New data from the Planck telescope indicates that the universe is 13.82 Billion years old — 100 million years older than we thought.

Planck launched into space in 2009 and has been scanning the skies ever since. It reads the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is the energy signature of the Big Bang, when the universe was born.

"This light started out as a white hot glow ... it would have been blindingly bright,"Charles Lawrence, U.S. Planck project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a press conference today. "During 13.8 billion years the universe has expanded and this light became a very cold glow that our eyes can't see."

This cosmic microwave background radiation, or CMB, is still detectable today, and interestingly, it's not evenly spread out across the universe. There are tiny fluctuations that make it "clumpy," and that shapes the universe around us. The clumpiness was the seeds of galaxies and clusters of galaxies that we see in the universe today.

It is clumpy because of fluctuations in the temperature and density of the universe at the moment the radiation waves started moving through it. Planck is able to look back at the universe when it was just 370,000 years old — when this radiation started moving.

In the new image, above, red means a little bit warmer than average, blue means a little bit cooler, and white is just about average. These are tiny fluctuations in temperature — one hundred millionth of a degree.

"Imprinted in this light is evidence of the universe's evolution and its origin," Paul Hertz, NASA's director of astrophysics, said in a press conference. The data from Planck is a huge improvement over previous readings of the CMB, from the WMAP data — seen to the right. "It's as if we've gone from a standard TV to a high definition TV."

By studying this data we can answer deep and fundamental questions of our universe. The universe is not only a little older than we thought, it is also expanding slower. Our universe has more matter than we previously thought — both the "normal" matter that makes up our world, and the mysterious dark matter. They also discovered that there's less dark energy, the mysterious stuff that's pushing the universe apart.

Here are the five things we learned for the first time about the universe:

• It's 100 million years older than we thought at 13.82 billion years old.
• It is expanding slower than we thought: 67.15 kilometers/second/megaparsec. A megaparsec is roughly 3 million light-years.
• There's more dark matter than we thought — 26.8 percent, up from 24 percent.
• It has less dark energy than we thought: 68.3 percent, down from 71.4 percent.
• It has more "normal matter"— which is the matter that we can interact with. It's now 4.9 percent, up from 4.6 percent.

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Morgan Freeman visited the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) tunnel yesterday, where CERN scientists discovered the the "God Particle,"a type of Higgs Boson.

Freeman visited the LHC before hosting the Fundamental Physics Prize ceremony in Geneva, where the seven scientists working on the Higgs Boson were honored. Freeman also hosted a Science Channel show on the Higgs, Through The Wormhole, which premiered March 20 and will be replayed March 27.

SEE ALSO: What It's Like To Work At CERN In Switzerland

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Peter Higgs, who invented the Higgs Boson, is an atheist and really doesn't like it that people call his particle "God."

The Telegraph noted an excerpt from an interview with Higgs:

But Prof Higgs, explained his distaste for the term in a BBC Scotland interview. He said: "First of all, I'm an atheist.

"The second thing is I know that name was a kind of joke and not a very good one. I think he shouldn't have done that as it's so misleading."

The particle, or a version of it, was discovered last spring, and the finding has been confirmed by the scientists at CERN. It helps explain what gives subatomic particles — and therefore the entire universe — its size and shape. It also supports certain theories about how the universe works and what happened during the Big Bang.

According to The Telegraph, Higgs doesn't believe the particle is the work of one almighty creator, so please, stop calling it the God Particle.

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Tomorrow Business Insider will have the chance to spend time with astrophysicist, science communicator, and all-around awesome guy Neil deGrasse Tyson.

He's the host of the wildly entertaining StarTalk radio podcast, which mixes comedians and scientists, and is the Director of the Hayden Planetarium and Research associate at the American Museum of Natural History.

He's also the host of the upcoming Cosmos reboot on FOX, the sequel to Carl Sagan's series. He frequently comments on topics from climate and space travel and even sports from time to time.

Here's a selection of his best quotes: 11 Baller Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes.

Leave your questions below in the comments or email them to jwelsh@businessinsider.com.

And here's one little bonus for you: a GIF of deGrasse moonwalking on stage during a filming of the podcast.

