Amazon’s quantum breakthrough that everyone missed
(Sabine Hossenfelder) While Microsoft’s Majoranaquantum computingchip might have grabbed all the headlines earlier this year, Amazon appears to have quietly made some big progress in the quantum computing race. Their new Ocelot chip uses cat qubits to support a scalable architecture that reduces errors by up to 90%. What does that mean? Let’s take a look.
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Sabine Hossenfelder, April 1, 2025; Sheldon S., CC Liu (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
The new most fun thing to do is watch scary and creepy Tik Toks, but the hosts of such shows are often embarrassingly nincompoopish folks who seem to know nothing and have no business commenting, though they have next to nothing to say other than, "Hey, let me know in the comments section what you think." Here's a guy with a brain, even though his interesting commentary and connections are contributing little. It would be better to watch Terrence on the Joe Rogan Experience.
Joe Rogan shocked by how Neil DeGrasse Tyson treated genius Terrence Howard
Sheldon S., CC Liu, Seth Auberon (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
How light travels faster than the speed of light
(Astrum) Oct. 2, 2023: #light #quantumphysics #lightspeed The double slit experiment through time. Listen to the Astrum Sleep Space Podcast on preferred platform by clicking here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2250635/share Displate posters: displate.com/promo/astrum... Astrum merch: https://astrum-shop.fourthwall.com/ Join on the Astrum discord: https://discord.gg/TKw8Hpvtv8 SUBSCRIBE for more videos about other planets. Subscribe: http://goo.gl/WX4iMN Facebook: http://goo.gl/uaOlWW Twitter: http://goo.gl/VCfejs. Astrum Spanish: @astrumespanol Astrum Portuguese: @astrumbrasil Donate Patreon: http://goo.gl/GGA5xT Ethereum Wallet: 0x5F8cf793962ae8Df4Cba017E7A6159a104744038 Become a Patron today and support channel. Donate link above. Thanks to those who have supported so far. #light #quantumphysics #lightspeed #doubleslitexperiment #spacetime
Dr. Ben Miles, Oct. 23, 2022; Sheldon S., CC Liu, Seth Auberon (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
How physicists proved the universe isn't locally real: 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics explained
(Dr Ben Miles) Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger conducted groundbreaking experiments using entangled quantum states, where two particles behave like a single unit even when they are separated [by great distances]. Their results have cleared the way for new technology based on quantum information.
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Zach Star (dimension video); Dhr. Seven, Pat Macpherson (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
Buddhist physics: The Sphere of Sensuality, where we live, is material, which is denser than the higher Fine Material Sphere of "shining ones," light beings, akasha devas. What are these kalapas or "particles" of perception? Each is a quality of matter, and each kind of kalapa has features. In that sense, each is LIKE a higher dimension or Platonic solids. What if matter were one substance, like clay, distinguished by geometric shape?
The Awakened One
From the beginning the wandering ascetic Siddhartha Gautama -- who soon became the Buddha, the "Awakened One," the "Scythian Sage" called Shakyamuni -- learned a form of serenity meditation that took him to an exalted formless attainment.
"Formless"? We live on a plane in the Sensual Sphere, above which exists a Fine Material Sphere, and beyond that, unbelievably, the Formless Sphere.
The first four meditative attainments called absorptions (Pali jhanas, Sanskrit dhyanas) correspond to the Form (Fine Material) Sphere. The next four correspond to four higher dimensions, the formless planes of existence. These "spheres" are called:
the Base of Boundless Space
the Base of Boundless Consciousness
the Base of Nothingness
the Base of Neither-Perception-nor-Non-Perception.
Chart of the 31 Planes of Existence
This Buddhist cosmology is explained in terms of a vertical arrangement of planes of existence, of which there are 31 mentioned, containing countless worlds. They are reached through these meditative attainments, which are very weighty good karma (actions). For they are purified states but not enlightened states.
They are "purified" insofar as they have temporarily suppressed the defilements that obscure knowledge and vision without uprooting the defilements. Insight wisdom permanently uproots them. Insight wisdom is an accomplishment worthy of the noble ones, the individuals at any of the four stages of enlightenment.
