2023's Biggest Breakthroughs in Physics

this is one of the most mysterious sounds in the universe a billion years ago two black holes collided at almost the speed of light the violent explosion distorted the fabric of space-time with waves called gravitational waves a gravitational wave is literally the stretching and compression of space-time um as Einstein predicted over 100 years ago, because mass actually bends space-time and therefore if mass shakes space-time as well, Einstein predicted that there should be a way to that gravitational waves existed, but he actually thought there was no chance anyone would detect them. them because they were very tiny so, in 2015, scientists at a gravitational wave observatory known as ligo made a breakthrough, we have protected gravitational waves, we did it, we were super happy to be in the era of gravitational waves, waves Gravitational waves travel at the speed of light and carry information about the most extremely relativistic objects in the universe, including objects like black holes, so at higher frequencies ground-based detectors like Lego are doing a great job measuring black holes on the scale. of solar mass or perhaps on a scale of 100 solar masses, but if you really want to measure the most massive black holes in the universe or even different types of gravitational waves you have to use much lower wavelengths.

For 15 years, an international coalition known as Nanograph has been trying to detect gravitational waves at low frequencies using a technique called a pulsar timing array. We use some of the world's largest radio telescopes to measure a bunch of pulsars and hopefully detect directly gravitational waves in the universe at the end of its life, a massive star gravitationally collapses into its core and becomes a neutron. Star A teaspoon of neutron star material could weigh as much as a mountain, making it incredibly dense. Some neutron stars begin to spin rapidly, releasing beams of radiation. These are pulsars, the types of pulsars that we use spin as fast as a kitchen blender, so when it spins, that beam could actually swing into our line of sight, like a lighthouse, and every time that beam passes by, We measure a radio pulse, gravitational waves can subtly alter the timing of those pulses, a gravitational wave could come from outside our galaxy. then it pushes and wobbles all the space between Earth and the many pulsars we observe, so we have effectively turned our small neighborhood of the Milky Way and the millisecond pulsars in that neighborhood into a large detector through which gravitational waves can pass.

In June

2023

, Nanograph published its 15-year data showing compelling evidence of the background hum of low-frequency gravitational waves that permeates our universe. We have solid evidence for the first time of what we like to call The Smoking Gun of gravitational waves at this frequency. range looks like noise it almost looks like a random signal and yet when we correlate the signal with another pulsar and another pulsar and another pulsar we can extract this very distinctive correlation pattern that we call the Helens and Downs curve and for us it is the fingerprint of the universe swirling in lots and lots of gravitational waves and adding up to this hum that we measure, the most likely source of these waves are violent collisions of supermassive black holes, but physicists are holding out hope for more exotic possibilities, it seems strange to say. but supermassive black holes could be the most mundane explanation for our signal.

We know that most galaxies have supermassive black holes and we know that galaxies merge, but there are already millions of papers published by theorists explaining this background in terms. of basic and new

physics

, the kind of

physics

beyond the standard model, strings or new types of dark matter, all kinds of possibilities and that would be super super exciting in physics, a set of laws holds that the laws of dynamics govern the flow of energy in In the universe, the first law dictates that energy cannot be destroyed or created. The second says that as energy is transferred or transformed, more and more is wasted.

In 2008, Japanese physicist Masahiro published a protocol that appeared to break both laws and described a feat called quantum teleportation—the quantum equivalent of conjuring energy from thin air—many leading researchers looked at it skeptically as if thinking, How is that really true? Maybe there was a mistake or misunderstanding there and it took a while for the community to realize that it's not actually Masahiro. is so good and so smart that it is actually finding something that is there that you have overlooked and is so unintuitive that it took you a while to understand it now, 15 years later, two independent experiments have teleported energy through quantum devices that show that the protocol works.

They offer a rare window into the mysterious world of the quantum vacuum, the lowest energy state known to physics. In our best models, we need to understand matter at the quantum level. It turns out that the matter we see are excitations of something called quantum fields, which basically tells you. Oh, what you see and the particles you see in particle physics are not really little spheres, right? Those things are excitations of quantum fields that are everywhere. If I take a magnifying glass and look at this small amount of the room, the quantum. It is felt still there, so the vacuum is full of motion in a way that these constant fluctuations imbue the vacuum with a minimal amount of energy known as zero point energy.

