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As a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives, I am often mistaken for a futurist. The people most interested in hiring me for my opinions about technology are usually less concerned with building tools that help people live better lives in the present than they are in identifying the Next Big Thing through which to dominate them in the future. I dont usually respond to their inquiries. Why help these guys ruin whats left of the internet, much less civilisation?

Still, sometimes a combination of morbid curiosity and cold hard cash is enough to get me on a stage in front of the tech elite, where I try to talk some sense into them about how their businesses are affecting our lives out here in the real world. Thats how I found myself accepting an invitation to address a group mysteriously described as ultra-wealthy stakeholders, out in the middle of the desert.

A limo was waiting for me at the airport. As the sun began to dip over the horizon, I realised I had been in the car for three hours. What sort of wealthy hedge-fund types would drive this far from the airport for a conference? Then I saw it. On a parallel path next to the highway, as if racing against us, a small jet was coming in for a landing on a private airfield. Of course.

The next morning, two men in matching Patagonia fleeces came for me in a golf cart and conveyed me through rocks and underbrush to a meeting hall. They left me to drink coffee and prepare in what I figured was serving as my green room. But instead of me being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, my audience was brought in to me. They sat around the table and introduced themselves: five super-wealthy guys yes, all men from the upper echelon of the tech investing and hedge-fund world. At least two of them were billionaires. After a bit of small talk, I realised they had no interest in the speech I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come to ask questions.

They started out innocuously and predictably enough. Bitcoin or ethereum? Virtual reality or augmented reality? Who will get quantum computing first, China or Google? Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? Should a shelter have its own air supply? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event? The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?

The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers if that technology could be developed in time.

I tried to reason with them. I made pro-social arguments for partnership and solidarity as the best approaches to our collective, long-term challenges. The way to get your guards to exhibit loyalty in the future was to treat them like friends right now, I explained. Dont just invest in ammo and electric fences, invest in people and relationships. They rolled their eyes at what must have sounded to them like hippy philosophy.

This was probably the wealthiest, most powerful group I had ever encountered. Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. Thats when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology.

Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonising Mars, Palantirs Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether. Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.

These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now theyve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch. Will it be Jeff Bezos migrating to space, Thiel to his New Zealand compound, or Mark Zuckerberg to his virtual metaverse? And these catastrophising billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy the supposed champions of the survival-of-the-fittest business landscape thats fuelling most of this speculation to begin with.

What I came to realise was that these men are actually the losers. The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where winning means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. Its as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.

Yet this Silicon Valley escapism lets call it The Mindset encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind.

Never before have our societys most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquests would be to render the world itself unliveable for everyone else. Nor have they ever before had the technologies through which to programme their sensibilities into the very fabric of our society. The landscape is alive with algorithms and intelligences actively encouraging these selfish and isolationist outlooks. Those sociopathic enough to embrace them are rewarded with cash and control over the rest of us. Its a self-reinforcing feedback loop. This is new.

Amplified by digital technologies and the unprecedented wealth disparity they afford, The Mindset allows for the easy externalisation of harm to others, and inspires a corresponding longing for transcendence and separation from the people and places that have been abused.

Instead of just lording over us for ever, however, the billionaires at the top of these virtual pyramids actively seek the endgame. In fact, like the plot of a Marvel blockbuster, the very structure of The Mindset requires an endgame. Everything must resolve to a one or a zero, a winner or loser, the saved or the damned. Actual, imminent catastrophes from the climate emergency to mass migrations support the mythology, offering these would-be superheroes the opportunity to play out the finale in their own lifetimes. For The Mindset also includes a faith-based Silicon Valley certainty that they can develop a technology that will somehow break the laws of physics, economics and morality to offer them something even better than a way of saving the world: a means of escape from the apocalypse of their own making.

By the time I boarded my return flight to New York, my mind was reeling with the implications of The Mindset. What were its main tenets? Who were its true believers? What, if anything, could we do to resist it? Before I had even landed, I posted an article about my strange encounter to surprising effect.

Almost immediately, I began receiving inquiries from businesses catering to the billionaire prepper, all hoping I would make some introductions on their behalf to the five men I had written about. I heard from a real estate agent who specialises in disaster-proof listings, a company taking reservations for its third underground dwellings project, and a security firm offering various forms of risk management.

But the message that got my attention came from a former president of the American chamber of commerce in Latvia. JC Cole had witnessed the fall of the Soviet empire, as well as what it took to rebuild a working society almost from scratch. He had also served as landlord for the American and European Union embassies, and learned a whole lot about security systems and evacuation plans. You certainly stirred up a bees nest, he began his first email to me. Its quite accurate the wealthy hiding in their bunkers will have a problem with their security teams I believe you are correct with your advice to treat those people really well, right now, but also the concept may be expanded and I believe there is a better system that would give much better results.

He felt certain that the event a grey swan, or predictable catastrophe triggered by our enemies, Mother Nature, or just by accident was inevitable. He had done a Swot analysis strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and concluded that preparing for calamity required us to take the very same measures as trying to prevent one. By coincidence, he explained, I am setting up a series of safe haven farms in the NYC area. These are designed to best handle an event and also benefit society as semi-organic farms. Both within three hours drive from the city close enough to get there when it happens.

Here was a prepper with security clearance, field experience and food sustainability expertise. He believed the best way to cope with the impending disaster was to change the way we treat one another, the economy, and the planet right now while also developing a network of secret, totally self-sufficient residential farm communities for millionaires, guarded by Navy Seals armed to the teeth.

