Vocab v45

A dully gleaming cobweb or latticework of metal, hundreds of miles in extent, grew out of nowhere until it filled the sky.

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A hundred failures would not matter, when a single success could change the destiny of the world.

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A thousand miles ahead, the band of twilight was hurtling toward them; behind, the Sun was sinking swiftly into the Jovian clouds, its rays spread out along the horizon like two flaming, down-turned horns, then contracted and died in a brief blaze of chromatic glory. The night had come. And yet - the great world below was not wholly dark. It was awash with phosphorescence, which grew brighter minute by minute as their eyes grew accustomed to the scene. Dim rivers of light were flowing from horizon to horizon, like the luminous wakes of ships on some tropical sea. Here and there they gathered into pools of liquid fire, trembling with vast, submarine disturbances welling up from the hidden heart of Jupiter. It was a sight so awe-inspiring that Poole and Bowman could have stared for hours; was this, they wondered, merely the result of chemical and electrical forces down there in that seething caldron - or was it the by-product of some fantastic form of life?

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All his years of training, all his earlier missions to the Moon and Mars, seemed to belong to another man, in another life.

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Antimatter bombs can theoretically be constructed, but antimatter is very costly to produce and hard to store safely.

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But was even this the end? A few mystically inclined biologists went still further. They speculated, taking their cues from the beliefs of many religions, that mind would eventually free itself from matter. The robot body, like the flesh-and-blood one, would be no more than a stepping-stone to something which, long ago, men bad called "spirit." And if there was anything beyond that, its name could only be God.

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By saving the knowledge of the race. The sum of human knowing is beyond any one man; any thousand men. With the destruction of our social fabric, science will be broken into a million pieces. Individuals will know much of exceedingly tiny facets of what there is to know. They will be helpless and useless by themselves. The bits of lore, meaningless, will not be passed on. They will be lost through the generations. But, if we now prepare a giant summary of all knowledge, it will never be lost. Coming generations will build on it, and will not have to rediscover it for themselves. One millennium will do the work of thirty thousand.

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Deliberate error was unthinkable. Even the concealment of truth filled him with a sense of imperfection, of wrongness - of what, in a human being, would have been called guilt. For like his makers, Hal had been created innocent; but, all too soon, a snake had entered his electronic Eden.

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He had been threatened with disconnection; he would be deprived of all his inputs, and thrown into an unimaginable state of unconsciousness. To Hal, this was the equivalent of Death. For he had never slept, and therefore he did not know that one could wake again.

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I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.

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It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand; but perhaps men were barbarians, beside the creatures who had made this thing.

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More moons circle Jupiter than planets orbited the Sun.

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Most fascinating of all were the EEG displays - the electronic signatures of three personalities that had once existed, and would one day exist again. They were almost free from the spikes and valleys, the electrical explosions that marked the activity of the waking brain - or even of the brain in normal sleep. If there was any wisp of consciousness remaining, it was beyond the reach of instruments, and of memory.

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On both occasions, he had almost lost control of all his higher logical processes; he had been within seconds of becoming a frenzied bundle of random impulses. Both times he had won through, but he knew well enough that any man, in the right circumstances, could be dehumanized by panic.

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Our schools replace curiosity with compliance and the only good that does is it produces an obedient factory worker.

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That was within a minute of the estimate; the fly-by had been carried out with impeccable precision. Like a ball on a cosmic pool table, Discovery had bounced off the moving gravitational field of Jupiter, and had gained momentum from the impact. Without using any fuel, she had increased her speed by several thousand miles an hour. Yet there was no violation of the laws of mechanics; Nature always balances her books, and Jupiter had lost exactly as much momentum as Discovery had gained. The planet had been slowed down -but as its mass was a sextillion times greater than the ship's, the change in its orbit was far too small to be detectable. The time had not yet come when Man could leave his mark upon the Solar System.

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The appearance of strength is all about you. It would seem to last forever. However, Mr. Advocate, the rotten tree-trunk, until the very moment when the storm-blast breaks it in two, has all the appearance of might it ever had. The storm-blast whistles through the branches of the Empire even now. Listen with the ears of psychohistory, and you will hear the creaking.

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The particle of dust that had impacted here at over a hundred thousand miles an hour was certainly smaller than a pinhead, and its enormous kinetic energy had vaporized it instantly. 'As was often the case, the crater looked as if it had been caused by an explosion from inside the ship; at these velocities, materials behaved in strange ways and the laws of common-sense mechanics seldom applied.

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They were a standard size, fitting the zero-torque wrench that he carried. The tool's internal spring mechanism would absorb the reaction as the nuts were unthreaded, so that the operator would have no tendency to spin around in reverse. The four nuts came off without any trouble, and Poole stowed them carefully away in a convenient pouch. (One day, somebody had predicted, Earth would have a ring like Saturn's, composed entirely of lost bolts, fasteners, and even tools that had escaped from careless orbital construction workers.)

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They were usually christened with feminine names, perhaps in recognition of the fact that their personalities were sometimes slightly unpredictable.

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Whatever way it worked, the final result was a machine intelligence that could reproduce - some philosophers still preferred to use the word "mimic" - most of the activities of the human brain -and with far greater speed and reliability. It was extremely expensive, and only a few units of the HAL9000 series had yet been built; but the old jest that it would always be easier to make organic brains by unskilled labor was beginning to sound a little hollow.