A system with this minimum energy is in the ground state if you try to extract energy from the vacuum, if you do something, let's say here, you try to extract energy from this side of the vacuum, you will not be able to do it, you will have to pay a price because whatever you do in the ground state remove the ground state and that will cost you energy, but Hoda's quantum teleportation protocol unlocks a trick. Quantum fields are entangled, meaning that fluctuations in one place tend to coincide with fluctuations in another place by exploiting this connection across space.

Hoda's protocol allows information to be sent without using energy, which Masahiro thought was fine, so this is what we can do. Actually, instead of trying to extract energy here, let's measure the FI here and write the information that the measurement cost you energy, but now it generated a ton. of information classic information that you can write on a notepad or put on a USB stick now you send that information to the other person so this side of the room still looks like the vacuum cleaner locally it looks like well, nothing happened here. he didn't do anything here, so Masahiro sends the information to a person here and that person said aha, sure it's the void I'm looking at, but now I have information about it because these two parts are intertwined following Hoda's protocol.

Martín Martínez and his team designed an experiment to teleport information between two carbon atoms in a quantum device. First they fired radio pulses at the atoms, placing them in a lowest-energy ground state with an entanglement connecting them, then they added a third C atom and fired a radio. pulse at both A and C measuring the position of A and transferring the information another pulse directed at b and c transmitted the message to b and made a final measurement the protocol took only 37 milliseconds to execute in the laboratory if the energy had traveled across these physical distances It would have taken a full second.

That's how you know if it's energy teleportation because if you see the energy moving faster than the time it would have taken to get there, then you know the energy never traveled so it's just the information that allowed it. showing that an implementation of quantum teleportation can be done in this particular setup, an NMR lab that every university would have, meaning it opens the door to applications of the protocol in both technology and basic science. 2 years ago, the James Web Space Telescope. launched to range point 2 a million miles from Earth since the first telescope data was released, the only constant has been surprise, the amount of detail and sensitivity in that data was simply mind-blowing, we knew immediately that it was going to be a telescope that would change the paradigm.

Just by looking at the data, the new discoveries we were seeing with jwst have been so groundbreaking that our predictions are thrown out the window in

2023

. The telescope observations continued to challenge our understanding of how familiar cosmic objects, such as stars, galaxies, and black holes, there became some. One of the most innovative results of jwst during its first year and a half has been the discovery of massive things in Early Times, suddenly all these really bright red objects appear that were just completely invisible in Hubble, these red dots are supermassive galaxies. transmitting signals from the beginning of the universe and that's surprising because in the early days we basically expected all objects to collide with each other all the time, something strange is happening in terms of how objects form, there are really big things at a very early stage. early. things that are now the size of our Milky Way galaxy, except a couple hundred million years after the Big Bang, so instead of having 14 billion years to form, they've had a couple hundred million , we say that Rome was not built in a day, um. and these galaxies appear to have been built over a period of time that is effectively like one day in cosmic history and we have no idea how cosmology dictates that galaxies can only grow so fast that they are bound by gas in giant halos containing matter. dark and that gas forms stars and so we are fundamentally limited by the star formation process that we have come to understand, but when we find these exceptionally luminous and exceptionally massive systems so early, then it could potentially change the framework of cosmology itself, The other thing that's been very surprising is that supermassive black holes also seem to form much earlier and in much larger quantities than we had anticipated.

There is an overabundance of black holes weighing more than a million times the mass of our Sun. We have no idea how they formed. could form before galaxies could be the seeds from which galaxies form the universe is much stranger than anything we can imagine in the coming years astronomers hope to answer open questions about how supermassive black holes in galaxies and The first generation of stars formed next to each other in the first hundreds of millions of years of the universe what we are really looking for are statistics, it is no longer about individual galaxies like this exceptionally luminous system or this really strange galaxy that we found and that we want find. hundreds and thousands of them and that can really teach us about the evolution of how they are built over time.

New discoveries are just the tip of the iceberg and I think the next few years will be profoundly innovative in terms of what we can do. to detect and reconstruct in terms of our own cosmic history galaxies are home to all the planets all the stars all the black holes all life we ​​don't know how they form we don't know why we are here so we really have hope for answers to the fundamental question that comprises our cosmic origin story, how we got here from the beginning of cosmic time until now.