SEE ALSO: Go On A Cosmic Journey With Our Six Favorite Carl Sagan Clips

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In these days of frivolous entertainments and frayed attention spans, the people who become famous are not necessarily the brightest stars. One of the biggest hits on YouTube, after all, is a video of a French bulldog who can’t roll over. But in amongst all the skateboarding cats and laughing babies, a new animated video, featuring the words of a dead theoretical physicist, has gone viral. In the film, created from an original documentary made for the BBC back in the early Eighties, the late Nobel Prize-winning professor, Richard Feynman, can be heard extolling the wonders of science contained within a simple flower.

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Could time come to an end? What would that even mean?

Last month I gave a talk about this strange physics idea at a TEDx event in Trento, Italy, based on a Scientific American article I wrote in 2010.

My conceit was that time’s end poses a paradox that might be resolved if time is emergent.

I don’t know whether that’s right, and it goes against what Lee Smolin argues in his latest book, but, if nothing else, this idea does provide a loose framework to talk about such physics concepts as the arrow of time and the holographic principle.

I’ll also be speaking on this general topic at the Empiricist League, an informal monthly science gathering, in Brooklyn on June 11th.

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The ultimate accessory in exact timekeeping — the atomic clock — is set to become even more precise, after ultrashort laser pulses were successfully transmitted across open air to help synchronize the "ticking" of new optical atomic clocks.

Keeping extremely precise time is not just a question of scientific achievement. It is a key to many modern technologies, from Global Positioning Systems (GPS) to mobile phone networks and broadcasters' transmitters. For GPS systems, an error of just one nanosecond, or a billionth of a second, would mean the location is about 12 inches (30 centimeters) off.

To ensure maximum precision, the U.S. national time standard is determined by atomic clocks. Current ones use extremely cold cesium atoms, laser-cooled to temperatures close to absolute zero. The cesium atoms are then blasted with microwaves until the atoms vibrate at a certain frequency. That frequency is equal to the energy that gets absorbed when the microwave radiation causes the cesium atom's outermost electron to jump to a higher orbit, or 9,192,631,770 Hz. What we call "the second" is then derived from the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of this frequency. [Wacky Physics: The Coolest Little Particles in Nature]

Now physicists are developing new optical atomic clocks which could be about 100 times more precise than microwave-based ones. They operate in a similar manner, but use laser light instead of microwaves. Laser light has a much higher frequency and hence gives much better timing resolution and much faster transmission of data.

Timekeeping troubles

Many national timekeeping laboratories have at least one type of an optical atomic clock,but the definition of a second does not yet rely on them, partly because it is not yet possible to ensure all of these clocks tick at exactly the same rate.Optical atomic clocks are extremely delicate devices, and also, not all of them are of the same type. They can be using completely different species of atoms — such as aluminum ion, strontium neutral or ytterbium ion, which are just some optical analogues of the microwave clock.

But even if the optical clocks in different labs use the same atoms, the clocks' accuracy depends on how well scientists control the atoms' environment, said Patrick Gill of the National Physical Laboratory in the U.K. Factors include"the background temperature, whether there is magnetic and electric field noise, also the precise influence of gravity, [because] clocks at different heights give different readings due to Einstein's general relativity."

To use optical atomic clocks as a common global timescale, the time on all the clocksmust match up. Making sure the clocks match up is relatively easy if the clocks sit next to each other in the same lab, Gill said, but is more difficult for remotely located clocks.

Currently, the best way to make optical clocks match up is by relaying the optical frequency, or the light, to the remote clock by sending that information along an optical fiber in order to compare the two frequencies and "see how well they agree," Gill said.

He added that if the clocks don't agree, scientists must figure out what's causing the glitch and then control for that factor.

"This is absolutely paramount if we want to make full use of the optical clock capability," Gill said.

But fibers are not an ideal solution for remote and difficult-to-access areas.

No more cables

So physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the United States decided to do away with cables. Instead, they used a laser to generate ultrashort infrared pulses at a very precise rate of 1 picosecond every 10 nanoseconds, where 10 ns corresponds to a set number of "ticks" of an optical atomic clock.

The NIST team transmitted the pulses from one location toward a mirror 0.62 miles (1 kilometer) away; the pulses reflected off the mirror and transmitted back toward a third location not far from the first — effectively showing that it was possible to take a very precise ticking clock and transfer its ticks to a location 1.2 miles (2 km)away "without messing it up,"said study co-author Nathan Newbury of NIST's Quantum Electronics and Photonics Division. "The actual link is a loop."