This discussion is speculative to try to conceive of what can be directly observed and exmined, so it is not merely pondering for pondering's sake. For realizing enlightenment/awakening, the Abhiddharma -- the "Ultimate Teachings" or "Teachings (Dharma) in Ultimate (Abhi) Terms" -- these kalapas must be seen and examined. How would it be possible with a defiled and impure mind?
All of the mind's powers are needed, its psychic abilities and supernormal faculties. Through meditation purified by the absorptions, it is also possible to visit (by remote viewing or a kind of astral travel) the 31 Planes of Existence here and now. So we can personally verify that they are real.
And the answer is... First of all, there is a Buddhist physics? Yes, Buddhism teaches practical physics necessary for releasing the mind/heart from clinging to illusion and suffering.
And the answer is... Wait. Does an answer make sense without posing the original question? In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, we learned that THE ANSWER to "life, the universe, and everything" was "42." With that information in hand, we should have been happy. But we were not, because what exactly was the question?
"How many roads must a Man travel?" "At what age does enlightenment dawn?" ... "What is 6 times 7?"
Bodhi Dharma (above) found "zen" (jhana) after emptying his mind, just as Einstein noted that a solution cannot be found at the level of the problem. Hard at fun or fun at work, Einstein did not give up on solving the UFT equation. "Hard work" is no way to find something this elusive (The Masters of Enlightenment: Albert Einstein/Lowdensitylifestyle.com).
Similarly, amateur physicists hanker for a working equation, but most of us have forgotten the question. In the Hitchhiker's Guide, The Question was not well formed. As such, it was not properly posed to the semi-sentient supercomputer who calculated for generations to produce The Answer.
Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, and the founder of Raytheon worked very hard before Einstein died in search of the answer.
Apparently, they found it. But Einstein died just after he formulated the equation, according to the controversial author Sean David Morton. He is not speculating but reporting. His sources, unfortunately, remain secret -- at their own request. And out of deference to their wishes Morton has novelized the story of how the answer was found, where it has been all this time, and what has been done with it by the military and parts of the government we know very little about.
Rest assured, something has been done with it. It is not a breakthrough to the secretive powers that be. And the fact that mainstream scientists are allowed to report that some particles, perhaps the most numerous in the universe (shy neutrinos that rarely interact), move faster than light goes to show secret science has moved so far ahead that it does not matter if we are now openly told special relativity is far from the whole story. Oh yeah, the answer is:
S = -MgC*dsb
This is a working equation (solution) for Einstein's Unified Field Theory. It should make about as much sense as E=MC2 or 42. Fortunately, it is explained in Sean David Morton's new book Sands of Time. We believe. And there are many reasons people should look to intuitive-futurists for mind-bending solutions that elude great mathematical geniuses. As the Buddha learned under the Bodhi Tree (and possibly Newton, Adam, and Eve under an apple tree), the answer does not come from muscling, pushing, straining, or "efforting." Instead, it comes from letting go.
[Of course, this right brain letting go makes more sense and seems more effective if it is done after putting forward extreme effort by using the left brain, as Watson and Crick found out when vision gave them the double-helix design they could not force out of their rational calculations.]
Time really is not different from space. Time-space echoes what Mahayana Buddhist thinkers may have been hinting at in the famous Heart (of Wisdom) Sutra when they spoke of what Mu Soeng [an American of Indian descent who spent 11 years as an ordained Korean Zen Buddhist monk in Korea] translates "space-time" as "point-instants" in explaining that "Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form."
Points are kalapas (particles), and cittas (consciousness moments or cognitions) are instants in the older Theravada Buddhist commentaries Mahayana Buddhists were trying to explain and improve on. Thank you to PasaDharma Zen Group for its ongoing study of this important text:
Why are we here? It remains one of the most perplexing unexplained mysteries of the universe. But particle physicists are gaining more confidence in a result from an atom smashing experiment that could be a step toward providing an answer: We exist because the universe is full of matter and not the opposite, so-called antimatter. When the Big Bang occurred, equal parts of both should have been created and immediately annihilated each other, leaving nothing leftover to build the stars, planets, and us. More
During insight meditation the body becomes transparent and particles become visible in the mind door (Buddhist-images.co.uk) Why do "we" exist? (Buddhism answers) Dharmachari Seven (Wisdom Quarterly) Of course, ultimately speaking, we do not. That is what it means to say all conditioned things are impersonal (not self, anatta). What are "conditioned things"? They are the constituents of being, of clinging, of the delusion that things are self, permanent, or able to bring lasting satisfaction. It should be more obvious that there is a self. But what is the nature of that self?