JC is currently developing two farms as part of his safe haven project. Farm one, outside Princeton, is his show model and works well as long as the thin blue line is working. The second one, somewhere in the Poconos, has to remain a secret. The fewer people who know the locations, the better, he explained, along with a link to the Twilight Zone episode in which panicked neighbours break into a familys bomb shelter during a nuclear scare. The primary value of safe haven is operational security, nicknamed OpSec by the military. If/when the supply chain breaks, the people will have no food delivered. Covid-19 gave us the wake-up call as people started fighting over toilet paper. When it comes to a shortage of food it will be vicious. That is why those intelligent enough to invest have to be stealthy.

JC invited me down to New Jersey to see the real thing. Wear boots, he said. The ground is still wet. Then he asked: Do you shoot?

The farm itself was serving as an equestrian centre and tactical training facility in addition to raising goats and chickens. JC showed me how to hold and shoot a Glock at a series of outdoor targets shaped like bad guys, while he grumbled about the way Senator Dianne Feinstein had limited the number of rounds one could legally fit in a magazine for the handgun. JC knew his stuff. I asked him about various combat scenarios. The only way to protect your family is with a group, he said. That was really the whole point of his project to gather a team capable of sheltering in place for a year or more, while also defending itself from those who hadnt prepared. JC was also hoping to train young farmers in sustainable agriculture, and to secure at least one doctor and dentist for each location.

On the way back to the main building, JC showed me the layered security protocols he had learned designing embassy properties: a fence, no trespassing signs, guard dogs, surveillance cameras all meant to discourage violent confrontation. He paused for a minute as he stared down the drive. Honestly, I am less concerned about gangs with guns than the woman at the end of the driveway holding a baby and asking for food. He paused, and sighed, I dont want to be in that moral dilemma.

Thats why JCs real passion wasnt just to build a few isolated, militarised retreat facilities for millionaires, but to prototype locally owned sustainable farms that can be modelled by others and ultimately help restore regional food security in America. The just-in-time delivery system preferred by agricultural conglomerates renders most of the nation vulnerable to a crisis as minor as a power outage or transportation shutdown. Meanwhile, the centralisation of the agricultural industry has left most farms utterly dependent on the same long supply chains as urban consumers. Most egg farmers cant even raise chickens, JC explained as he showed me his henhouses. They buy chicks. Ive got roosters.

JC is no hippy environmentalist but his business model is based in the same communitarian spirit I tried to convey to the billionaires: the way to keep the hungry hordes from storming the gates is by getting them food security now. So for $3m, investors not only get a maximum security compound in which to ride out the coming plague, solar storm, or electric grid collapse. They also get a stake in a potentially profitable network of local farm franchises that could reduce the probability of a catastrophic event in the first place. His business would do its best to ensure there are as few hungry children at the gate as possible when the time comes to lock down.

So far, JC Cole has been unable to convince anyone to invest in American Heritage Farms. That doesnt mean no one is investing in such schemes. Its just that the ones that attract more attention and cash dont generally have these cooperative components. Theyre more for people who want to go it alone. Most billionaire preppers dont want to have to learn to get along with a community of farmers or, worse, spend their winnings funding a national food resilience programme. The mindset that requires safe havens is less concerned with preventing moral dilemmas than simply keeping them out of sight.

Many of those seriously seeking a safe haven simply hire one of several prepper construction companies to bury a prefab steel-lined bunker somewhere on one of their existing properties. Rising S Company in Texas builds and installs bunkers and tornado shelters for as little as $40,000 for an 8ft by 12ft emergency hideout all the way up to the $8.3m luxury series Aristocrat, complete with pool and bowling lane. The enterprise originally catered to families seeking temporary storm shelters, before it went into the long-term apocalypse business. The company logo, complete with three crucifixes, suggests their services are geared more toward Christian evangelist preppers in red-state America than billionaire tech bros playing out sci-fi scenarios.

Theres something much more whimsical about the facilities in which most of the billionaires or, more accurately, aspiring billionaires actually invest. A company called Vivos is selling luxury underground apartments in converted cold war munitions storage facilities, missile silos, and other fortified locations around the world. Like miniature Club Med resorts, they offer private suites for individuals or families, and larger common areas with pools, games, movies and dining. Ultra-elite shelters such as the Oppidum in the Czech Republic claim to cater to the billionaire class, and pay more attention to the long-term psychological health of residents. They provide imitation of natural light, such as a pool with a simulated sunlit garden area, a wine vault, and other amenities to make the wealthy feel at home.

On closer analysis, however, the probability of a fortified bunker actually protecting its occupants from the reality of, well, reality, is very slim. For one, the closed ecosystems of underground facilities are preposterously brittle. For example, an indoor, sealed hydroponic garden is vulnerable to contamination. Vertical farms with moisture sensors and computer-controlled irrigation systems look great in business plans and on the rooftops of Bay Area startups; when a palette of topsoil or a row of crops goes wrong, it can simply be pulled and replaced. The hermetically sealed apocalypse grow room doesnt allow for such do-overs.

Just the known unknowns are enough to dash any reasonable hope of survival. But this doesnt seem to stop wealthy preppers from trying. The New York Times reported that real estate agents specialising in private islands were overwhelmed with inquiries during the Covid-19 pandemic. Prospective clients were even asking about whether there was enough land to do some agriculture in addition to installing a helicopter landing pad. But while a private island may be a good place to wait out a temporary plague, turning it into a self-sufficient, defensible ocean fortress is harder than it sounds. Small islands are utterly dependent on air and sea deliveries for basic staples. Solar panels and water filtration equipment need to be replaced and serviced at regular intervals. The billionaires who reside in such locales are more, not less, dependent on complex supply chains than those of us embedded in industrial civilisation.