The test was done across land, but eventually, the researchers hope, it should be possible to transfer the pulses via satellites.

In the future, optical atomic clocks could be used for satellite-based experiments to prove Einstein's theory of general relativity and create more precise GPS satellite navigation systems, which "could be improved in the sense that you could put better optical clocks in satellites and crosslink them optically," Newbury said. [Top 10 Inventions That Changed the World]

"There may be an argument for security. Currently, GPS is fragile in the sense you can jam it. A system with an optical backbone is much more secure since you cannot jam it —optical systems are directional, so they are much harder to jam," Newbury added. "It is also why optical signals are tougher to send and receive, because you have to point at the correct place."

Atmospheric troubles

Atmospheric turbulence is one hurdle optical clocks will need to clear, as the molecules in the air, in some instances, can break up an optical signal and lead to a timing error.

"Our system is not limited by the link length, as far as precision is concerned, but of course at some point, turbulence can interrupt the link," lead study author Fabrizio Giorgetta, also of NIST, said. "If there is dense fog, there's nothing we can do." But during wind or rain, he added, a so-called stirring mirror helps to correct for the turbulence.

Gill of the National Physical Laboratory in the U.K., who was not involved in the research, called the study "a good starting point" for an alternative method to optical fibers for precise optical atomic clocks.If the optical method works, the bell might toll for microwave-based atomic clocks.

Funded in part by DARPA, the study was detailed in the journal Nature Photonics.

Editor's note: This article has been updated to correct frequency units from 9,192,631,770 GHz to 9,192,631,770 Hz.

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• Images: The World's Most Beautiful Equations
• Warped Physics: 10 Effects of Faster-Than-Light Discovery
• Super-Intelligent Machines: 7 Robotic Futures

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Baseball season is upon us and we thought we'd share with you the awesome physics of the curve ball. Here's a great video from Tetra Research of a curve ball in flight which will help us understand the forces acting on it better.

The red areas are under higher pressure and blue are under lower pressures. Watch the clip:

From F*ck Yeah Fluid Dynamics:

Because the ball is spinning forward, pressure forces are unequal between the top and bottom of the ball, with the bottom part of the baseball experiencing lower pressure. As with a wing in flight, this pressure difference between surfaces creates a force — for the curveball, downward.

This is known as the Magnus effect — as the ball is in motion through the air, the air produces lift perpendicular to the spin axis.

As the ball rotates around the ball's horizontal axis, it creates additional pressure on the top of the ball, which makes it drop faster than gravity alone. If it was spinning in a different way, for instance around the vertical axis, the pressure would push it right or left.

This is the opposite of how lift works in a plane's wing. It also shows up in soccer, tennis, and golf.

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WARNING: This video will blow your mind.

When a 160-foot-long chain of connected beads (like those in a mardi gras necklace) is unleashed from a jar, it loops way up and over the edge, rising higher and higher as it siphons itself onto the floor. Watch the quick video from Steve Mould:

Why? Physics!

the momentum of gravity pulling the strand down keeps the chain moving up and out of the jar. The time it takes to switch from being pulled up and out to being pulled down makes the loop move up and get bigger.

More info and slow motion video, from Earth Unplugged, thanks to i09:

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This is a great party trick or anytime cool-down treat — by shaking up an unopened bottle of soda before cooling it for a few hours, you can make an instant slushie of any flavor you want.

Here's the process:

1. Get a room-temperature bottle or can of soda.

2. Shake it up violently to increase the pressure. This pressure is what will keep the soda from freezing even when it's super-cooled.

3. Place the soda in the freezer on a shelf alone (it seems important that it doesn't lie on something already frozen, we tried this and the liquid cooled unevenly and started freezing on one side — still semi successful, see image, but not like the video) for two to three hours, then start quickly checking on it every 15 minutes.

In the video below the 500-milliliter sodas are chilled for 3 hours and 15 minutes. Our experiment froze quicker, but that could be because it was lying on already frozen stuff.

Be careful not to forget about the bottle, or you risk the liquid freezing and exploding the bottle. You are probably hitting the danger zone around about 4 hours, depending how cold your freezer is set.

4. Take out the soda bottle and open and close the cap quickly, before inverting the soda. The liquid will freeze into a carbonated slush.