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Whether Hal could actually think was a question which had been settled by the British mathematician Alan Turing back in the 1940s. Turing had pointed out that, if one could carry out a prolonged conversation with a machine - whether by typewriter or microphone was immaterial - without being able to distinguish between its replies and those that a man might give, then the machine was thinking, by any sensible definition of the word. Hal could pass the Turing test with ease. The time might even come when Hal would take command of the ship. In an emergency, if no one answered his signals, he would attempt to wake the sleeping members of the crew, by electrical and chemical stimulation. If they did not respond, he would radio Earth for further orders. And then, if there was no reply from Earth, he would take what measures he deemed necessary to safeguard the ship and to continue the mission - whose real purpose he alone knew, and which his human colleagues could never have guessed. Poole and Bowman had often humorously referred to themselves as caretakers or janitors aboard a ship that could really run itself. They would have been astonished, and more than a little indignant, to discover how much truth that jest contained.

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Dilution refrigerator

A 3He/4He dilution refrigerator is a cryogenic device that provides continuous cooling to temperatures as low as 2 mK, with no moving parts in the low-temperature region.[1] The cooling power is provided by the heat of mixing of the Helium-3 and Helium-4 isotopes. The refrigeration process uses a mixture of two isotopes of helium: helium-3 and helium-4. When cooled below approximately 870 millikelvins, the mixture undergoes spontaneous phase separation to form a 3He-rich phase (the concentrated phase) and a 3He-poor phase (the dilute phase). As shown in the phase diagram, at very low temperatures the concentrated phase is essentially pure 3He, while the dilute phase contains about 6.6% 3He and 93.4% 4He. The working fluid is 3He, which is circulated by vacuum pumps at room temperature. The 3He enters the cryostat at a pressure of a few hundred millibar. In the classic dilution refrigerator (known as a wet dilution refrigerator), the 3He is precooled and purified by liquid nitrogen at 77 K and a 4He bath at 4.2 K. Next, the 3He enters a vacuum chamber where it is further cooled to a temperature of 1.2-1.5 K by the 1 K bath, a vacuum-pumped 4He bath (as decreasing the pressure of the helium reservoir depresses its boiling point). The 1 K bath liquefies the 3He gas and removes the heat of condensation. The 3He then enters the main impedance, a capillary with a large flow resistance. It is cooled by the still (described below) to a temperature 500-700 mK. Subsequently, the 3He flows through a secondary impedance and one side of a set of counterflow heat exchangers where it is cooled by a cold flow of 3He. Finally, the pure 3He enters the mixing chamber, the coldest area of the device. In the mixing chamber, two phases of the 3He-4He mixture, the concentrated phase (practically 100% 3He) and the dilute phase (about 6.6% 3He and 93.4% 4He), are in equilibrium and separated by a phase boundary. Inside the chamber, the 3He is diluted as it flows from the concentrated phase through the phase boundary into the dilute phase. The heat necessary for the dilution is the useful cooling power of the refrigerator, as the process of moving the 3He through the phase boundary is endothermic and removes heat from the mixing chamber environment. The 3He then leaves the mixing chamber in the dilute phase. On its way up, the cold, dilute 3He cools the downward flowing 3He via the heat exchangers until it enters the still. In the still, the 3He flows through superfluid 4He which is at rest.[3] The pressure in the still is kept low (about 10 Pa) by the pumps at room temperature. The vapor in the still is practically pure 3He, which has a much higher partial pressure than 4He at 500-700 mK. The pump therefore creates an osmotic pressure difference, which drives more 3He from the concentrated to dilute phases in the mixing chamber, and then up from the mixing chamber to the still. Heat is supplied to the still to maintain a steady flow of 3He. The pumps compress the 3He to a pressure of a few hundred millibar and feed it back into the cryostat, completing the cycle.

deformity

A disfigurement. A deformity happens when a body part is misshapen. A deformity can also be a change for the worse in something's appearance. A two-headed kitten has a deformity.

globular cluster

A globular cluster is a spherical collection of stars that orbits a galactic core. Globular clusters are very tightly bound by gravity, which gives them their spherical shapes, and relatively high stellar densities toward their centers.

nuclear thermal rocket (NTR)

A nuclear thermal rocket (NTR) is a type of thermal rocket where the heat from a nuclear reaction, often nuclear fission, replaces the chemical energy of the propellants in a chemical rocket. In an NTR, a working fluid, usually liquid hydrogen, is heated to a high temperature in a nuclear reactor and then expands through a rocket nozzle to create thrust. The external nuclear heat source theoretically allows a higher effective exhaust velocity and is expected to double or triple payload capacity compared to chemical propellants that store energy internally. The pulsed nuclear thermal rocket (not to be confused with nuclear pulse propulsion, which is a hypothetical method of spacecraft propulsion that uses nuclear explosions for thrust) is a type of solid nuclear thermal rocket for thrust and specific impulse (Isp) amplification.[3] In this concept, the conventional solid fission NTR can operate in a stationary as well as in a pulsed mode, much like a TRIGA reactor. Because the residence time of the propellant in the chamber is short, an important amplification in energy is attainable by pulsing the nuclear core, which can increase the thrust via increasing the propellant mass flow. However, the most interesting feature is the capability to obtain very high propellant temperatures (higher than the fuel) and then high amplification of exhaust velocity. This is because, in contrast with the conventional stationary solid NTR, propellant is heated by the intense neutron flux from the pulsation, which is directly transported from the fuel to the propellant as kinetic energy. By pulsing the core it is possible to obtain a propellant hotter than the fuel. However, and in clear contrast with classical nuclear thermal rockets (including liquid and gas nuclear rockets), the thermal energy from the decay of fission daughters is unwanted.[citation needed]

Supercurrent

A supercurrent is a superconducting current, that is, electric current which flows without dissipation.