Self, soul, ego, personality, "I" all refer to five functionally integrated components -- the physical and the psychological. The physical or material components of the self are the four characteristics of matter (called the Great Elements, mahabhuta). They further break down to what is called derived materiality* that make the sense organs, which are just configurations of the Four Great Elements. All of this is referred to as one group labelled "form."
The other Five Aggregatesfeel closer -- sensations, perceptions, mental formations (such as volition), and consciousness. They cling to the illusion of a "self" independent of them, in possession of them, controlling them. The self originates dependent on them. The illusion of our actual existence arises dependently originated on the aggregation of these five groups of factors. That is the self (soul, atta, atman, I, me, mine)! But what is the nature of the self? Looked at closely -- in a particle physics lab (in the case of form and kalapas) or in a meditation hall after emerging from the four absorptions (in the case of consciousness and cittas) -- it becomes perfectly clear that they are:
impersonal (not subject to control, following their own nature, not able to be clung to, dependent on karma, not self, not me, not mine, devoid of an owner and in that sense "empty").
It is completely incorrect to say we are "nothing." What we call a "self" is composed of many things. However, as with all "things," the composite is not what it seems.
Under the penetrating analysis of meditation (for purifying concentration and analytical insight, jhana and vipassana), even form is revealed. In Buddhist physics, form is seen as kalapas ("particles of perception") as explained in the Abhidharma. In Buddhist psychology, the aggregates of self-awareness are called cittas (mind moments, processes, consciousnesses, which make the most sense to me as being comparable to neuronal impulses, bearing in mind that there are neurons in the heart and throughout the gut as well as the spine, nerves innervating the body, and concentrating in the brainstem and cavity of the skull but in no way limited to the skull).
Why? What is impelling the process, what causes the "self" to re-arise after passing away? Karma. This is not a guess. It is revealed by the insight-meditation practice of Dependent Origination, tracing back this life through the chain of causation, which the mind discovers is not in this life. It is not the same self -- which is passing away all the time -- but a self dependent past causes and present conditions.
Meditation (virtue, concentration, insight) is the key to realization.
Moral of the Story All of this is directly, personally verifiable. We don't own a large hadron collider; yet, it is possible for the mind to be collected and intensified (through optimal-concentration, samma-samadhi) to discern kalapas. None of this is to be taken on faith. None of this is dogma. It is all experiential. And this is sure: If one does not make the effort to realize the Truth (not "learn" it or "believe" but realize it for oneself), whatever the Truth is, one will not become enlightened or liberated from ignorance and illusion. Without liberation, disappointment is certain (not eventually but in every moment).
Illustration of the God particle, Higgs boson (dailygalaxy.com)
(TOI) Has the Holy Grail of physics finally been found? The internet is abuzz with rumors that the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, US, has found the Higgs boson — nicknamed the "God particle" — after Tommaso Dorigo, a physicist at the University of Padua in Italy wrote in his blog that there has been talk coming out of the Illinois laboratory that the Higgs has been discovered.
The Higgs boson, believed to give all other particles in the universe their mass, is called the "God particle," because scientists believe finding it — or even proving that it exists — can help explain how the universe came into being.
In ‘‘Rumors about a light Higgs,’’ a post on Science20.com, Dorigo says: ‘‘It reached my ear, from two different, possibly independent sources, that an experiment at the Tevatron is about to release some evidence of a light Higgs boson signal. Some say a three-sigma effect, others do not make explicit claims but talk of a unexpected result.’’ More>>
US scientists create cloth that can listen (AFP) This could give a whole new meaning to the phrase power dressing. Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created a cloth that can hear and emit noise. The team, led by MIT professor Yoel Fink, has reached "a new milestone on the path to functional fibers..." MIT said in a statement.