Here's the process described by Grant Thompson. If you don't believe us, watch it happen:

SEE ALSO: 8 Ways To Stay Cool If You Don't Have Air Conditioning

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The video above shows a drop of water and a small piece of the element sodium colliding and causing an explosive reaction in midair.

What's really great? The two particles are suspended there entirely by sound waves, using a new technique that to levitate objects and move them through the air. The research was published July 15 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Scientists had already known how to use sound waves to suspend matter in air, but couldn't get the objects to move from side to side. While levitating an object, the sound waves would basically create a tunnel around it, keeping it in on place.

Somewhat like a ping-pong ball suspended by the air from a hair dryer, the object suspended by sound waves could only bounce in one place.

"Before, it was like you had a beautiful car, but could only park it," study researcher Dimon Poulikakos, of ETF Zurich, told Science News. "Now you can drive the car."

Poulikakos and his team figured out how to bend the sound waves to allow movement.

To levitate the material, they use several small square metal plates that vibrate, with a sheet of plexiglass a few millimeters above them.

When the plates buzz rapidly, the sound waves rise up and bounce off the plexiglass sheet above. The collision of the rising and falling sound waves suspend the the objects perfectly between them.

The researchers found that tiny adjustments to the rate at which each metal block vibrated, they could manipulate the particles to move horizontally.

The breakthrough could make it much easier for scientists and engineers to handle volatile materials (as demonstrated in the video, where the element Sodium combines with water to produce a volatile reaction).

Polystyrene and water:

Instant coffee and water:

Levitating toothpick:

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Quantum computers aren't for browsing the Internet, checking email, or running standard software.

Instead, they rely on the underpinnings of quantum mechanics, a branch of physics that's defied conventional understanding for almost 100 years. It involves manipulating individual particles to solve previously unsolvable problems.

If you wanted to say that a quantum computer runs on magic, you wouldn't be too far off. Science fiction daydreams like time travel and teleportation are run of the mill when we're dealing with objects this tiny (think: smaller than an individual atom). The "rules" don't apply.

This opens up some exciting possibilities, especially in a branch of mathematics known as optimization, which is pretty much what it sounds like: finding the best answer from a large set of potential answers. For such a specific slice of math, this field addresses some of the most tangible problems in the real world. What's the best route for a UPS truck to make its deliveries? How do you schedule flights at an airport to keep things running smoothly?

Conventional computers are ill-equipped to handle certain optimization calculations. Professor Daniel Lidar, scientific director at the USC Lockheed-Martin Center for Quantum Computing, says that "it would take many times the age of the universe to try to identify the folded states of a protein, and yet nature can do this in seconds, maybe minutes. It's had billions of years to think about it."

In a way, quantum computing taps into nature's ability to interact with the world. That might be a tough thought to comprehend, but it's only the tip of the iceberg.

Quantum computers rely on quantum mechanics to work, and quantum mechanics is CRAZY.

The rules for the microscopic particles that make up atoms are drastically different from the rules for macroscopic objects that we can see with the naked eye.

For example, quantum particles can exist in two places at once, move forwards or backwards in time, and even "teleport" by way of what physicists call "quantum tunneling."

This is the stuff of science fiction to us, but in the quantum world it's business as usual. And scientists can't really explain it.

No one knows for sure what happens inside a quantum computer.

A widely-known tenet of quantum mechanics (and science in general) is that the simple act of observation changes the outcome of an event. We are limited by the precision of our instruments, and this is especially true of a scientist's inquisitive eyeballs. A quantum particle observed or otherwise measured is a quantum particle changed forever.

Forget the digital bits of ones and zeroes – quantum computers use qubits, and these things are wild.

At your personal computer's core, it is manipulating bits – digital representations of zero and one, nothing else.

A quantum computer uses quantum bits, called qubits, to crunch through its operations. Just like bits, qubits can represent either a zero or one, but the real juice is in their third state, called the "superposition"– they can represent both one and zero at the same time.

This quirky ability means that the same string of qubits can represent lots of different things simultaneously. For example, a set of two qubits in superposition represents four possible situations at the same time– [0, 0]; [0, 1]; [1, 0]; or [1, 1].

Is this starting to get hard to follow? It's okay! Some of the very intelligent people who study it for a living are just as perplexed.

Anyone who has studied physics and marketing can observe some very interesting similarities between the concepts of these two seemingly different disciplines. Unlike physics, however, marketing is not often taught according to scientific principles.