Angel Oak

Angel Oak is a Southern live oak located in Angel Oak Park on Johns Island near Charleston, South Carolina. The tree is estimated to be 400-500 years old. It stands 66.5 ft tall, measures 28 ft in circumference, and produces shade that covers 17,200 square feet. Its longest branch distance is 187 ft in length.

idiomatic

Anything idiomatic relates to idioms, which are figurative phrases like "It's raining cats and dogs."

ebon

Black like ebony a durable dark wood dark black

cultural appropriation

Cultural appropriation, at times also phrased cultural misappropriation, is the adoption of elements of one culture by members of another culture. This can be controversial when members of a dominant culture appropriate from disadvantaged minority cultures.

Cumulus Clouds

Cumulus clouds are bright white and look like big puffs of cotton. The word cumulus is Latin for "heap" or "pile." This is because these clouds are sometimes extremely thick and tall and they often grow upward in size. An easy way to remember this is to think of the word accumulate, which means "to gather an increasing amount." The bases of these clouds are often flat and the tops are usually composed of rounded sections. Cumulus clouds are vertically developing clouds which mean they can become extremely tall clouds.

D-Wave Systems

D-Wave Systems, Inc. is a Canadian quantum computing company, based in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. D-Wave was the world's first company to sell computers to exploit quantum effects in their operation.[2] D-Wave's early customers include Lockheed Martin, University of Southern California, Google/NASA and Los Alamos National Lab. In 2015, D-Wave's 2X Quantum Computer with more than 1000 qubits was installed at the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at NASA Ames Research Center. They have subsequently shipped systems with 2048 qubits. In 2019, D-Wave announced a 5000 qubit system available mid-2020, using their new Pegasus chip with 15 connections per qubit.[3][4] The first commercially produced D-Wave processor was a programmable,[25] superconducting integrated circuit with up to 128 pair-wise coupled[26] superconducting flux qubits.[27][28][29] The 128-qubit processor was superseded by a 512-qubit processor in 2013.[30] The processor is designed to implement a special-purpose quantum annealing[11][12][13][14] as opposed to being operated as a universal gate-model quantum computer. In February 2019 D-Wave announced their next-generation Pegasus quantum processor chip, announcing that it would be "the world's most connected commercial quantum system," with 15 connections per qubit instead of 6; that the next-generation system would use the Pegasus chip; that it would have more than 5000 qubits and reduced noise; and that it would be available in mid-2020.[55]

DNA computing

DNA computing is a branch of computing which uses DNA, biochemistry, and molecular biology hardware, instead of the traditional silicon-based computer technologies. Research and development in this area concerns theory, experiments, and applications of DNA computing. The term "molectronics" has sometimes been used, but this term has already been used for an earlier technology, a then-unsuccessful rival of the first integrated circuits;[1] this term has also been used more generally, for molecular-scale electronic technology. The organisation and complexity of all living beings is based on a coding system functioning with four key components of the DNA molecule. Because of this, the DNA is very suited as a medium for data processing.[15] According to different calculations a DNA-computer with one liter of fluid containing six grams of DNA could potentially have a memory capacity of 3072 exabytes. The theoretical maximum data transfer speed would also be enormous due to the massive parallelism of the calculations. Therefore, about 1000 petaFLOPS could be reached, while today's most powerful computers do not go above much (200 petaFLOPS being the current record).[16]

Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCR)

Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCR) are the slowly varying, highly energetic background source of energetic particles that constantly bombard Earth. GCR originate outside the solar system and are likely formed by explosive events such as supernova.

IEDs

Improvised explosive devices can be made in suitcases, backpacks, boxes, and so on

Metaheuristic

In computer science and mathematical optimization, a metaheuristic is a higher-level procedure or heuristic designed to find, generate, or select a heuristic (partial search algorithm) that may provide a sufficiently good solution to an optimization problem, especially with incomplete or imperfect information or limited computation capacity.[1][2] Metaheuristics sample a set of solutions which is too large to be completely sampled. Metaheuristics may make few assumptions about the optimization problem being solved, and so they may be usable for a variety of problems. A heuristic is a rule or method that helps you solve problems faster than you would if you did all the computing. It sounds fancy, but you might know a heuristic as a "rule of thumb."

Spin glass

In condensed matter physics, a spin glass is a model of a certain type of magnet. Magnetic spins are, roughly speaking, the orientation of the north and south magnetic poles in three-dimensional space. In ferromagnetic solids, component atoms' magnetic spins all align in the same direction. Spin glasses are contrasted with ferromagnets as "disordered" magnets in which their atoms' spins are not aligned in a regular pattern. The term "glass" comes from an analogy between the magnetic disorder in a spin glass and the positional disorder of a conventional, chemical glass, e.g., a window glass. In window glass or any amorphous solid the atomic bond structure is highly irregular; in contrast, a crystal has a uniform pattern of atomic bonds. In ferromagnetic solids, magnetic spins all align in the same direction; this is analogous to a crystal's lattice-based structure. The individual atomic bonds in a spin glass are a mixture of roughly equal numbers of ferromagnetic bonds (where neighbors have the same orientation) and antiferromagnetic bonds (where neighbors have exactly the opposite orientation: north and south poles are flipped 180 degrees). These patterns of aligned and misaligned atomic magnets create what are known as frustrated interactions - distortions in the geometry of atomic bonds compared to what would be seen in a regular, fully aligned solid. They may also create situations where more than one geometric arrangement of atoms is stable.

Tunnel junction

In electronics/spintronics, a tunnel junction is a barrier, such as a thin insulating layer or electric potential, between two electrically conducting materials. Electrons (or quasiparticles) pass through the barrier by the process of quantum tunnelling. Classically, the electron has zero probability of passing through the barrier. However, according to quantum mechanics, the electron has a non-zero wave amplitude in the barrier, and hence it has some probability of passing through the barrier. Tunnel junctions serve a variety of different purposes. In multijunction photovoltaic cells, tunnel junctions form the connections between consecutive p-n junctions. They function as an ohmic electrical contact in the middle of a semiconductor device. In magnetic tunnel junctions, electrons tunnel through a thin insulating barrier from one magnetic material to another.[1] This can serve as a basis for a magnetic detector.