Surely the billionaires who brought me out for advice on their exit strategies were aware of these limitations. Could it have all been some sort of game? Five men sitting around a poker table, each wagering his escape plan was best?

But if they were in it just for fun, they wouldnt have called for me. They would have flown out the author of a zombie apocalypse comic book. If they wanted to test their bunker plans, theyd have hired a security expert from Blackwater or the Pentagon. They seemed to want something more. Their language went far beyond questions of disaster preparedness and verged on politics and philosophy: words such as individuality, sovereignty, governance and autonomy.

Thats because it wasnt their actual bunker strategies I had been brought out to evaluate so much as the philosophy and mathematics they were using to justify their commitment to escape. They were working out what Ive come to call the insulation equation: could they earn enough money to insulate themselves from the reality they were creating by earning money in this way? Was there any valid justification for striving to be so successful that they could simply leave the rest of us behind apocalypse or not?

Or was this really their intention all along? Maybe the apocalypse is less something theyre trying to escape than an excuse to realise The Mindsets true goal: to rise above mere mortals and execute the ultimate exit strategy.

This is an edited extract from Survival of the Richest by Douglas Rushkoff, published by Scribe (20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

Continued here:
The super-rich preppers planning to save themselves from the apocalypse - The Guardian

Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scotty Scott, Chief Engineer and third in command of the starship Enterprise had his dilithium crystals: Quantum computers could soon have time crystals. It all sounds very Doctor Who, but time crystals were theoretically predicted 10 years ago, and ongoing research now shows they can be engineered to interconnect, not only to help build quantum computers but also provide greatly improved and highly stable memory storage for the devices.

Mind you, as of today, theyd be difficult to manage because any connections would have to take place in a superfluid of helium-3 maintained at a temperate of one-ten-thousandth of a degree above absolute zero, which itself is minus 273 degrees Celsius, so your average fridge wont be of much use. At such a low temperature there is no viscosity, no friction and no heat is produced, and thus perpetual motion becomes a possibility. Superfluidity can occur in helium-3 when individual atoms pair up to make bosonic complexes called Cooper pairs: Youll have to take my word for that, or read it up yourselves.

In normal crystals salt, sugar or snowflakes, for example atoms are arranged periodically in a lattice formation. These atoms move in three dimensions within that framework (up and down, left and right, backwards and forwards on an X, Y, Z axis), oscillating until, when at ground state (when all electrons are at the lowest possible energy levels), they stop moving. The structures of atoms in time crystals are very different because they oscillate in time as well in space in other words, in a fourth dimension.And, heres the astonishing bit, they do exhibit perpetual motion, jiggling around forever without the need for any energy input or losing any energy at any time.

By doing this, time crystals might appear to break the Second Law of Thermodynamics by negating entropy, which can be described as a measure of randomness, uncertainty, unpredictability and decline into disorder. Or, as Paul Simon sings (on his under-rated and under-played track), everything put together sooner or later falls apart. Entropy is also a measure of the number of possible arrangements the atoms in a system can have. However, time crystals existing in space time cannot create infinite energy as, in fact, they do obey the Second Law of Thermodynamics, because the energy is conserved within a closed system.

That negation of entropy in a closed system is down to a principle of quantum mechanics called many-object localisation. Here, when a force is exerted on one atom, that force is felt by that single atom alone and not by any others, i.e. the change is localised rather than systemwide. Thus, the system does not experience entropy and so become unpredictable and liable to breakdown, but instead continues to oscillate, presumably for ever (as no one ever looks at what is going on). If that happens, the state changes according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which says that when a quantum system is observed and measured, its quantum wave function disappears. Thus, time crystals can work properly only when completely separate to, and isolated from, their surroundings, and then we are back to the closed system again.

A research fellow and physics lecturer at Lancaster University, Samuli Autti, has been working with scientists at Aalto University in Finland (where he completed his PhD) and created two time crystals that paired and interacted with one another. The pairing existed for 1,000 seconds, a period that equated to many billions of periods of oscillation before the wave function decayed and slowed. The research programme continues, and pairing times are expected be extended.

The experiment showed that the paired time crystals (and their interaction) may well turn out to be the basic foundation upon which to build a fully-functioning quantum computer. Thats because a mass of paired time crystals could be made to operate as qubits quantum bits that can represent a 1 and 0 and on and off simultaneously, to provide massive and very fast computing processing speed. Meanwhile, the search is on to develop time crystals that will work at room temperature, a breakthrough that would make it far easier to construct and run quantum computers.

Even though the experiments may sound like something from science fiction, they are science fact, and Scotty has been proved right in his oft-repeated assertion that Ye cannae break the laws of physics, Captain. And, indeed, you cant, but it may be possible to bend them a bit from time to time.

Go here to see the original:
Want the best quantum computers? Then youll need time crystals... - TelecomTV

In photoelectric effect, light waves cannot knock electrons out; and in a photons passing through many slit experiment, a photon cannot pass through many slits at the same time. Namely, the two physical processes, respectively, reflect one aspect of wave-particle duality of quantum particle. On the other hand, in photoelectric effect, photons can knock electrons out; in the many slit experiment, a photon light wave can pass through many slits at the same time. The two physical processes then are complementarily equivalent in wave-particle duality of quantum particle. That is, in wave-particle duality of quantum particle, the first and the second cases use the particle property and the wave property, respectively. Namely, a photon can show as either particle or wave, but cannot be observed as both at the same time for a physics process.