This is unfortunate. It perhaps explains why too many people, whether they are trained in marketing or not, have strong opinions on marketing issues. It also explains why virtually everyone thinks his, or her, “guess” is as good as anyone else’s when marketing decisions need to be made.

The same people who would never dream of giving advice to a brain surgeon before an operation or to a computer scientist before constructing a complex program are stridently insistent about their views on marketing goods, services, and ideas.

Unfortunately for them (and those whom they are advising), their confident “certainty” is based on ignorance rather than understanding. Interestingly enough, this ignorance also has parallels with the evolution of our understanding of the universe.

Disagreement about the sky

Biblical authors were insistent that the sky was a fixed semi-circular metallic sphere, known as the firmament, with a fixed width and the Earth at its center. Greek philosophers extended the size of this firmament to thousands of miles. Galileo believed it to cover millions of miles, and talked in terms of a sun-centered solar system, but he was imprisoned and blinded for his “blasphemous” thoughts by the Church. Kepler thought of the universe in terms of billions of miles. Halley extended it to trillions of kilometers in diameter and began talking in terms of light years as a yardstick to measure stellar distances.

Better understanding from better knowledge

Over the centuries, as measuring systems and knowledge grew more sophisticated, successive scientists have extended our notion of the universe and have found that there is no firmament, or solid sphere, but that the Earth is surrounded only by space, makes one rotation every 24 hours, and revolves around the Sun. The Sun, in turn, circles a Galactic center, which is 30,000 light years away, and makes one complete revolution every 230 million years. Our Milky Way galaxy is not alone but part of huge galactic cluster that contain untold numbers of galaxies, and these clusters are themselves parts of larger structures.

Degree of certainty seems inversely proportional to knowledge

Over the history of civilization, those with the least knowledge seemed to be the most certain that they had “all the answers” about our universe.  It is not surprising that their views have been proven wrong time and again. The same is true of self-righteous marketers whose belief that they are right seems to be directly proportional to their lack of knowledge of the subject. Oddly enough, those with deeper marketing knowledge are the ones that do more research to determine what customers want and to double-check their marketing strategies before implementing them.

Marketing follows the rules of the universe

Al Ries and Jack Trout point out in their book, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, that marketing is not a “black art” where knowledgeable practitioners are guessing. They rightly state that “Marketing has a set of laws as constant as the speed of light. Follow those laws and do well in the marketplace. Violate them at your own risk.”

Beginning of a series

While Ries and Trout formulate those marketing laws that they believe are important, I hope to embark on a series of posts in Business Insider that will relate marketing concepts to the universal laws of physics, mathematics, and other related scientific disciplines. The underlying idea is that universal laws and concepts govern the behavior of everything in the universe from the tiniest sub-atomic particles to the largest known galactic clusters. Marketing is no exception.

Perception versus Reality

Subsequent posts will explore some of the rules of the universe and draw parallels with the fundamentals that govern marketing. Since perception and reality are often confused in marketing and business, a good starting point will be to explore the “boundary” between the two. This confusion is often cited as the culprit that undermines marketing’s credibility as a rigorous discipline. Please stay tuned.

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A team of scientists have finally filmed a sight they have been waiting to see for decades: a drop of extremely slow-moving pitch break off and fall.

The team running the pitch-drop project at Trinity College in Dublin witnessed it detach at roughly 5 p.m. on July 11, according to Nature News.

It may not seem like a hugely momentous event, but moments like these only come around once a decade or so, and the drop has never been filmed before. Paying close attention to this slower-than-molasses experiment gives scientists an extraordinary glimpse into the physical properties of an ordinary substance.

"We were all so excited," project leader Shane Bergin told Nature News. "It’s been such a great talking point, with colleagues eager to investigate the mechanics of the break, and the viscosity of the pitch."

Pitch, also known as asphalt or bitumen, moves so slowly at room temperature that it appears to be a solid. Watching the drop allowed the team to estimate the viscosity of the pitch: It flows about 20 million times slower than honey and more than 2 billion times slower than water.

They think that the funnel and pitch was set up in 1944 by Nobel laureate Ernest Walton who was a professor at the school. They think he wanted to use the experiment as an educational tool.

When first set up it took three years for the blob of pitch to begin flowing out of the funnel, and then another seven to ten to form a drop. The set-up lay neglected for years, until scientists literally blew the dust off the pitch and began watching it again.