Exotic matter

In physics, exotic matter is matter that somehow deviates from normal matter and has "exotic" properties. A broader definition of exotic matter is any kind of non-baryonic matter—that is not made of baryons, the subatomic particles (such as protons and neutrons) of which ordinary matter is composed.[1] Exotic mass has been considered a colloquial term for matters such as dark matter, negative mass, or complex mass

Mirror matter

In physics, mirror matter, also called shadow matter or Alice matter, is a hypothetical counterpart to ordinary matter. Modern physics deals with three basic types of spatial symmetry: reflection, rotation, and translation. The known elementary particles respect rotation and translation symmetry but do not respect mirror reflection symmetry (also called P-symmetry or parity). Of the four fundamental interactions—electromagnetism, the strong interaction, the weak interaction, and gravity—only the weak interaction breaks parity. Parity violation in weak interactions was first postulated by Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang[1] in 1956 as a solution to the τ-θ puzzle. They suggested a number of experiments to test if the weak interaction is invariant under parity. These experiments were performed half a year later and they confirmed that the weak interactions of the known particles violate parity. However, parity symmetry can be restored as a fundamental symmetry of nature if the particle content is enlarged so that every particle has a mirror partner. The theory in its modern form was described in 1991,[5] although the basic idea dates back further. Mirror particles interact amongst themselves in the same way as ordinary particles, except where ordinary particles have left-handed interactions, mirror particles have right-handed interactions. In this way, it turns out that mirror reflection symmetry can exist as an exact symmetry of nature, provided that a "mirror" particle exists for every ordinary particle. Parity can also be spontaneously broken depending on the Higgs potential.[8][9] While in the case of unbroken parity symmetry the masses of particles are the same as their mirror partners, in case of broken parity symmetry the mirror partners are lighter or heavier. Mirror matter, if it exists, would need to use the weak force to interact with ordinary matter. This is because the forces between mirror particles are mediated by mirror bosons. With the exception of the graviton, none of the known bosons can be identical to their mirror partners. The only way mirror matter can interact with ordinary matter via forces other than gravity is via kinetic mixing of mirror bosons with ordinary bosons or via the exchange of Holdom particles.[10] These interactions can only be very weak. Mirror particles have therefore been suggested as candidates for the inferred dark matter in the universe. In another context[which?], mirror matter has been proposed to give rise to an effective Higgs mechanism responsible for the electroweak symmetry breaking. In such a scenario, mirror fermions have masses on the order of 1 TeV since they interact with an additional interaction, while some of the mirror bosons are identical to the ordinary gauge bosons. In order to emphasize the distinction of this model from the ones above[which?], these mirror particles are usually called katoptrons.[16][17]

Charge qubit

In quantum computing, a charge qubit (also known as Cooper-pair box) is a qubit whose basis states are charge states (e.g. states which represent the presence or absence of excess Cooper pairs in the island).[1][2][3] In superconducting quantum computing, a charge qubit[4] is formed by a tiny superconducting island (also known as a Cooper-pair box) coupled by a Josephson junction (or practically, superconducting tunnel junction) to a superconducting reservoir (see figure). The state of the qubit is determined by the number of Cooper pairs which have tunneled across the junction. In contrast with the charge state of an atomic or molecular ion, the charge states of such an "island" involve a macroscopic number of conduction electrons of the island. The quantum superposition of charge states can be achieved by tuning the gate voltage U that controls the chemical potential of the island. The charge qubit is typically read-out by electrostatically coupling the island to an extremely sensitive electrometer such as the radio-frequency single-electron transistor. Typical T2 coherence times for a charge qubit are on the order of 1-2 μs.[5] Recent work has shown T2 times approaching 100 μs using a type of charge qubit known as a transmon inside a three-dimensional superconducting cavity.[6][7] Understanding the limits of T2 is an active area of research in the field of superconducting quantum computing. Cooper-Pair Boxes are fabricated using techniques similar to those used for microelectronics. The devices are usually made on silicon or sapphire wafers using electron beam lithography (different from phase qubit, which uses photolithography) and metallic thin film evaporation processes. To create Josephson junctions, a technique known as shadow evaporation is normally used; this involves evaporating the source metal alternately at two angles through the lithography defined mask in the electron beam resist. This results in two overlapping layers of the superconducting metal, in between which a thin layer of insulator (normally aluminum oxide) is deposited.