The "Science of Resilience" (NYT) Is the loss of language and culture connected to the extinction of plant and animal species in a globalized “epidemic of sameness”? Welcome to the “science of resilience” — an interdisciplinary study of the value of diversity in complex systems. In Seed magazine, Maywa Montenegro and Terry Glavin report on a growing effort to study the feedback loops of “linguistic, cultural, and biological extinction.”
Asteroid pictures: Battered world found in Lutetia National Geographic) Asteroid 21 Lutetia is exposed, craters and all, in a picture captured Saturday by the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft. Rosetta's close encounter with Lutetia revealed a battered world—a possible remnant from the birth of our solar system, astronomers say. To snap the above image, Rosetta swooped about 1,965 miles (3,162 kilometers) above Lutetia's surface. The image is the highest-resolution photo taken of the space rock, located more than 270 million miles (440 million kilometers) away from Earth, between Mars and Jupiter. (Watch a video of Rosetta's flyby.) More>>
Instead of meditating on the Four Elements (introduced below) and seeing for themselves, scientists have built a machine so we can all have a look. It's clumsy, but it's empirical. And it's much easier than the search for kalapas.
GENEVA -- A blip heard around the world: a blink of the computer screen and physicists everywhere (except perhaps Illinois) were celebrating. This blip was literally of cosmic proportions, representing a new tool to probe the birth of the universe.
The world's largest atom smasher passed its first test yesterday as physicists said their tool is almost ready to reveal how the tiniest particles [in Buddhist terms kalapasor hadrons] were first created after the "Big Bang," which is the theory that a massive explosion formed the elements, stars, planets, and everything else we see.
Rivals and friends in pajamas turned out at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, to watch the event via a special satellite connection. Joining in from around the world were other physicists — many of whom may one day work on the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC, pictured).
Tension mounted in the control rooms at CERN as scien-tists huddled around computer screens and fired protons through the 17-mile tunnel of the collider under-ground along the Swiss-French border. Then they celebrated. "The first technical challenge has been met," said a jubilant Robert Aymar, director-general of CERN, and went on:
"What you have just seen is the result of 20 years of effort. It all went like clockwork. Now it's for the physicists to show us what they can do. They are ready to go for discoveries...Man has always shown he wants to know where he comes from and where he will go, where the universe comes from and where it will go. So here we're looking at essential questions for mankind."
The CERN experiments could reveal more about various forms of matter including the theoretical "God particle" (Higgs-boson). And maybe next science will tackle the ocean's growing plastic waste problem.
Smaller colliders have been used for decades to study the makeup of the atom. Scientists once thought protons and neutrons were the smallest components of an atom's nucleus, but experiments have shown that protons and neutrons are made of quarks and gluons and that there are other forces and particles.
European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) scientists look at a computer screen during the switch on operation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the Cern's press center near Geneva. Particle physicists were jubilant on Wednesday after the long-awaited startup of a mega-machine designed to expose secrets of the cosmos passed its first tests with flying colors (AFP/Pool/Fabrice Coffrini).
The LHC project was organized by 20 European member nations. It has attracted researchers from 80 nations. Some 1,200 of those researchers are from the US, an observer country and contributor. India, Japan, Canada, and Russia are also observers and major contributors.
The Eightfold Way: a classification of subatomic particles known as hadrons into groups on the basis of their symmetrical properties, the number of members of each group being 1, 8 (most frequently), 10, or 27.
The system was proposed in 1961 by the American physicistMurray Gell-Mann and the Israeli physicist Yuval Neʾeman. It is based on the mathematical symmetry group SU(3); however, the name of the system was suggested by analogy with the Eightfold Path of Buddhism because of the centrality of the number eight. One of the early triumphs of the Eightfold Way was the prediction of the existence of a heavy subatomic particle required to complete one of the groups.
The particle, called omega-minus, was discovered in 1964. That same year, Gell-Mann set forth the concept of quarks as the physical basis for the classification system, thereby establishing the foundation for the modern quark model of hadrons. See also quark.