The flowing pitch is one of the world's longest-running scientific experiments. Last April, they set up a Web cam so people around the world could watch the drop finally break off and fall.

While it has taken years to flow out of the funnel, it only takes a tenth of a second for the drop to dislocate and fall. Seeing it happen is so rare that in the 83 years that an even older pitch experiment has been running at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, no one has witnessed any of the nine drops that have fallen.

Watch the Trinity College drop fall, the first time this historic event has ever been captured on camera:

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Speaking at the International Conference for Quantum Technologies  in Moscow yesterday afternoon, Professor Vladimir Shalaev of Purdue University shared some incredibly compelling figures on how our relationship with information has changed as computers improve.

In what he terms the "evolution of an information society," the amount of hard drive space people require to store their digital lives is growing at quite a click.

In 1986, the average person had just 500 megabytes to his or her name.

By 2007, this number ballooned to 44.5 gigabytes, an 8,800% increase over 21 years.

For an individual's purposes, 44.5 GB isn't considered an especially large amount of data today. But consider this – cloud services are quickly becoming a primary means for people to store their data on a single server. If you're a large company like Google, managing 44.5 GB of data per person becomes a tricky task when you have a few hundred million customers.

Here's where the quantum side of things comes in.

Quantum computers have proven to be especially capable at solving problems in a branch of mathematics known as optimization. This is a process of computationally finding the best possible answer from a vast set of potential answers. Because quantum computers are able to parallel process many, many different approaches to an optimization problem at the same time, they could drastically reduce the amount of time needed to sort through the seas of data we create every day and may very well revolutionize the Big Data industry.

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Today's computers solve problems by moving electrons through circuits, but Professor Vladimir Shalaev is working on incredibly compelling technology that, once fully realized, will make this beyond obsolete – instead of electrons, he wants to perform computations by manipulating light.

"We're running out of ways to make computers faster and quantum technology is clearly the next step," he told Business Insider.

Shalaev is an expert in the field of nanophotonics, a branch of quantum physics that deals with how light behaves at very, very small scales. This idea of light-as-data presents staggering potential for the world of computation, but how could a computer possibly"steer" light through a circuit to calculate a correct answer?

The answer lies in metamaterials, man-made objects with unusual characteristics that are simply not found in nature. They are pretty innocuous in appearance, looking like a sheet of material with a bunch of holes in it. They're used to investigate all order of sciences, but it is certain metamaterial's special relationship with light that makes it such an attractive tool for the next generation of computing. Specifically, it can bend and control light.

The fastest computers in the world today approach 10¹¹ GHz, crunching through 100 billion operations every second. A fully-realized system making use of metamaterials to steer light through its circuits would dwarf this, clocking in at 10¹⁵ GHz.

Some of Shalaev's work is funded by QWave, a venture capital fund helping businesses that are looking for opportunity in quantum technology.

"QWave is great because they're helping build a quantum culture, investing lots of money in companies without any expectation for immediate return," said Shalaev.

But if incredibly powerful and efficient computers aren't your thing, maybe you'd rather have an invisibility cloak.

Again, metamaterial is the ticket. Remember, it controls light. All it has to do is curve light around you. If no light reflects off of you, then you're literally invisible. If you can control the light to return back to its original trajectory after passing around you, you won't even cast a shadow.

Imagine a rock that breaks the surface of a river. When water contacts the rock, it's diverted from it's original path before returning to business as usual on the other side of the rock. In this example, the water is light and the rock is metamaterial. The water never touches the space occupied by the rock, so that space might as well not be there. As far as the water is concerned, the rock doesn't exist.

Of course a full-size and fully-operational "invisibility cloak" isn't a practical reality just yet. These light manipulation techniques have so far only worked on an incredibly small scale, but that's the only detail that matters – it works.

We'll be paying attention here for sure. Metamaterial may very well usher in the next era of super-supercomputers. Shalaev was quick to remind us that "the invisibility is just for fun."

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Last night I found myself at the Tatler Club, a posh lounge/restaurant in the Moscow Radisson, talking with Seth Lloyd, a professor at MIT and a brand-name guy in the world of quantum mechanics.

As a fun aside, Professor Lloyd shared an interesting theory on the existence of aliens. Instead of a scientific explanation, though, he offered up a sociological one.

