If you’ve watched mainstream news, you might have noticed the flurry of activity around a spate of UFO or UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) sightings. Over the last few years, there has been a series of videos depicting what appear to be flying devices that are propelled by a mechanism we simply do not understand on earth. The U.S. Navy formalized a reporting process in 2019 for pilots to report incidents of UFO sightings and the Pentagon declassified three videos taken by U.S. Navy pilots last April which show unidentified objects flying at high speeds in the Earth’s atmosphere along with audio of Navy pilots expressing their shock at the craft. We take a diversion into looking at some lesser-known views of technological innovation.
Category: Fun Stuff
We at Quantum Zeitgeist love reading science, not just about the latest developments in Quantum Computing and Quantum Technology but also the more esoteric aspects of science. Perhaps one of the oldest questions is whether we are alone in the universe or are we a) part of a larger group or life and b) are we being visited. Quantum Computing already brings up profound questions as to the reality of existence such as the “Many Worlds” theory or Quantum Physics exposed by David Deutsch and Hugh Everett. Prof Avi Loeb believes we have good evidence that there is intelligent life elsewhere as evidenced by an object that came “close” to earth. In his latest book named “Extra Terrestrial” he examines the evidence for believing an object named Oumuamua which came close to the earth is more than a piece of rock and could represent advanced technology.
On February 2021, Xanadu hosted QHack 2021. The event ran from February 17 to 26th, and it was free to enter. Teams could register and then listen to a variety of lectures, talks, and tutorials for the first three days while the open hackathon was opened on the 22nd. Teams competed for valuable prizes.
In March 2018, Leo Kouwenhoven, a Dutch physicist and Microsoft employee, believed that he found a Majorana fermion, an elusive particle. Microsoft wanted to exploit this particle for quantum computing to rival its competitors, and the company’s quantum computing business development head, Julie Love, promised that a commercial quantum computer will be ready in five years. However, three years later, Kouwenhoven and his team discovered that they did not really find the particle and will retract their original paper published in Nature.
The name of this machine learning model comes from a combination of artist Salvador Dalí and Pixar’s beloved robot WALL·E. A truly creative name, if we dare say. DALL.E is a 12-billion parameter version of OpenAI’s GPT-3 specialising in image generation from text.
Happy New Year, everyone! As we pass through the first few days of 2021, we do so with the hope of leaving COVID-19 behind. However, we should not forget that 2020 was a year full of developments and milestones in quantum computing.
In the right conditions, scientists can fast-forward or rewind a quantum computer’s evolution just like a VHS tape or cassette. An article published by a team of theoretical physicists from the Austrian Academy of Sciences describes the process.
One might not expect quantum computing and music industry to be spoken in the same sentence, and yet by the New Year in 2021, this will start becoming a reality.
Quantum Physics can be hard for anyone to understand and any tools that can elucidate the difficulties of the complex quantum are welcome. We report on an amazing series of seriously cool Quantum Animations exploring a variety of physics phenomena such as the Double Split experiments, particle spin, and even entanglement.
Starting on December 9, Q2B and Quantum Realm Games hosted a quantum chess tournament, and many leading quantum computing companies sent representatives to play. The games were all live-streamed on Twitch as well. After a long and hard battle, Amazon’s Aleksander Kubica was victorious.
