Energy teleportation has been discovered: Those feisty physicists are at it again. Quantum physics nerds have found a way to extract quantum energy (negative energy) form a vacuum (empty space) by entangling one vacuum with negative energy pumped into its quantum field to another space that accepts it in its quantum field. Right, this is beyond nuts. But it appears to be real and true. And, no fundamental laws of physics are broken, i.e., conservation of energy, by this means of teleporting energy from one place to another.
Quanta Magazine writes:
While studying black holes, Masahiro Hotta came to suspect that an exotic occurrence in quantum theory — negative energy — could be the key to measuring entanglement. Black holes shrink by emitting radiation entangled with their interiors, a process that can also be viewed as the black hole swallowing dollops of negative energy. Hotta noted that negative energy and entanglement appeared to be intimately related. To strengthen his case, he set out to prove that negative energy — like entanglement — could not be created through independent actions at distinct locations.
Hotta found, to his surprise, that a simple sequence of events could, in fact, induce the quantum vacuum to go negative — giving up energy it didn’t appear to have.
Now in the past year, researchers have teleported energy across microscopic distances in two separate quantum devices, vindicating Hotta’s theory. The research leaves little room for doubt that energy teleportation is a genuine quantum phenomenon.
“This really does test it,” said Seth Lloyd, a quantum physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the research. “You are actually teleporting. You are extracting energy.”
The trouble arises from the bizarre nature of the quantum vacuum, which is a peculiar type of nothing that comes dangerously close to resembling a something. The uncertainty principle forbids any quantum system from settling down into a perfectly quiet state of exactly zero energy. As a result, even the vacuum must always crackle with fluctuations in the quantum fields that fill it. These never-ending fluctuations imbue every field with some minimum amount of energy, known as the zero-point energy.
Hotta’s publication was met with crickets. Machines that exploit the zero-point energy of the vacuum are a mainstay of science fiction, and his procedure rankled physicists tired of fielding crackpot proposals for such devices. But Hotta felt certain he was onto something, and he continued to develop his idea and promote it in talks. He received further encouragement from William Unruh, who had gained prominence for discovering another odd vacuum behavior.
“This kind of stuff is almost second nature to me,” Unruh said, “that you can do strange things with quantum mechanics.”
The quantum computer used to test the
negative energy teleporter concept
You can do strange things with quantum mechanics!
The first practical application of this has been used to cool a carbon atom (named Bob) in a quantum computer by transferring negative energy from Bob to another nearby carbon atom (named Alice). This was done to make qubits, Bobs, in a quantum computer super cold by teleporting negative energy from Bob (cooling Bob down), thereby warming up Alice outside the computer. Cold qubits are reliable qubits, the colder the better. We all want lots of cold Bobs and warm Alices. Right? Right.
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Democracy in Mexico is under attack: The worldwide authoritarian attack on democracies continues. The tactics are always similar. In addition to the usual constant blasts of polarizing dark free speech (deceit, lies, slanders, etc.), tyrants, plutocrats, theocrats and kleptocrats quietly work to undermine and weaken pro-democracy institutions. The NYT writes about the onslaught in Mexico:
Mexican lawmakers passed sweeping measures overhauling the nation’s electoral agency on Wednesday, dealing a blow to the institution that oversees voting and that helped push the country away from one-party rule two decades ago.
The changes, which will cut the electoral agency’s staff, diminish its autonomy and limit its ability to punish politicians for breaking electoral laws, are the most significant in a series of moves by the Mexican president to undermine the country’s fragile institutions — part of a pattern of challenges to democratic norms across the Western Hemisphere.
Now, another test looms: The Supreme Court, which has increasingly become a target of the president’s ire, is expected to hear a challenge to the measures in the coming months.
If the changes stand, electoral officials say it will become difficult to carry out free and fair elections — including in a crucial presidential contest next year.
Given human history, we appear to be at the end of a golden period for secular democracy, free and fair elections and civil liberties. Memory of the brutality and overreach of the authoritarian tyrants in the 20th century is being attacked and distorted by extremists worldwide. Radical propaganda is that the tyrants were (i) great patriots and nationalists, (ii) not nearly as murderous or corrupt as their historical narratives assert, and (iii) fighting against tyranny by evil outsiders, usually immigrants, non-heterosexuals, Jews and/or non-religious people. Democracy is now under a constant dark free speech and poison policy attack. This will not go away for the foreseeable future.
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Tyrants need to rewrite history: The NYT writes:
In Sharing Video With Fox Host, McCarthy Hits Rewind on Jan. 6
In granting exclusive access to Jan. 6 Capitol surveillance footage to a cable news host bent on rewriting the history of the attack, the speaker effectively outsourced a politically toxic re-litigation of the riotThe most conservative Republican members of Congress — many of whom have worked to downplay or deny the reality of the Jan. 6 attack — have been pushing Mr. McCarthy for weeks to release the video after he promised to do so during his campaign for speaker.