Flux qubit

In quantum computing, and more specifically in superconducting quantum computing, flux qubits (also known as persistent current qubits) are micrometer sized loops of superconducting metal interrupted by a number of Josephson junctions, functioning as quantum bits. The flux qubit was first proposed by Terry P. Orlando et al. at MIT in 1999.[1] The junction parameters are engineered during fabrication so that a persistent current will flow continuously when an external magnetic flux is applied. As only an integer number of flux quanta are allowed to penetrate the superconducting ring, clockwise or counter-clockwise mesoscopic supercurrents (typically 300 nA[2]) are developed in the loop to compensate (screen or enhance) a non-integer external flux bias. When the applied flux through the loop area is close to a half integer number of flux quanta, the two lowest energy eigenstates of the loop will be a quantum superposition of the clockwise and counter-clockwise currents. The two lowest energy eigenstates differ only by the relative quantum phase between the composing current-direction states. Higher energy eigenstates correspond to much larger (macroscopic) persistent currents, that induce an additional flux quantum to the qubit loop, thus are well separated energetically from the lowest two eigenstates. This separation, known as the "qubit non linearity" criteria, allows operations with the two lowest eigenstates only, effectively creating a two level system. Usually, the two lowest eigenstates will serve as the computational basis for the logical qubit. Computational operations are performed by pulsing the qubit with microwave frequency radiation which has an energy comparable to that of the gap between the energy of the two basis states, similar to RF-SQUID. Properly selected pulse duration can put the qubit into a quantum superposition of the two basis states while subsequent pulses can manipulate the probability weighting that the qubit will be measured in either of the two basis states, thus performing a computational operation. Flux qubits are fabricated using techniques similar to those used for microelectronics. The devices are usually made on silicon or sapphire wafers using electron beam lithography and metallic thin film evaporation processes. To create Josephson junctions, a technique known as shadow evaporation is normally used; this involves evaporating the source metal alternately at two angles through the lithography defined mask in the electron beam resist. This results in two overlapping layers of the superconducting metal, in between which a thin layer of insulator (normally aluminum oxide) is deposited. The flux qubit is distinguished from other types of superconducting qubit such as the charge qubit or phase qubit by the coupling energy and charging energy of its junctions. In the charge qubit regime the charging energy of the junctions dominates the coupling energy, while in a flux qubit the situation is reversed and the coupling energy dominates. Typically in a flux qubit the coupling energy is 10-100 times greater than the charging energy. It is this ratio that allows the Cooper pairs to flow continuously around the loop, rather than tunnel discretely across the junctions as in a charge qubit.

Phase qubit

In quantum computing, and more specifically in superconducting quantum computing, the phase qubit is a superconducting device based on the superconductor-insulator-superconductor (SIS) Josephson junction,[1] designed to operate as a quantum bit, or qubit. The phase qubit is closely related, yet distinct from, the flux qubit and the charge qubit, which are also quantum bits implemented by superconducting devices. The major distinction among the three is the ratio of Josephson energy vs charging energy[3] (the necessary energy for one Cooper pair to charge the total capacitance in the circuit) A phase qubit is a current-biased Josephson junction, operated in the zero voltage state with a non-zero current bias. A Josephson junction is a tunnel junction,[6] made of two pieces of superconducting metal separated by a very thin insulating barrier, about 1 nm in thickness. The barrier is thin enough that electrons, or in the superconducting state, Cooper-paired electrons, can tunnel through the barrier at an appreciable rate. Each of the superconductors that make up the Josephson junction is described by a macroscopic wavefunction, as described by the Ginzburg-Landau theory for superconductors.[7] The difference in the complex phases of the two superconducting wavefunctions is the most important dynamic variable for the Josephson junction, and is called the phase difference {\displaystyle \delta }\delta , or simply "phase".

lorentz invariance

Lorentz invariance expresses the proposition that the laws of physics are the same for different observers, for example, an observer at rest on Earth or one who is rotated through some angle, or traveling at a constant speed relative to the observer at rest. In relativistic physics, Lorentz symmetry, named after Hendrik Lorentz, is an equivalence of observation or observational symmetry due to special relativity implying that the laws of physics stay the same for all observers that are moving with respect to one another within an inertial frame.

Magic state distillation

Magic state distillation is considered by many experts to be one of the leading proposals for achieving fault tolerant quantum computation. Magic state distillation has also been used to argue that quantum contextuality may be the "magic ingredient" responsible for the power of quantum computers.

peasantry

Members of the lowest class in some social class systems. peasants

Mesoscopic physics

Mesoscopic physics is a subdiscipline of condensed matter physics that deals with materials of an intermediate length. These materials range in size between the nanoscale for a quantity of atoms (such as a molecule) and of materials measuring micrometres.[citation needed] The lower limit can also be defined as being the size of individual atoms. At the micrometre level are bulk materials. Both mesoscopic and macroscopic objects contain many atoms. Whereas average properties derived from its constituent materials describe macroscopic objects, as they usually obey the laws of classical mechanics, a mesoscopic object, by contrast, is affected by thermal fluctuations around the average, and its electronic behavior may require modeling at the level of quantum mechanics. A macroscopic electronic device, when scaled down to a meso-size, starts revealing quantum mechanical properties. For example, at the macroscopic level the conductance of a wire increases continuously with its diameter. However, at the mesoscopic level, the wire's conductance is quantized: the increases occur in discrete, or individual, whole steps. During research, mesoscopic devices are constructed, measured and observed experimentally and theoretically in order to advance understanding of the physics of insulators, semiconductors, metals and superconductors. The applied science of mesoscopic physics deals with the potential of building nanodevices.

Metcalfe's law

Metcalfe's law states the effect of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.

model vs law vs theory

Model: A representation of something difficult or impossible to display directly Law: A concise description, usually in the form of a mathematical equation, used to describe a pattern in nature Theory: An explanation for patterns in nature that is supported by scientific evidence and verified multiple times by various groups of researchers

The reason we can see muons in the atmosphere is due to time dilation. Muons have a very fast decay rate so if this was not the case we wouldn't be able to see them.

Muons are unstable particles created when cosmic rays interact with the upper atmosphere. ... i.e., the atmosphere that the muon sees is 70 times thinner 0.6 km > 0.14 km and so the ground will reach the muon. Thus, length contraction and time dilation are real! http://www.atmosp.physics.utoronto.ca/people/strong/phy140/lecture32_01.pdf

"Your theory is crazy - but not crazy enough to be true."

