were able to match certain strings of those components with mother-calf interactions, for instance. The work has let them plan for the coming summer when they want to confirm two-way communication between humans and dolphins.

Deacon is excited to see if such work can lead to a better understanding of animal cultures. He suspects much animal communication will turn out to be basic pointing or signposting rather than more complex language. But humans often communicate on a basic level too. "I don't see a fundamental white line that distinguishes us from other animals," he says.

Two Photon Entanglement Modeled with 103 Dimensions

This is a neat primer on particle entanglement, photon entanglement and effective parallel processing ability in a quantum computer.  This technology is advancing wonderfully.

To understand what is happening here a particle or a photon is a natural resonance system.  In combination it is possible for the resonance to synchronize to form what is essentially a single entity.  On separation that synchronization does not end and they do not have to exchange information in the form of photons.  Thus we achieve simultaneous information transfer across potentially the universe without having to deal directly with the speed of light whatsoever except to send the receiver there.  We certainly will not be going even to Mars without this powering our communication.

As is becoming blindingly clear, faster that light communication is already a workable reality and will soon be coming to your cell phone to speed data transfer.

Entering the 103rd dimension: Scientists reveal major quantum breakthrough that could lead to ultrafast computers and unbreakable encryption

·         Could lead to unbreakable encryption and superfast computers

·         Researchers created entanglement of 103 dimensions with only two photons - smashing the previous record of 11

·         NSA also working on quantum computer that could break encryption systems

·         Researchers joke their discovery means  Schrödinger's famous cat could actually be alive, dead or in 101 other states

By MARK PRIGG

PUBLISHED: 21:30 GMT, 28 March 2014 | UPDATED: 11:44 GMT, 29 March 201

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2591919/Entering-103rd-dimension-Scientists-reveal-major-breakthrough-lead-ultrafast-computers-means-Schr-dingers-famous-cat-actually-alive-dead-101-states.html

Researchers have made a major step forward in the development of quantum computers that can run at speeds far faster than current systems.

A Spanish team claims to have created a pair of particles with 103 dimensions.

The experiment smashes the previous record of 11 dimensions, and mean quantum computers are one step closer to becoming commonplace.

+2

A current quantum computer chip: Unlike 'bits' found in normal computers that can only be on or off at any one time, qubits can also be in a 'mixed state' between these points. This means quantum computers such as the D-Wave range can peform single tasks much faster than normal computers, and perform multiple tasks at once, much more efficiently. The latest breakthrough could make them even more powerful.

WHAT IS QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT

Quantum entanglement is a physical phenomenon that occurs when pairs or groups of particles are generated or interact in ways such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently – instead, a quantum state may be given for the system as a whole.

Superpositions are produced, such as the possibility of being in two places at once, which defies intuition. 

In addition, when two particles are entangled a connection is generated: measuring the state of one (whether they are in one place or another, or spinning one way or another, for example) affects the state of the other particle instantly, no matter how far away from each other they are.

The discovery could represent a great advance toward the construction of quantum computers with much higher processing speeds than current ones, and toward a better encryption of information, the researchers say.

The states in which elementary particles, such as photons, can be found have properties which are beyond common sense. 

The phenomenon means that superpositions are produced, such as the possibility of being in two places at once, which defies intuition. 

This allows quantum computers, for instance, to process more than one thing at a time more effectively - and makes them much quicker when processing several tasks at the same time.

In addition, when two particles are entangled a connection is generated: measuring the state of one (whether they are in one place or another, or spinning one way or another, for example) affects the state of the other particle instantly, no matter how far away from each other they are.

Scientists have spent years combining both properties to construct networks of entangled particles in a state of superposition. 

This in turn allows constructing quantum computers capable of operating at unimaginable speeds, encrypting information with total security and conducting experiments in quantum mechanics which would be impossible to carry out otherwise.

###

+2######

An example of a two-dimensional subspace is shown. The intensities and phases for two different modes in the z basis are demonstrated, and their superposition leads to a mode in the x basis. The y basis can be constructed similarly.

Until now, in order to increase the 'computing' capacity of these particle systems, scientists have mainly turned to increasing the number of entangled particles, each of them in a two-dimensional state of superposition: a qubit (the quantum equivalent to an information bit, but with values which can be 1, 0 or an overlap of both values). 

Using this method, scientists managed to entangle up to 14 particles, an authentic multitude given its experimental difficulty.

The research team was directed by Anton Zeilinger and Mario Krenn from the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. 

It included the participation of Marcus Huber, researcher from the Group of Quantum Information and Quantum Phenomena from the UAB Department of Physics, as well as visiting researcher at the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO). 

The team has advanced one more step towards improving entangled quantum systems.

In an article published this week in the journal PNAS, scientists described how they managed to achieve a quantum entanglement with a minimum of 103 dimensions with only two particles. 

###

WHAT IS QUANTUM COMPUTING?

Modern day computers run on a model designed by Alan Turing in the 1930s.

They are digital and use bits to transfer information and perform tasks. 

They use binary code and can only ever been in an active, or an inactive state - running at one or zero. 

This means that a single bit is either on or off at any one time.

The D-Wave quantum computer

Qubits work differently and can be on, off, or in a mixed state in between. 

As a result, qubits are able to be in multiple places at the same time. 

Whereas the original Turing computer can only make one calculation at a time, quantum computers are capable of performing single tasks faster, and performing multiple tasks more effectively. 

Tasks that would take normal computers years to complete can be processed in seconds using quantum computers like the D-Wave.

'We have two Schrödinger cats which could be alive, dead, or in 101 other states simultaneously', Huber jokes, 'plus, they are entangled in such a way that what happens to one immediately affects the other'. 

The results implies a record in quantum entanglements of multiple dimensions with two particles, established until now at 11 dimensions.

Instead of entangling many particles with a qubit of information each, scientists generated one single pair of entangled photons in which each could be in more than one hundred states, or in any of the superpositions of theses states; something much easier than entangling many particles. 

These highly complex states correspond to different modes in which photons may find themselves in, with a distribution of their characteristic phase, angular momentum and intensity for each mode.

'This high dimension quantum entanglement offers great potential for quantum information applications. 

'In cryptography, for example, our method would allow us to maintain the security of the information in realistic situations, with noise and interference. 

'In addition, the discovery could facilitate the experimental development of quantum computers, since this would be an easier way of obtaining high dimensions of entanglement with few particles', explained researcher Marcus Huber.

Now that the results demonstrate that obtaining high dimension entanglements is accessible, scientists conclude in the paper that the next step will be to search how they can experimentally control these hundreds of spatial modes of the photons in order to conduct quantum computer operations.