Science & technology

Note: Turing Machines are now undoubtedly part of pop culture, aren't they?

Via Open Culture (via Boing Boing)

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It took Richard Ridel six months of tinkering in his workshop to create this contraption--a mechanical Turing machine made out of wood. The silent video above shows how the machine works. But if you're left hanging, wanting to know more, I'd recommend reading Ridel's fifteen page paper where he carefully documents why he built the wooden Turing machine, and what pieces and steps went into the construction.

If this video prompts you to ask, what exactly is a Turing Machine?, also consider adding this short primer by philosopher Mark Jago to your media diet. 

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More about Quantum Information by Vlatko Vedral and his book Decoding Reality.

Via Legalise Freedom

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Listen to the discussion online HERE (Youtube, 1h02).

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Vlatko Vedral on Decoding Reality -- The Universe as Quantum Information. What is the nature of reality? Why is there something rather than nothing? These are the deepest questions that human beings have asked, that thinkers East and West have pondered over millennia. For a physicist, all the world is information. The Universe and its workings are the ebb and flow of information. We are all transient patterns of information, passing on the blueprints for our basic forms to future generations using a digital code called DNA.

Decoding Reality asks some of the deepest questions about the Universe and considers the implications of interpreting it in terms of information. It explains the nature of information, the idea of entropy, and the roots of this thinking in thermodynamics. It describes the bizarre effects of quantum behaviour such as 'entanglement', which Einstein called 'spooky action at a distance' and explores cutting edge work on harnessing quantum effects in hyperfast quantum computers, and how recent evidence suggests that the weirdness of the quantum world, once thought limited to the tiniest scales, may reach up into our reality.

The book concludes by considering the answer to the ultimate question: where did all of the information in the Universe come from? The answers considered are exhilarating and challenge our concept of the nature of matter, of time, of free will, and of reality itself.

Note: the title and beginning of the article is very promissing or teasing, so to say... But unfortunately not freely accessible without a subscription on the New Scientist. Yet as it promisses an interesting read, I do archive it on | rblg for record and future readings.

In the meantime, here's also an interesting interview (2010) from Vlatko, at the time when he published his book Decoding Reality () about Information with physicist Vlatko Vedral for The Guardian.

Via The Guardian

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And an extract from the article on the New Scientist:

I’m building a machine that breaks the rules of reality

We thought only fools messed with the cast-iron laws of thermodynamics – but quantum trickery is rewriting the rulebook, says physicist Vladko Vedral.

Martin Leon Barreto

By Vlatko Vedral

A FEW years ago, I had an idea that may sound a little crazy: I thought I could see a way to build an engine that works harder than the laws of physics allow.

You would be within your rights to baulk at this proposition. After all, the efficiency of engines is governed by thermodynamics, the most solid pillar of physics. This is one set of natural laws you don’t mess with.

Yet if I leave my office at the University of Oxford and stroll down the corridor, I can now see an engine that pays no heed to these laws. It is a machine of considerable power and intricacy, with green lasers and ions instead of oil and pistons. There is a long road ahead, but I believe contraptions like this one will shape the future of technology.

Better, more efficient computers would be just the start. The engine is also a harbinger of a new era in science. To build it, we have had to uncover a field called quantum thermodynamics, one set to retune our ideas about why life, the universe – everything, in fact – are the way they are.

Thermodynamics is the theory that describes the interplay between temperature, heat, energy and work. As such, it touches on pretty much everything, from your brain to your muscles, car engines to kitchen blenders, stars to quasars. It provides a base from which we can work out what sorts of things do and don’t happen in the universe. If you eat a burger, you must burn off the calories – or …

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