Niels Bohr

Quantum annealing

Quantum annealing (QA) is a metaheuristic for finding the global minimum of a given objective function over a given set of candidate solutions (candidate states), by a process using quantum fluctuations (in other words, a meta-procedure for finding a procedure that finds an absolute minimum size/length/cost/distance from within a possibly very large, but nonetheless finite set of possible solutions using quantum fluctuation-based computation instead of classical computation). Quantum annealing is used mainly for problems where the search space is discrete (combinatorial optimization problems) with many local minima; such as finding the ground state of a spin glass[1] or the traveling salesman problem. It was formulated in its present form by T. Kadowaki and H. Nishimori (ja) in "Quantum annealing in the transverse Ising model"[2] though a proposal in a different form had been made by A. B. Finnila, M. A. Gomez, C. Sebenik and J. D. Doll, in "Quantum annealing: A new method for minimizing multidimensional functions". Quantum annealing starts from a quantum-mechanical superposition of all possible states (candidate states) with equal weights. Then the system evolves following the time-dependent Schrödinger equation, a natural quantum-mechanical evolution of physical systems. The amplitudes of all candidate states keep changing, realizing a quantum parallelism, according to the time-dependent strength of the transverse field, which causes quantum tunneling between states. If the rate of change of the transverse field is slow enough, the system stays close to the ground state of the instantaneous Hamiltonian (also see adiabatic quantum computation).[4] If the rate of change of the transverse field is accelerated, the system may leave the ground state temporarily but produce a higher likelihood of concluding in the ground state of the final problem Hamiltonian, i.e., diabatic quantum computation.[5][6] The transverse field is finally switched off, and the system is expected to have reached the ground state of the classical Ising model that corresponds to the solution to the original optimization problem. An experimental demonstration of the success of quantum annealing for random magnets was reported immediately after the initial theoretical proposal.[7] An introduction to combinatorial optimization (NP-hard) problems, the general structure of quantum annealing-based algorithms and two examples of this kind of algorithms for solving instances of the max-SAT and Minimum Multicut problems together with an overview of the quantum annealing systems manufactured by D-Wave Systems are presented in.[8]

synchronism

Simultaneousness. the relation that exists when things occur at the same time

meteorological

Something that's meteorological is related to the weather or changes in the Earth's atmosphere. If you're interested in a meteorological career, it means you'd like to be a meteorologist — a weather expert.

Spintronics

Spintronics (a portmanteau meaning spin transport electronics), also known as spin electronics, is the study of the intrinsic spin of the electron and its associated magnetic moment, in addition to its fundamental electronic charge, in solid-state devices.[4] The field of spintronics concerns spin-charge coupling in metallic systems; the analogous effects in insulators fall into the field of multiferroics. Spintronics fundamentally differs from traditional electronics in that, in addition to charge state, electron spins are exploited as a further degree of freedom, with implications in the efficiency of data storage and transfer. Spintronic systems are most often realised in dilute magnetic semiconductors (DMS) and Heusler alloys and are of particular interest in the field of quantum computing and neuromorphic computing.[5]

Stratus Clouds

Stratus clouds are thick, gray clouds that look like fog that hasn't touched the ground. In fact, these clouds sometimes are made up of fog that has lifted from the ground. As you may have guessed, these are low-altitude clouds, which means they are really close to the ground. When someone says, "today is a gray and cloudy day", they are usually referring to these thick, uniform clouds. Stratus clouds often produce a light, drizzly rain or snow, especially when it's a nimbostratus cloud.

Superconducting quantum computing

Superconducting quantum computing is an implementation of a quantum computer in superconducting electronic circuits. Research in superconducting quantum computing is conducted by Google,[1] IBM,[2] IMEC,[3] BBN Technologies,[4] Rigetti,[5] and Intel.[6] as of May 2016, up to nine fully controllable qubits are demonstrated in a 1D array,[7] up to sixteen in a 2D architecture. More than two thousand superconducting qubits are in a commercial product by D-Wave Systems, however these qubits implement quantum annealing instead of a universal model of quantum computation. Classical computation models rely on physical implementations consistent with the laws of classical mechanics.[9] It is known, however, that the classical description is only accurate for specific cases, while the more general description of nature is given by quantum mechanics. Quantum computation studies the application of quantum phenomena, that are beyond the scope of classical approximation, for information processing and communication. Various models of quantum computation exist, however the most popular models incorporate the concepts of qubits and quantum gates. A qubit is a generalization of a bit - a system with two possible states, that can be in a quantum superposition of both. A quantum gate is a generalization of a logic gate: it describes the transformation that one or more qubits will experience after the gate is applied on them, given their initial state. The physical implementation of qubits and gates is difficult, for the same reasons that quantum phenomena are hard to observe in everyday life. One approach is to implement the quantum computers in superconductors, where the quantum effects become macroscopic, though at a price of extremely low operation temperatures. In a superconductor, the basic charge carriers are pairs of electrons (known as Cooper pairs), rather than the single electrons in a normal conductor. The total spin of a Cooper pair is an integer number, thus the Cooper pairs are bosons (while the single electrons in the normal conductor are fermions). Cooled bosons, contrary to cooled fermions, are allowed to occupy a single quantum energy level, in an effect known as the Bose-Einstein condensate. In a classical interpretation it would correspond to multiple particles occupying the same position in space and having an equal momentum, effectively behaving as a single particle. At every point of a superconducting electronic circuit (that is a network of electrical elements), the condensate wave function describing the charge flow is well-defined by a specific complex probability amplitude. In a normal conductor electrical circuit, the same quantum description is true for individual charge carriers, however the various wave functions are averaged in the macroscopic analysis, making it impossible to observe quantum effects. The condensate wave function allows designing and measuring macroscopic quantum effects. For example, only a discrete number of magnetic flux quanta penetrates a superconducting loop, similarly to the discrete atomic energy levels in the Bohr model. In both cases, the quantization is a result of the complex amplitude continuity. Differing from the microscopic quantum systems (such as atoms or photons) used for implementations of quantum computers, the parameters of the superconducting circuits may be designed by setting the (classical) values of the electrical elements that compose them, e.g. adjusting the capacitance or inductance. In order to obtain a quantum mechanical description of an electrical circuit a few steps are required. First, all the electrical elements are described with the condensate wave function amplitude and phase, rather than with the closely related macroscopic current and voltage description used for classical circuits. For example, a square of the wave function amplitude at some point in space is the probability of finding a charge carrier there, hence the square of the amplitude corresponds to the classical charge distribution. Second, generalized Kirchhoff's circuit laws are applied at every node of the circuit network to obtain the equations of motion. Finally, the equations of motion are reformulated to Lagrangian mechanics and a quantum Hamiltonian is derived. The devices are typically designed in the radio-frequency spectrum, cooled down in dilution refrigerators below 100mK and addressed with conventional electronic instruments, e.g. frequency synthesizers and spectrum analyzers. Typical dimensions on the scale of micrometers, with sub-micrometer resolution, allow a convenient design of a quantum Hamiltonian with the well-established integrated circuit technology. A distinguishing feature of superconducting quantum circuits is the usage of a Josephson junction - an electrical element non existent in normal conductors. A junction is a weak connection between two leads of a superconducting wire, usually implemented as a thin layer of insulator with a shadow evaporation technique. The condensate wave functions on the two sides of the junction are weakly correlated - they are allowed to have different superconducting phases, contrary to the case of a continuous superconducting wire, where the superconducting wave function must be continuous. The current through the junction occurs by quantum tunneling. This is used to create a non-linear inductance which is essential for qubit design, as it allows a design of anharmonic oscillators. A quantum harmonic oscillator cannot be used as a qubit, as there is no way to address only two of its states.