We now generally show them by exact deduction.

In 4-dimensional momentum representation of quantum theory, when considering wave function (phi (vec{p},E)) of momentum representation, one has25

$$ psi (vec{r},t) = frac{1}{{(2pi hbar )^{2} }}int_{ - infty }^{infty } {} phi (vec{p},E)e^{{i(vec{p} cdot vec{r} - tE)/hbar }} dvec{p}dE = frac{1}{{(2pi hbar )^{3/2} }}int_{ - infty }^{infty } {} varphi (vec{p},t)e^{{ivec{p} cdot vec{r}/hbar }} dvec{p} $$

(1)

Equation(1) is a general Fourier transformation of ( , phi (vec{p},E)) (about the plane wave energy E and momentum (vec{p})) from the four-dimensional momentum representation state vector ( , phi (vec{p},E)) to the projection of the plane wave basic vector (e^{{i(vec{p} cdot vec{r} - tE)/hbar }}) and making integration for getting ( , psi (vec{r},t)), which make ( , psi (vec{r},t)) have not only the characteristics of the probabilistic state vector of the particle but also the characteristics of the plane wave, i.e., make ( , psi (vec{r},t)) have the state vector characteristics of wave-particle duality.

Because the momentum representation state vector ( , phi (vec{p},E)) is nonlocal, it also reflects that the system has the global characteristics of momentum (vec{p}) and energy (E), this global property can be the integrity of the particle, e.g., even including different physics qualities, e.g., spin, since the different qualities are not related to space coordinates.

Therefore, the expression (1) exactly shows wave-particle dualitys origin which displays that the wave property is originating from the plane wave part of the general Fourier expansion, and the particle property is originating from the general Fourier expansion coefficients with the particles global property even including different spins.

Therefore, we discover, for arbitrary particle, on an aspect, it propagates with the plane wave of the four-dimensional momentum ((vec{p},E)) as the propagation amplitude of the plane wave; on another aspect, it moves as a particle with the four-dimensional momentum ((vec{p},E)). Especially, when the expanding coefficients have different spins, it moves as a particle with both the four-dimensional momentum ((vec{p},E)) and the different spins, which are the new true physics and the new physical pictures, and uncover the corresponding expressions contributions of both wave part and particle part of wave-particle duality origin. Namely, Eq.(1) is the function of unified expression of wave-particle duality.

A little bit of philosophical insight on what this work means that the unified expression of wave-particle duality is just the superposition state of wave-particle duality, and the superposition state of wave-particle duality is physically real.

Furthermore, the infinite big momenta and energy show their corresponding to infinite big velocity in Eq.(1), and then the infinite big velocity is included, i.e., the wave function (1) of coordinate representation has the contribution of infinite big momentum or speed, namely, the wave function at any spatial and time points has the contributions from negative to positive infinite big momenta or speeds. Similarly, when we do the inverse Fourier transformation of Eq.(1) about whole spacetime coordinates, we find that the wave function of 4-dimentional momentum representation has the contributions of the whole 4-dimentional spacetime, i.e., the wave function at any 4-dimentialal momentum spatial point has the contributions from the whole spacetime. Thus, the above both cases just the reasons that Feynman path integral can be done in whole 4-dimentional spacetime or momentum space.

Using Eq.(1), we have wave function of momentum representation at time t

$$ varphi (vec{p},t) = frac{1}{{(2pi hbar )^{1/2} }}int_{ - infty }^{infty } {} phi (vec{p},E)e^{ - itE/hbar } dE $$

(2)

On the other hand, using Huygens' Principle, one has the basic wave analysis:

Every point of a wave front may be considered the source of secondary wavelets that spread out in all directions with a speed equal to the speed of propagation of the waves. What this means is that when one has a wave, he can view the "edge" of the wave as actually creating a series of circular waves. These waves combine together in most cases to just continue the propagation, and in some cases there are significant observable effects. The wave front can be viewed as the line tangent to all of these circular waves26.

Further using Eq.(1) and Huygens principle above, we have N subwave functions through N slits

$$ psi (vec{r}_{j} ,t) = frac{1}{{(2pi hbar )^{2} }}int_{ - infty }^{infty } {} phi (vec{p},E)e^{{i(vec{p} cdot vec{r}_{j} - tE)/hbar }} dvec{p}dE = frac{1}{{(2pi hbar )^{3/2} }}int_{ - infty }^{infty } {} varphi (vec{p},t)e^{{ivec{p} cdot vec{r}_{j} /hbar }} dvec{p} $$

(3)

where j=1,2,,N. No losing generality and for simplicity, taking N=2 just shows the up slit and down slit, respectively, in Young's Double Slits in Fig.2.

Interference of a particle plane wave in Young's double slit experiment.

Therefore, Eqs.(1)(3) can also be seen as a kind of expressions of Huygens principle. Consequently, these Fourier expansions physically imply new physics, and are not only just the mathematical tools.

The superposition density function of two subwaves is just Eq.(5) in Section Solutions to Wheelers delayed choice puzzle and puzzle of a particles passing double slits simultaneously by the physics processes of the exact quantum physics expressions, the interference terms of the two subwaves in Fig.2 are just the third term and fourth term in Eq.(5).

These properties are exactly conforming to the plane wave properties of the single particle, thus a particle plane wave can simultaneously pass through N slits, for simplicity, Young's Double Slits in Fig.2, Eq.(3) just generally give the both subwave functions that simultaneously pass through N slits, for simplicity, two slits s1 and s2 in Young's Double Slits, respectively.

