Better Sleep, Quantum Computing and The Biggest Thing In The Universe
What I've been writing and reading this week
How Our Ancestors Slept
After weeks of bad sleep I’d had enough. Every morning I woke up tired and every evening I struggled to switch off my overactive brain, unable to drift off into a merciful unconsciousness. The problem was getting worse and starting to seriously impact my life. Something was wrong and I needed a solution.
Sleep, it is fair to say, dominates our lives. We spend roughly a third of our time in bed and far more time feeling tired or sleepy. Bad sleep leads to under productive days and chronic poor sleep is linked to a shocking array of conditions, from obesity to depression. No wonder, then, that caffeine, the component of coffee that makes us feel more awake, is the world’s most popular drug.
For something that is such an important component of everyday life, we know surprisingly little about sleep. Despite millennia, literally, of research, we still have almost no idea why we actually do it at all. It probably, though scientists are not at all certain, has something to do with memory, and with clearing accumulated chemical clutter from the brain.
How Quantum Computers Work and What They Mean for the Future
Quantum is hard. That is perhaps to put things lightly — the subject is often bizarre, defies common sense, and predicts all sorts of things that should, by rights, be utterly impossible. Computers that include the quantum bit, it logically follows, should be just as weird and baffling.
And yes, at times quantum computing can be a strange subject. It is also difficult — some of the best engineers in the world have struggled for decades to build a simple working quantum computer. But despite all that, quantum computing promises to change the world and so it is worth making an effort to understand.
In what follows I’ve tried to present the basic concepts of quantum computing as simply as possible. It is true that the result is not always simple. There’s a limit on how easy some things are to explain. But in the whole I’ve tried to be true to Einstein’s adage — things should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Visions of the Cosmic Web
The Atacama Desert — the driest, most arid place on Earth — may seem an unlikely place to find a building site. But here, on an isolated mountain far from civilization, something strange is rising from the dusty desert sands. This is the ELT — the Extremely Large Telescope — the most powerful eye on the heavens ever constructed.
The strength of its vision is hard to grasp. For the first time we will be able to directly see planets around other stars, or pick out individual stars in distant galaxies. Astronomers will observe the edge of the Universe, peering back billions of years to watch the birth of the galaxies and the first stars. But somewhat paradoxically, its intense gaze will also reveal the largest structure of the Universe, one that has been almost invisible to us until recently.
For most of history astronomers had no idea of the true scale of creation. Though the night sky might appear crowded, especially if you visit somewhere as remote as the Atacama Desert, most of the stars you can see are only a few thousand light years away. If you are lucky you might spot Andromeda, a faint smudge in the northern sky. If you do — congratulations — you are seeing the most distant object visible to the human eye.
Best of the Rest…
It had never occurred to me that pirates might try to kidnap a multibillion dollar space telescope, but that is exactly the topic recently discussed by NASA. According to Marina Koren, telescopes have a long history of being kidnapped or waylaid on their journeys around the world. The James Webb Space Telescope will soon be sent by ship to a launch site in South America, and NASA appears to be taking every precaution to avoid an encounter with pirates.
On the topic of space telescopes, a piece in the MIT Technology Review looks at the future of Hubble, the most famous telescope ever built. After more than thirty years in orbit Hubble is starting to show its age. No other instrument in space can currently match its capabilities, so what happens when it finally fails? One option is to build a new, better telescope, but that will probably take at least two decades before first light.
Most modern telescopes suffer from a big problem: huge amounts of noise and interference coming from the Earth. The issue is worst for radio telescopes, those that scan the universe in frequencies often used on Earth for communications and television. Fortunately the far side of the Moon, permanently shielded from our planet, offers a solution. In Scientific American Anil Ananthaswarmy takes a look at what space agencies are planning for the years to come.
So much reporting around health, science and space exploration is unrealistic, hyperbolic and misleading. These are complicated topics, and there are often no easy or straight forward answers. Instead what is needed is analysis, discussion and an exploration of the possible ways forward.
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