Niemeyer-Dolan technique

The Niemeyer-Dolan technique, also called the Dolan technique or the shadow evaporation technique, is a thin-film lithographic method to create nanometer-sized overlapping structures. This technique uses an evaporation mask that is suspended above the substrate (see figure). The evaporation mask can be formed from two layers of resist. Depending on the evaporation angle, the shadow image of the mask is projected onto different positions on the substrate. By carefully choosing the angle for each material to be deposited, adjacent openings in the mask can be projected on the same spot, creating an overlay of two thin films with a well-defined geometry. The Niemeyer-Dolan technique is used to create thin-film electronic nanostructures such as quantum dots and tunnel junctions.

lowdown

The details and relevant information on a given topic or issue. Your supervisor will give you the lowdown on how this company operates.

Ebullism

The formation of gas bubbles in bodily fluids due to reduced environmental pressure Ebullism is the formation of gas bubbles in bodily fluids due to reduced environmental pressure, for example at high altitude. It occurs because a system of liquid and gas at equilibrium will see a net conversion of liquid to gas as pressure lowers, for example, liquids reach their boiling point at lower temperatures when the pressure on them is lowered.

re-acquisition

The process by which a conditioned stimulus re-acquires the ability to elicit a previously extinguished response.

dirty bomb

The term dirty bomb refers to a specialized device that relies on a comparatively low explosive yield to scatter harmful material over a wide area. Most commonly associated with radiological or chemical materials, dirty bombs seek to kill or injure and then to deny access to a contaminated area until a thorough clean-up can be accomplished. In the case of urban settings, this clean-up may take extensive time, rendering the contaminated zone virtually uninhabitable in the interim.

Nimbus Clouds

The word "nimbus" means rain in Latin, so these are the clouds that produce rain. Any cloud with the prefix "nimbo" or the suffix "nimbus" is a type of rain cloud. For example, a nimbostratus cloud is a stratus cloud that will cause rain or snow. Since stratus clouds are dull, gray, and featureless, nimbostratus clouds can be seen on gray, rainy days. Another type of rain cloud is the cumulonimbus. Since cumulus clouds are the heaping, giants, cumulonimbus clouds are giant, heaping rain clouds. These clouds can be so huge that their bases start at only 1,000 feet above the ground with a top of 39,000 feet! These clouds, sometimes called thunderheads, form into the shape of an anvil which is a sure sign of a storm! Heavy thunderstorms and even tornadoes are associated with this type of cloud (a tornado is a rotating column of air connected to a cumulonimbus cloud.)

Cirrus Clouds

These are the highest clouds in the atmosphere. Cirrus clouds are thin, wispy clouds that often appear on days with fair weather conditions and low winds. In fact, the word cirrus means "curl of hair" in Latin! Because of the freezing temperatures high up in the atmosphere, these clouds are usually made up of ice crystals which give them a bright white appearance. These clouds form in flat sheets, so they aren't as thick as the other types of clouds. Cirrus clouds are also spread out in patches, with large breaks of the sky in between them. Since these clouds are so far from the ground, they aren't often affected by the changing weather on the earth's surface. Instead, they peacefully float along from west to east. Cirrus clouds are often a telltale sign that the weather is about to change for the worse.

christen

To name in baptism. give (a baby) a Christian name at baptism as a sign of admission to a Christian Church.

largest nuke in the world

Tsar Bomba The bhangmeter results and other data suggested the bomb yielded about 58 megatons of TNT The mushroom cloud of Tsar Bomba seen from a distance of 161 km (100 mi). The crown of the cloud is 65 km (40 mi) (213,000 feet) high at the time of the picture.

ablate

When you ablate something, you wear it away by rubbing or some other method. In medicine, doctors sometimes need to ablate a patient's skin to help it heal.

trundle

When you trundle something, you move it or roll it awkwardly. You might have to trundle your broken suitcase down the stairs if you can't find an elevator.

apologia

a formal written defense of one's opinions or conduct. a formal written defense of something you believe in strongly

Hibernaculum

a shelter occupied during the winter by a dormant animal

heliograph

a signaling device by which sunlight is reflected in flashes from a movable mirror.

heuristic

a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier but also more error-prone than algorithms proceeding to a solution by trial and error or by rules that are only loosely defined.