The N subwave functions have the same amplitude (phi (vec{p},E)) for some certain (vec{p},E), (e^{{i(vec{p} cdot vec{r}_{j} - tE)/hbar }}) (j=1, 2,, N) are just N plane subwave functions in Eq.(3), and the N probabilistic wave functions in Eq.(3) integrate for ((vec{p},E)) from negative infinite to positive infinite, i.e., having considered all possibility, which make the N expressions (3) exact.

The global property of a particle does not allow the single particle to simultaneously pass through N slits, for simplicity, Young's double slits, in reality, the interference of a particle wave is observed, which just show a particle wave simultaneously does pass the N slits, for simplicity, the double slits, but all theories up to now cannot solve the hard puzzle of a particles passing the N slits, e.g., Youngs double slits simultaneously.

Link:
New quantum physics, solving puzzles of Wheeler's delayed choice and a particle's passing N slits simultaneously and quantum oscillator in experiments...

If you spend any time online, youve undoubtedly heard about Ethereum. Just as a reminder, Ethereum (ETH) is a decentralized blockchain platform. It can be used by anyone to create digital technology. Software developers are able to build applications in finance, advertising, identity management, gaming, and web browsing, to name a few. Ether is the cryptocurrency that fuels the network it allows it to operate. Like Bitcoin, Ether can be used for payments. There are so many companies that accept ETH, so you can spend your Ethereum anywhere. Ethereum brings real value.

Ethereum helps create a decentralized computer, which makes possible smart contracts and DApps. Smart contracts are special kinds of programs that run when predetermined conditions are met. They operate based upon an if, then logic. The apps run according to the given instructions, so theres no chance of latency, restriction, deceit, or third-party interference. DApps, also called decentralized applications, exist on the peer-to-peer network of computers. More often than not, theyre accessible via traditional web browsers such as Google Chrome and Firefox.

As opposed to Bitcoin, which has a limited scripting language, ETH runs on Solidity, which creates machine-level code and incorporates it within the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Its similar in nature to C++ and pretty simple to learn. The Ethereum blockchain is capable of executing code of unmatched complexity. Ethereum 1.0 was an attempt to build a world computer. Ethereum 2.0 will be the world computer. It may subsume the functions of the Internet as we know it. What is certain is that the Merge will make a difference as regards the Ethereum ecosystem (and more than that).

At the time of the launch, Ethereum was one of the most formidable projects in the crypto space. Vitalik Buterin and his supporters wanted to change how the Internet works. Many argue that Ethereum is the Internets next step. Ethereum 2.0, the upgrade to the blockchain network, will improve the speed, efficiency, and scalability of the network. ETH will be used by more and more people. The transition to the Ethereum 2.0 world has been slow, though. In spite of this, adoption is still growing. Compared to other cryptocurrencies, the transaction volume is higher.

For the time being, the priority is to address the restrictions of proof-of-work. The platform is moving to the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, which promises to use less energy (approx. 99% less) and help reach 100 000 transactions per second. Validators are chosen based on the number of tokens they possess. Those who spend money on coins practically invest in the networks continued success. Validators cant corrupt the system, as proof-of-stake has checks and balances in place to prevent this from happening.

Theres so much traffic on the Ethereum blockchain, and this overload can result in high transaction fees. The solution to this problem is simple: layer-2 chains. Chains like Polygon complete more transactions per second with lower gas fees. Speaking of which, Polygon is the most widely adopted layer-2 solution for ETH. It processes transactions outside the mainnet, which explains the increased throughput. In case you didnt know, Ethereums layer-2 solutions fall under several categories, namely channels, plasma, sidechains, rollups, and validium. Many of them are undergoing research, testing, and implementation.

As highlighted by Vitalik Buterin, soon enough, Ethereum will be run on a full node using lighter hardware. A single piece of client software will be enough to run a full node. When a transaction is added to the blockchain network, the full node validates the transaction and ascertains it complies with the Ethereum specification. The full node prunes its blockchain to save disk space. Thus, full nodes dont store data back to genesis. Most laptops are eligible for being full nodes. The more nodes in existence, the more unlikely it is for a cyberattack to succeed.

Cryptocurrencies achieve decentralized security and trust. Cryptography is the pillar of cryptocurrency processing. Encrypted information that is transmitted with an algorithm can be deciphered by a quantum computer, so threat actors can intercept that information. Quantum-resistant cryptography can protect data from threats down the road. Vitalik Buterin is looking ahead into the future and plans to upgrade the Ethereum platform for quantum resistance. Its believed there are several years ahead until ETH will experience a threat to its current cryptographic signatures, but its better to be safe than sorry.

Ethereum wont hide from quantum computers, so dont rush to sell your Ether just yet. Try to imagine what it will become in the future. Wise investors dont sell their coins. Quite the opposite, actually. They withdraw liquidity from exchanges like Binance, which has a positive effect on the Ethereum price. Getting back on topic, competitions are constantly organized for researchers to standardize new cryptographic protocols that protect against quantum attackers. Better protocols are needed for improving zero-knowledge proofs. The Ethereum Virtual Machine generates zero-knowledge proofs to guarantee the correctness of programs. ZPK systems can be post-quantum secure.

Given the current and planner improvements to the Ethereum blockchain, Ethereum might well become the dominant chain as far as transaction volumes are concerned. As the platform increases its efficiency, it might work alongside multichain technologies. The emergence of a highly competitive ecosystem will enable ETH to expand its capacity and allow for remarkable results. The one wont replace the other, that is for sure. Down the line, there will be more vertically focused blockchains for specific use cases, including healthcare and gaming.