It goes like this:

Given the size of the universe, it very unlikely that the humans on planet Earth are the only intelligent beings out there. There are simply too many opportunities for life to exist when you consider the number of stars with their own planetary systems around them.

Now, an overwhelming majority (about 85%) our universe is made of what's called dark matter, and science has yet to crack it open and make sense of it. The regular matter that makes up human beings, the planets, and everything with mass in the conventional sense only accounts for 4.9%. We are by far an inconsequential minority in the scope of astrophysics.

Professor Lloyd's "modest proposal" (as he outlined in a 2011 letter to the editor in the NYT) is that "cold" dark matter, which accounts for 23% of the energy in the universe, is the aliens. They use that which we can't understand as a means to hide from us.

As he wrote for the NYT: 

While not actively hostile, the aliens would prefer not to live in our neighborhood. Whatever it is made of, the dark energy is their way of suggesting, politely but firmly, that we leave. Dark energy is simply the mechanism for 'alien flight' in the cosmic real estate market.

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We're learning everything we can here at the International Conference on Quantum Technologies, an event organized by the Russian Quantum Center that brought a troop of physicists from around the world to downtown Moscow to share what they're working on.

Professor Nicolas Gisin of Université de Genève in Switzerland is an accomplished experimental physicist who took some time to talk to us this afternoon about quantum communication and cryptography, technologies that make it possible for us to send messages in a truly unbreakable code.

Here's how it works.

(It will help to brush up on key-based encryption methods like PGP, which can help you send encrypted emails, to follow this effectively.)

"Quantum communication" is the name for what happens when we send a quantum state from one place to another. This means that we are taking all the characteristics of one particle and forcing them onto a new particle some distance away. A quantum state cannot be copied, so in transferring it like this the original is necessarily destroyed.

Let's use teleportation as an analogy here. If you were somehow able to teleport yourself to another room, this doesn't generate a clone of yourself. Whatever "you" was in the first room no longer exists, because it's now in the new room.

In the same way that you can't duplicate yourself, scientists can't duplicate a quantum state. This is the essential mechanism for quantum encryption.

Gisin defines quantum encryption as "classical encryption based on keys shared using quantum physics." This classical key-based encryption makes use of a seemingly random string of characters that are actually computer instructions for encoding and decoding a message.

If Bill wants to email Fred, he'll type out his message and encrypt it with a key. He'll send the encrypted message and the relevant key (or keys) to Fred, who can then easily decrypt it.

Quantum encryption functions almost exactly this way, except we share keys using powerful techniques from quantum physics. Your data can be transmitted via individual photons of light.

Remember, one of the foundations of quantum mechanics is that the very act of measuring or observing something changes it. If an unauthorized third party were to somehow intercept a quantum key (which is incredibly difficult), it would be changed as a direct result. The third party now has a message he can't read and the two people originally in communication with each other would instantly know so.

If you were a malicious hacker type wanting to snag someone's quantum message, you'd have to catch the photons carrying that message in real time. Good luck with that. Even if you were successful, as an unauthorized recipient, the data would change as soon as you accessed it.

Disclosure: Our trip to Moscow, including travel and lodging expenses, was sponsored by the Russian Quantum Center.

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In my previous post, I talked about physics being a good metaphor for marketing. One of the striking similarities between the two disciplines is they are both difficult to understand because most people have a hard time comprehending the difference between perception and reality.

Why? People tend to believe what they perceive– a thought captured by the common expression “seeing is believing.”

Good physicists and marketers know that what is real is often hard to perceive and therefore hard for many to believe. Some examples will help to illustrate this point.

The Earth is flat

When humans looked at the horizon they saw a straight line. In fact, the word horizontal connotes a straight line, and it is derived from horizon. That is the perception. The reality is that humans see only a small segment of a very large curve, which looks like a straight line. Sorry Flat Earth Society.

Motion

Everything in your office – your desk, walls, and furniture are made of materials that do not appear to be moving. That is the perception. In reality, the atoms and sub-atomic particles in those materials are moving quite a lot. Since you cannot see the motion, you presume nothing is moving. In fact, if you saw the movement of everything around you, it would drive you crazy. The same is true of the Earth. As we go about our daily business, we do not sense that the Earth is moving. Where I am in Los Angeles, it is rotating at roughly 750 miles an hour. It is revolving around the Sun at about 67,000 miles per hour, and our Sun is revolving around our galaxy, the Milky Way, at about 486,000 miles per hour. Now, that’s a lot of motion. Since the Earth acts like a very large ship moving through space, we do not perceive the movement. If we did, we would probably be a lot less secure, as we are when there is an earthquake or a massive storm.