second definition (time)

a sixtieth of a minute of time, which as the SI unit of time is defined in terms of the natural periodicity of the radiation of a cesium-133 atom. The second is now operationally defined as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom." It follows that the hyperfine splitting in the ground state of the cesium 133 atom is exactly 9,192,631,770 hertz. In other words, cesium atoms can be made to vibrate in a very steady way, and these vibrations can be readily observed and counted. The second is the time required for 9,192,631,770 of these vibrations to occur.

airlock

a special doorway that allows astronauts to enter and leave the spacecraft a compartment with controlled pressure and parallel sets of doors, to permit movement between areas at different pressures.

extensible

able to be extended or stretched; extendable.

adjournment

an act or period of adjourning or being adjourned.

azimuth

arc of the horizon the direction of a celestial object from the observer, expressed as the angular distance from the north or south point of the horizon to the point at which a vertical circle passing through the object intersects the horizon.

astern

behind a ship Astern means at the rear of a ship, boat, or plane. If your seat on an airplane is astern, you'll have to walk all the way to the very back to find it.

unmistakable

clear; cannot be understood the wrong way; not able to be confused or misunderstood

dusky

dim; shadowy; dark

Network effect

each additional user adds more value to the whole A network effect is the effect described in economics and business that an additional user of goods or services has on the value of that product to others. When a network effect is present, the value of a product or service increases according to the number of others using it.

Josephson effect

flow of electric current between two pieces of superconducting material separated by a thin layer of insulating material tunneling of Cooper pairs through a barrier separating two superconductors The Josephson effect is the phenomenon of supercurrent, a current that flows indefinitely long without any voltage applied, across a device known as a Josephson junction (JJ), which consists of two or more superconductors coupled by a weak link. The weak link can consist of a thin insulating barrier (known as a superconductor-insulator-superconductor junction, or S-I-S), a short section of non-superconducting metal (S-N-S), or a physical constriction that weakens the superconductivity at the point of contact (S-s-S). The Josephson effect is an example of a macroscopic quantum phenomenon. It is named after the British physicist Brian David Josephson, who predicted in 1962 the mathematical relationships for the current and voltage across the weak link.[1][2] The DC Josephson effect had been seen in experiments prior to 1962,[3] but had been attributed to "super-shorts" or breaches in the insulating barrier leading to the direct conduction of electrons between the superconductors. The first paper to claim the discovery of Josephson's effect, and to make the requisite experimental checks, was that of Philip Anderson and John Rowell.[4] These authors were awarded patents on the effects that were never enforced, but never challenged. Types of Josephson junction include the pi Josephson junction, varphi Josephson junction, long Josephson junction, and superconducting tunnel junction. A "Dayem bridge" is a thin-film variant of the Josephson junction in which the weak link consists of a superconducting wire with dimensions on the scale of a few micrometres or less. The Josephson junction count of a device is used as a benchmark for its complexity. The Josephson effect has found wide usage, for example in the following areas. SQUIDs, or superconducting quantum interference devices, are very sensitive magnetometers that operate via the Josephson effect. They are widely used in science and engineering. In precision metrology, the Josephson effect provides an exactly reproducible conversion between frequency and voltage. Since the frequency is already defined precisely and practically by the caesium standard, the Josephson effect is used, for most practical purposes, to give the standard representation of a volt, the Josephson voltage standard. However, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures has not changed the official SI unit definition. Single-electron transistors are often constructed of superconducting materials, allowing use to be made of the Josephson effect to achieve novel effects. The resulting device is called a "superconducting single-electron transistor".[11]

concealment

hiding the condition of being concealed or hidden

cloud types

https://owlcation.com/stem/Cloud-Types-with-Pictures

Rose's law

moore's law for quantum computing Rose's Law for Quantum Computing highlights the new platforms sheer power to solve humanity's and society's most complex problems on, and off, Earth.

embolism

obstruction of an artery, typically by a clot of blood or an air bubble.

nacreous

pearly, lustrous

Quantum state

probability distribution for the value of each observable, i.e. for the outcome of each possible measurement on the system. Knowledge of the quantum state together with the rules[clarification needed] for the system's evolution in time exhausts all that can be predicted about the system's behavior. A mixture of quantum states is again a quantum state. Quantum states that cannot be written as a mixture of other states are called pure quantum states, all other states are called mixed quantum states. Mathematically, a pure quantum state can be represented by a ray in a Hilbert space over the complex numbers.[3] The ray is a set of nonzero vectors differing by just a complex scalar factor; any of them can be chosen as a state vector to represent the ray and thus the state. A unit vector is usually picked, but its phase factor can be chosen freely anyway. Nevertheless, such factors are important when state vectors are added together to form a superposition.

extravehicular

relating to an activity performed in space outside a spacecraft.

sealant

resin material used to seal pits and fissures to prevent decay a kind of sealing material that is used to form a hard coating on a porous surface (as a coat of paint or varnish used to size a surface)

circumnavigation

the action or process of sailing or otherwise traveling all the way around something, especially the world.

onomatopoetic

the formation of a word by imitation of a sound made by or associated with its referent describing words that imitate the sound they denote

normalization of deviance

the gradual process through which unacceptable practices or standards become acceptable

neptunes kiss (the kiss of neptune)

the name given to the water/piss splash which wets ones bottom when excreting a particularly heavy turd when sat on the toilet The splashback of cold bog water up your ringpiece when dropping the kids off at the pool.

retrogression

the process of returning to an earlier state, typically a worse one.

triplicate

three copies

man-ape

us

infinite wisdom

used in an ironic way to say that someone has made a foolish choice or decision He decided, in his infinite wisdom, that it would be better to sell the house than to keep it.