All in all, Ethereum is working towards solving its problems. As businesses get funded via Ether, an ever-increasing number of people will become familiar with the digital asset. Startups that have raised money through an ICO will end up surviving in the long term and help promote the mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies. Well just have to wait and see what the future holds for ETH. Good things dont come easy.

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Briefing On Vitalik Buterins Long-Term Vision for The Ethereum Blockchain - Cryptopolitan

In Jules Vernes 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon, members of the fictitious Baltimore Gun Club, all disabled Civil War veterans, restlessly search for a new enemy to conquer. They had spent the war innovating new, deadlier weaponry. By the wars end, with not quite one arm between four persons, and exactly two legs between six, these self-taught amputee-weaponsmiths decide to repurpose their skills toward a new projectile: a rocket ship.

The story of the Baltimore Gun Club propelling themselves to the moon is about the extraordinary masculine power of the veteran, who doesnt simply overcome his disability; he derives power and ambition from it. Their crutches, wooden legs, artificial arms, steel hooks, caoutchouc [rubber] jaws, silver craniums [and] platinum noses dont play leading roles in their personalitiesthey are merely tools on their bodies. These piecemeal men are unlikely crusaders of invention with an even more unlikely mission. And yet who better to design the next great leap in technology than men remade by technology themselves?

As Verne understood, the U.S. Civil War (during which 60,000 amputations were performed) inaugurated the modern prosthetics era in the United States, thanks to federal funding and a wave of design patents filed by entrepreneurial prosthetists. The two World Wars solidified the for-profit prosthetics industry in both the United States and Western Europe, and the ongoing War on Terror helped catapult it into a US $6 billion dollar industry across the globe. This recent investment is not, however, a result of a disproportionately large number of amputations in military conflict: Around 1,500 U.S. soldiers and 300 British soldiers lost limbs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Limb loss in the general population dwarfs those figures. In the United States alone, more than 2 million people live with limb loss, with 185,000 people receiving amputations every year. A much smaller subsetbetween 1,500 to 4,500 children each yearare born with limb differences or absences, myself included.

Today, the people who design prostheses tend to be well-intentioned engineers rather than amputees themselves. The fleshy stumps of the world act as repositories for these designers dreams of a high-tech, superhuman future. I know this because throughout my life I have been fitted with some of the most cutting-edge prosthetic devices on the market. After being born missing my left forearm, I was one of the first cohorts of infants in the United States to be fitted with a myoelectric prosthetic hand, an electronic device controlled by the wearers muscles tensing against sensors inside the prosthetic socket. Since then, I have donned a variety of prosthetic hands, each of them striving toward perfect fidelity of the human handsometimes at a cost of aesthetics, sometimes a cost of functionality, but always designed to mimic and replace what was missing.

In my lifetime, myoelectric hands have evolved from clawlike constructs to multigrip, programmable, anatomically accurate facsimiles of the human hand, most costing tens of thousands of dollars. Reporters cant get enough of these sophisticated, multigrasping bionic hands with lifelike silicone skins and organic movements, the unspoken promise being that disability will soon vanish and any lost limb or organ will be replaced with an equally capable replica. Prosthetic-hand innovation is treated like a high-stakes competition to see what is technologically possible. Tyler Hayes, CEO of the prosthetics startup Atom Limbs, put it this way in a WeFunder video that helped raise $7.2 million from investors: Every moonshot in history has started with a fair amount of crazy in it, from electricity to space travel, and Atom Limbs is no different.

We are caught in a bionic-hand arms race. But are we making real progress? Its time to ask who prostheses are really for, and what we hope they will actually accomplish. Each new multigrasping bionic hand tends to be more sophisticated but also more expensive than the last and less likely to be covered (even in part) by insurance. And as recent research concludes, much simpler and far less expensive prosthetic devices can perform many tasks equally well, and the fancy bionic hands, despite all of their electronic options, are rarely used for grasping.

Activity arms, such as this one manufactured by prosthetics firm Arm Dynamics, are less expensive and more durable than bionic prostheses. The attachment from prosthetic-device company Texas Assistive Devices rated for very heavy weights, allowing the author to perform exercises that would be risky or impossible with her much more expensive iLimb bionic arm.Gabriela Hasbun; Makeup: Maria Nguyen for MAC cosmetics; Hair: Joan Laqui for Living Proof

In recent decades, the overwhelming focus of research into and development of new artificial hands has been on perfecting different types of grasps. Many of the most expensive hands on the market differentiate themselves by the number and variety of selectable prehensile grips. My own media darling of a hand, the iLimb from Ottobock, which I received in 2018, has a fist-shaped power grip, pinching grips, and one very specific mode with thumb on top of index finger for politely handing over a credit card. My 21st-century myoelectric hand seemed remarkableuntil I tried using it for some routine tasks, where it proved to be more cumbersome and time consuming than if I had simply left it on the couch. I couldnt use it to pull a door shut, for example, a task I can do with my stump. And without the extremely expensive addition of a powered wrist, I couldnt pour oatmeal from a pot into a bowl. Performing tasks the cool bionic way, even though it mimicked having two hands, wasnt obviously better than doing things my way, sometimes with the help of my legs and feet.

When I first spoke with Ad Spiers, lecturer in robotics and machine learning at Imperial College London, it was late at night in his office, but he was still animated about robotic handsthe current focus of his research. Spiers says the anthropomorphic robotic hand is inescapable, from the reality of todays prosthetics to the fantasy of sci-fi and anime. In one of my first lectures here, I showed clips of movies and cartoons and how cool filmmakers make robot hands look, Spiers says. In the anime Gundam, there are so many close-ups of gigantic robot hands grabbing things like massive guns. But why does it need to be a human hand? Why doesnt the robot just have a gun for a hand?