The real meaning of Anicca is that "impermanence" or "decay" is the inherent nature of every-thing that exists in the universe — whether animate or inanimate.
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Kalapa, artist's conception
The Buddha taught that everything that exists at the material level is composed of kalapas. Kalapas are material units very much smaller than atoms, which die out immediately after they come into being. Each kalapa is a mass formed of the eight basic constituents of matter — the solid, liquid, calorific, and oscillatory, together with color, smell, taste, and nutriment. The first four are called primary qualities and are predominant in a kalapa. The other four are subsidiaries, dependent upon and springing from the former.
BUILDING BLOCKS
A kalapa is the minutest particle on the physical plane — still beyond the range of science today. It is only when the eight basic material constituents unite together that the kalapa is formed. In other words, the momentary collocation of these eight basic elements of behavior makes a human just for that moment, which in Buddhism is known as a kalapa. The life-span of a kalapa is termed a "moment," and a trillion such moments are said to elapse in the wink of an eye.
Kalapas are in a state of constant change, a perpetual flux. To the observer during insight meditation (vipassana) they can be felt as a stream of energy.
Moreover, according to Pa Auk Sayadaw (and many who have trained under him to directly experience kalapas such as Rasmussen & Snyder), it is possible to literally see and know kalapas and their constituents, that is, their four elemental and four subsidiary qualities. The Sayadaw is alive and teaching worldwide (currently in Barre, Massachusetts). But Buddhist physics goes further, pointing out aspects of matter directly relating to the human experience.
"Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form" is a famous expression from the discourse on the core of wisdom, or penetrative knowledge, that has "gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond" (Heart Sutra). It enters the realm of Buddhism's Higher Teaching (Abhidharma), which was exploring physics long before the Greeks (themselves influenced by Buddhism and other Indian philosophies) ever thought to search for the "atom" (kalapa = building block of matter).
There are underived elements, namely, the four primary qualities of matter (dhatu). And there are 24 derived (upada) or secondary phenomena. These will make very little sense to modern students of Western physics. But they suggest that what we see on a relative or conventional level is designed into the subatomic or most minute aspects of materiality. These derived/subsidiary qualities (such as taste or color, which we presume to be macro-level only) are already seen occurring at a micro or constituent level. This is what a meditator sees and directly knows. It is experiential rather than theoretical (the theory is merely recorded in the ancient texts and confirmed by practitioners). Buddhism itself, therefore, is more concerned with the successful practice of directly knowing and seeing than with any textbook discussion of the universe.
SPACE
Space (akasa-dhatu), interestingly, is also a derived quality of the material world. (There are two kinds, limited and boundless or finite and infinite). Limited space is the derived aspect of form already mentioned. "The space element has the characteristic of delimiting matter. Its function is to indicate the boundaries of matter....its manifestation consists of being untouched [by the Four Elements]... Its proximate cause is the matter delimited" (Path of Purification XIV,63).
Space (ajatakasa or anantakasa), more interestingly, that is unlimited, unentangled, unobstructed -- empty or hyperspace -- is the object of the First Immaterial Meditation (jhana). It corresponds to an actual, literal plane of existence called the Sphere of Boundless Space. [See WQ for the "31 Planes of Existence"]. Whether this actually exists in the universe is a matter of debate: The German scholar-monk, Ven. Nyanatiloka, deduces that since it is not included in an all-inclusive Commentarial summary of reality, it does not have objective (but only conceptual) existence. He goes on to point out that later Buddhist schools "regarded it as one of several unconditioned or uncreated states (asankhata dharma)" whereas Theravada Buddhism regards only nirvana as an "unconditioned" [i.e., without constituents] element.
Ulitmately, whether discussing a material form or a psychological "element" (sensation, perception, mental-formation, and consciousness) the same thing may be said. "It still remains a firm condition, an immutable fact, a fixed law that all formations [i.e., all conditioned phenomena] are radically impermanent (in constant flux), unsatisfactory, and impersonal (empty)." Therefore, for practical purposes but not ultimately, it matters what the LHC finds: hadrons, kalapas, the "God particle," a Black Hole on the French side of the border.
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