That is where Mr. Carlson comes in.
“I promised,” Mr. McCarthy said on Wednesday in a brief phone interview in which he defended his decision to grant Mr. Carlson exclusive access to the more than 40,000 hours of security footage. “I was asked in the press about these tapes, and I said they do belong to the American public. I think sunshine lets everybody make their own judgment.”
Still, the sunshine Mr. McCarthy referred to will, for now, be filtered through a very specific prism — that of Mr. Carlson, a hero of the hard right who has insinuated without evidence that the Jan. 6 attack was a “false flag” operation carried out by the government.
“By handpicking Tucker Carlson, Speaker McCarthy laid bare that this sham is simply about pandering to MAGA election deniers, not the truth,” Mr. Schumer wrote. “Tucker Carlson has no fidelity to the truth or facts and has used his platform to promote the Big Lie, distort reality and espouse bogus conspiracy theories about Jan. 6.”
The reason I've been pounding heavily on Faux News and Tucker Carlson lately is the obvious urgent need for radical right anti-democracy authoritarians to rewrite inconvenient history. Tyrants, kleptocrats and theocrats do that all the time. The 1/6 Republican coup attempt is a critical bit of history that needs to be rewritten. It need to become a touching story about valiant patriots fighting to defend democracy, liberty and truth. At present, the 1/6 narrative is an extremely inconvenient story of violence and treason in defense of kleptocratic tyranny and aggressive, bigoted Christian theocracy.
Make no mistake, Faux and Tucker will spin the 1/6 coup attempt into a completely different event compared to what it actually was. When the House 1/6 Committee released information in the days before before the radical right took control, those Democrats understood what was coming. They released information to the public to blunt the torrent of lies that McCarthy and his cadre of radical right thugs are salivating to poison the internet and airwaves with.
Prepare for a gigantic onslaught of divisive, polarizing, pro-tyranny deceit, lies, slanders and crackpottery in the coming months. We will be lied to a lot. How many of us will be deceived and manipulated is the open question.
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Faux news is brass knuckles capitalist, not pro-democracy, pro-truth or pro-honest governance, and the law is usually on its side: A WaPo analysis of the Dominion lawsuit indicates that Faux should lose the defamation lawsuit that Dominion Voting Systems filed against the company. What is extraordinary is that Faux might actually lose, and maybe might even have to pay the asked for $1.6 billion in damages. The WaPo writes:
Under New York Times v. Sullivan, a 1964 Supreme Court ruling that has guided libel and defamation claims for nearly 60 years, a plaintiff like Dominion must show that a defendant like Fox published false statements with “actual malice” — meaning that it was done “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”
Based on the messages revealed last week, “I think that Dominion both will and should prevail,” said Laurence Tribe, a former Harvard law professor. “If anything, the landmark this case is likely to establish will help show that New York Times v. Sullivan” is not an impossible legal hurdle to clear, as some critics have claimed.
Fox’s attempt to defend itself with Sullivan notably clashes with efforts by some prominent conservatives to undo the ruling. Trump has said numerous times it should be easier for people to claim libel against the news media. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has backed state legislation to do just that. Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch have also suggested the Sullivan standard should be revisited.
The “actual malice” standard makes it hard to win defamation lawsuits because of the difficulty in demonstrating a reporter or publisher‘s state of mind before publication. It places the burden on the plaintiff to prove that the reporter was not simply just wrong, but knew it and proceeded regardless.
Sullivan doles not impose an impossible legal hurdle for plaintiffs like Dominion to meet. But it is darn close to impossible. If the arrogant asses at Faux had controlled themselves and not put the truth into writing, Dominion would have had no chance to win this lawsuit. Without those text messages, Dominion would have no viable case, even though it was obvious that Faux was lying about Dominion. In its defense, Faux cites Sullivan and says what it did was protected free speech within the scope of the court’s 1964 holding.
If this case gets accepted by our radical right Supreme Court, it could decide to overturn Sullivan and come up with a new standard that lets Faux off the hook. Some radical right elites want that outcome. Or, it could say it leaves Sullivan alone but what Faux did was not defamation. The Republican radicals could even say the circumstances were extraordinary and circumstances created an exception to Sullivan, with future lawsuits to be decided on a case-by-case basis. That last possibility would be very tempting because it allows the court to shield friends and punish enemies one at a time while pretending to be non-partisan.
I do not know how this will play out. We will not know until the radical right Supreme Court either rejects the case or accepts it and decides.
Everything means audience and profits,
not democracy or truth
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