Its time to ask who prostheses are really for, and what we hope they will actually accomplish.

Spiers believes that prosthetic developers are too caught up in form over function. But he has talked to enough of them to know they dont share his point of view: I get the feeling that people love the idea of humans being great, and that hands are what make humans quite unique. Nearly every university robotics department Spiers visits has an anthropomorphic robot hand in development. This is what the future looks like, he says, and he sounds a little exasperated. But there are often better ways.

The vast majority of people who use a prosthetic limb are unilateral amputeespeople with amputations that affect only one side of the bodyand they virtually always use their dominant fleshy hand for delicate tasks such as picking up a cup. Both unilateral and bilateral amputees also get help from their torsos, their feet, and other objects in their environment; rarely are tasks performed by a prosthesis alone. And yet, the common clinical evaluations to determine the success of a prosthetic are based on using only the prosthetic, without the help of other body parts. Such evaluations seem designed to demonstrate what the prosthetic hand can do rather than to determine how useful it actually is in the daily life of its user. Disabled people are still not the arbiters of prosthetic standards; we are still not at the heart of design.

The Hosmer Hook [left], originally designed in 1920, is the terminal device on a body-powered design that is still used today. A hammer attachment [right] may be more effective than a gripping attachment when hammering nails into wood.Left: John Prieto/The Denver Post/Getty Images; Right: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis/Getty Images

To find out how prosthetic users live with their devices, Spiers led a study that used cameras worn on participants heads to record the daily actions of eight people with unilateral amputations or congenital limb differences. The study, published last year in IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics, included several varieties of myoelectric hands as well as body-powered systems, which use movements of the shoulder, chest, and upper arm transferred through a cable to mechanically operate a gripper at the end of a prosthesis. The research was conducted while Spiers was a research scientist at Yale Universitys GRAB Lab, headed by Aaron Dollar. In addition to Dollar, he worked closely with grad student Jillian Cochran, who coauthored the study.

Watching raw footage from the study, I felt both sadness and camaraderie with the anonymous prosthesis users. The clips show the clumsiness, miscalculations, and accidental drops that are familiar to even very experienced prosthetic-hand users. Often, the prosthesis simply helps brace an object against the body to be handled by the other hand. Also apparent was how much time people spent preparing their myoelectric prostheses to carry out a taskit frequently took several extra seconds to manually or electronically rotate the wrists of their devices, line up the object to grab it just right, and work out the grip approach.The participant who hung a bottle of disinfectant spray on their hook hand while wiping down a kitchen counter seemed to be the one who had it all figured out.

In the study, prosthetic devices were used on average for only 19 percent of all recorded manipulations. In general, prostheses were employed in mostly nonprehensile actions, with the other, intact hand doing most of the grasping. The study highlighted big differences in usage between those with nonelectric, body-powered prosthetics and those with myoelectric prosthetics. For body-powered prosthetic users whose amputation was below the elbow, nearly 80 percent of prosthesis usage was nongrasping movementpushing, pressing, pulling, hanging, and stabilizing. For myoelectric users, the device was used for grasping just 40 percent of the time.

In the United States alone, more than 2 million people live with limb loss, and 185,000 people receive amputations every year.

More tellingly, body-powered users with nonelectric grippers or split hooks spent significantly less time performing tasks than did users with more complex prosthetic devices. Spiers and his team noted the fluidity and speed with which the former went about doing tasks in their homes. They were able to use their artificial hands almost instantaneously and even experience direct haptic feedback through the cable that drives such systems. The research also revealed little difference in use between myoelectric single-grasp devices and fancier myoelectric multiarticulated, multigrasp handsexcept that users tended to avoid hanging objects from their multigrasp hands, seemingly out of fear of breaking them.

We got the feeling that people with multigrasp myoelectric hands were quite tentative about their use, says Spiers. Its no wonder, since most myoelectric hands are priced over $20,000, are rarely approved by insurance, require frequent professional support to change grip patterns and other settings, and have costly and protracted repair processes. As prosthetic technologies become more complex and proprietary, the long-term serviceability is an increasing concern. Ideally, the device should be easily fixable by the user. And yet some prosthetic startups are pitching a subscription model, in which users continue to pay for access to repairs and support.

Despite the conclusions of his study, Spiers says the vast majority of prosthetics R&D remains focused on refining the grasping modes of expensive, high-tech bionic hands. Even beyond prosthetics, he says, manipulation studies in nonhuman primate research and robotics are overwhelmingly concerned with grasping: Anything that isnt grasping is just thrown away.

TRS makes a wide variety of body-powered prosthetic attachments for different hobbies and sports. Each attachment is specialized for a particular task, and they can be easily swapped for a variety of activities. Fillauer TRS

If weve decided that what makes us human is our hands, and what makes the hand unique is its ability to grasp, then the only prosthetic blueprint we have is the one attached to most peoples wrists. Yet the pursuit of the ultimate five-digit grasp isnt necessarily the logical next step. In fact, history suggests that people havent always been fixated on perfectly re-creating the human hand.

As recounted in the 2001 essay collection Writing on Hands: Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, ideas about the hand evolved over the centuries. The soul is like the hand; for the hand is the instrument of instruments, Aristotle wrote in De Anima. He reasoned that humanity was deliberately endowed with the agile and prehensile hand because only our uniquely intelligent brains could make use of itnot as a mere utensil but a tool for apprehensio, or grasping, the world, literally and figuratively.