Sound

Our own voices sound very differently inside our heads than they do to others. In fact, when people hear a sound recording of their voices for the first time, most don’t like what they hear. It sounds strange and unfamiliar. Even so, that is how we sound to the outside world. Again, humans perceive one thing. Reality is another.

Sight

When you look in a mirror, you see a mirror image of yourself. That is not the way you look to the rest of the world. Moreover, since you typically see yourself in the mirror everyday, your brain edits what it sees. It presumes you look the same as before and only senses noticeable differences. As with sound, we need to turn to the “outside” word to discover how we appear to others. The same is true of our companies and products. Customers and prospects in the marketplace are the only ones that can objectively tell us how our company and products appear to them. To find out what they really think about our products, we have to develop a good marketing information system. When we listen, we often get a healthy dose of reality. If their perceptions are truly different from reality, good marketers learn that our marketing strategies are not working.

Limited by your senses

I could go on and on with the metaphors, but hopefully have made the point. What most think is real is only a perception because humans are limited by their senses. Why is this important? To be successful, marketers need to understand that (1) marketplace perceptions become business realities and (2) if those perceptions are different from what we want them to be, we need to execute the proper marketing strategies to change them.

What is most important is often counter-intuitive

Just as physicists find it difficult to explain relativity, gravity, black holes, and quantum theory to the public, marketers experience similar difficulty convincing constituents what marketing strategy will be the most effective. The reason for this is that, as discussed above, reality is often counter-intuitive. To be successful, marketers need to …

1. Understand marketing fundamentals at a deeper level.
2. Know more about how the human brain works.
3. Know how to sell decision makers, clients, and students on the correct strategy.
4. Use independent, 3rd-party, credible proof to support selling efforts.
5. Patiently educate those that remain skeptical because they can nix the right strategy and create a lose-lose, rather than win-win, outcome.

Some common misperceptions

To better illustrate the counter-intuitive problem, it is useful to look at some common marketing misconceptions. Too many believe that…

• Short communications routinely sell better than long ones.
• Sex helps to sell most everything.
• Celebrities, while expensive, help to sell the products they endorse.

The reality

The reality is that long communications typically…

• Sell better than short.
• Sex is not as effective at selling products if the products are unrelated to sex.
• Celebrities are only effective selling products if they are considered expert users of those products.

Being customer driven and thinking outside-in

Why do so many believe these misconceptions? As when they hear their own voice, they are listening inside their own heads, and people tend to trust their own perceptions. To sell others, they need to listen to actual data from the marketplace and think “outside-in” rather than “inside-out.” You can safely “trust your gut” if you have knowledge, experience, or inherent genius. If not, it is important to find the real marketplace data to support the “gut feel.” That is what science is about, and good marketing needs to support the “art” with science. Good marketers need to understand that (1) perception is reality in business and (2) if the perception is different from the desired reality, it is up to marketers to change the perceptions to put them in synch with what is positively real and important about their companies and products.

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Quantum cryptography represents one of the most powerfully secure communication systems that science can conceive of, relying on the underpinnings of quantum mechanics to obscure data from those you don't want seeing it.

What if there were a data network built on these principles?

It's an idea called the quantum Internet, and we caught up with Professor Alex Lvovsky at the International Conference on quantum computing in Moscow to find out what it's all about.

"The Internet we use every day is very fast but not very secure. A quantum Internet would be slower, but much more secure," he said.

It becomes a calculation of convenience versus security – which do you prefer?

During the course of our conversation, Lvovsky hypothesized about a merging of the two.

"It's entirely realistic that we may be able to use the regular Internet by default and switch over to quantum when we need to transmit sensitive data like a credit card number. There's no reason the two couldn't interact like that."

Quantum data transmission is so secure because the data is altered as soon as it's seen by an unauthorized party. This means that all the personal data we put out there on a regular basis could become much more difficult for people to steal when the quantum Internet becomes a reality.

Disclosure: Our trip to Moscow, including travel and lodging expenses, was sponsored by the Russian Quantum Center.

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