More than 1,000 years later, Aristotles ideas resonated with artists and thinkers of the Renaissance. For Leonardo da Vinci, the hand was the brains mediator with the world, and he went to exceptional lengths in his dissections and illustrations of the human hand to understand its principal components. His meticulous studies of the tendons and muscles of the forearm and hand led him to conclude that although human ingenuity makes various inventionsit will never discover inventions more beautiful, more fitting or more direct than nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous.

Da Vincis illustrations precipitated a wave of interest in human anatomy. Yet for all of the studious rendering of the human hand by European masters, the hand was regarded more as an inspiration than as an object to be replicated by mere mortals. In fact, it was widely accepted that the intricacies of the human hand evidenced divine design. No machine, declared the Christian philosopher William Paley, is more artificial, or more evidently so than the flexors of the hand, suggesting deliberate design by God.

Performing tasks the cool bionic way, even though it mimicked having two hands, wasnt obviously better than doing things my way, sometimes with the help of my legs and feet.

By the mid-1700s, with the Industrial Revolution in the global north, a more mechanistic view of the world began to emerge, and the line between living things and machines began to blur. In her 2003 article Eighteenth-Century Wetware, Jessica Riskin, professor of history at Stanford University, writes, The period between the 1730s and the 1790s was one of simulation, in which mechanicians tried earnestly to collapse the gap between animate and artificial machinery. This period saw significant changes in the design of prosthetic limbs. While mechanical prostheses of the 16th century were weighed down with iron and springs, a 1732 body-powered prosthesis used a pulley system to flex a hand made of lightweight copper. By the late 18th century, metal was being replaced with leather, parchment, and corksofter materials that mimicked the stuff of life.

The techno-optimism of the early 20th century brought about another change in prosthetic design, says Wolf Schweitzer, a forensic pathologist at the Zurich Institute of Forensic Medicine and an amputee. He owns a wide variety of contemporary prosthetic arms and has the necessary experience to test them. He notes that anatomically correct prosthetic hands have been carved and forged for the better part of 2,000 years. And yet, he says, the 20th centurys body-powered split hook is more modern, its design more willing to break the mold of the human hand.

The body powered armin terms of its symbolism(still) expresses the man-machine symbolism of an industrial society of the 1920s, writes Schweitzer in his prosthetic arm blog, when man was to function as clockwork cogwheel on production lines or in agriculture. In the original 1920s design of the Hosmer Hook, a loop inside the hook was placed just for tying shoes and another just for holding cigarettes. Those designs, Ad Spiers told me, were incredibly functional, function over form. All pieces served a specific purpose.

Schweitzer believes that as the need for manual labor decreased over the 20th century, prostheses that were high-functioning but not naturalistic were eclipsed by a new high-tech vision of the future: bionic hands. In 2006, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched Revolutionizing Prosthetics, a research initiative to develop the next generation of prosthetic arms with near-natural control. The $100 million program produced two multi-articulating prosthetic arms (one for research and another that costs over $50,000). More importantly, it influenced the creation of other similar prosthetics, establishing the bionic handas the military imagined itas the holy grail in prosthetics. Today, the multigrasp bionic hand is hegemonic, a symbol of cyborg wholeness.

And yet some prosthetic developers are pursuing a different vision. TRS, based in Boulder, Colo., is one of the few manufacturers of activity-specific prosthetic attachments, which are often more durable and more financially accessible than robotic prosthetics. These plastic and silicone attachments, which include a squishy mushroom-shaped device for push-ups, a ratcheting clamp for lifting heavy weights, and a concave fin for swimming, have helped me experience the greatest functionality I have ever gotten out of a prosthetic arm.

Such low-tech activity prostheses and body-powered prostheses perform astonishingly well, for a tiny fraction of the cost of bionic hands. They dont look or act like human hands, and they function all the better for it. According to Schweitzer, body-powered prostheses are regularly dismissed by engineers as arcane or derisively called Captain Hook. Future bionic shoulders and elbows may make a huge difference in the lives of people missing a limb up to their shoulder, assuming those devices can be made robust and affordable. But for Schweitzer and a large percentage of users dissatisfied with their myoelectric prosthesis, the prosthetic industry has yet to provide anything fundamentally better or cheaper than body-powered prostheses.

Bionic hands seek to make disabled people whole, to have us participate in a world that is culturally two-handed. But its more important that we get to live the lives we want, with access to the tools we need, than it is to make us look like everyone else. While many limb-different people have used bionic hands to interact with the world and express themselves, the centuries-long effort to perfect the bionic hand rarely centers on our lived experiences and what we want to do in our lives.

Weve been promised a breakthrough in prosthetic technology for the better part of 100 years now. Im reminded of the scientific excitement around lab-grown meat, which seems simultaneously like an explosive shift and a sign of intellectual capitulation, in which political and cultural change is passed over in favor of a technological fix. With the cast of characters in the world of prostheticsdoctors, insurance companies, engineers, prosthetists, and the militaryplaying the same roles they have for decades, its nearly impossible to produce something truly revolutionary.

In the meantime, this metaphorical race to the moon is a mission that has forgotten its original concern: helping disabled people acquire and use the tools they want. There are inexpensive, accessible, low-tech prosthetics that are available right now and that need investments in innovation to further bring down costs and improve functionality. And in the United States at least, there is a broken insurance system that needs fixing. Releasing ourselves from the bionic-hand arms race can open up the possibilities of more functional designs that are more useful and affordable, and might help us bring our prosthetic aspirations back down to earth.

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The Bionic-Hand Arms Race - IEEE Spectrum