Through a quantum-switch experiment, researchers attempt to reveal “indefinite causal order”—a quantum phenomenon involving events in a before-and-after superposition.
Category: quantum physics
Scientists create a new state of matter at room temperature using light and nanostructures
Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) have created a new and unusual state of matter—known as a supersolid—by engineering how light and matter interact inside a nanoscale device. The work, published in Nature Nanotechnology, demonstrates that this exotic quantum phase can exist at room temperature, overcoming a long-standing limitation in the field.
Supersolids are unusual because they combine two seemingly incompatible properties: Like a solid, they form an ordered, crystal-like structure. At the same time, they behave like a fluid, meaning they can flow without resistance. Until now, such states have only been observed under extremely cold conditions, close to absolute zero.
“Our work shows that you can create and control this exotic state using light,” said Wei Bao, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at RPI and senior author of the study. “What’s especially exciting is that it happens at room temperature, in a platform that can be engineered and potentially scaled.”
Scientists used 7,000 GPUs to simulate a tiny quantum chip in extreme detail
Researchers have pushed quantum chip design into a new era by simulating every physical detail before fabrication. Using a supercomputer with nearly 7,000 GPUs, they modeled how signals travel and interact inside an ultra-tiny chip. Unlike earlier “black box” approaches, this method captures real materials, layouts, and qubit behavior. The result is a powerful new way to spot problems early and build better quantum hardware faster.
CERN Discovers New Particle After Upgrading Large Hadron Collider
The Large Hadron Collider has discovered a new particle, the 80th identified so far by the world’s most powerful particle smasher, Europe’s CERN physics laboratory announced Tuesday.
The new particle has been named “Xi-cc-plus”
Scientists hope the particle – which is similar to a proton but four times heavier – will reveal more about the strange behaviour of quantum mechanics.
Are Faster-Than-Light Messages Already Reaching Us?
What if the universe is already sending messages faster than light… and humanity has been too primitive to recognize them?
In this episode of Divergent Files, we investigate one of the most disturbing possibilities in modern physics: that information may already be moving beyond the speed limit we were taught could never be broken.
Quantum entanglement. Nonlocality. Unexplained cosmic bursts. Declassified research into remote viewing, anomalous cognition, and consciousness. Different fields. Different languages. Same uncomfortable pattern.
Something may be traveling farther, faster, and stranger than our current models can fully explain.
This is not a claim of proof.
It’s a grounded investigation into the science, the anomalies, and the classified edges of research that all point toward the same question:
💡 We talk about the past as if it’s gone forever — erased, unreachable, finished
But according to Richard Feynman and the laws of physics, that intuition is deeply misleading.
At the fundamental level, the equations that describe reality don’t care which way time flows. The same mathematics behind Quantum Electrodynamics — the most precisely tested theory in science — work just as well forward in time as they do backward.
In this video, we explore why the past may not be as “gone” as it feels.
🎥 *In this video, we explore:*
→ Why the laws of physics don’t distinguish past from future
→ How particles can be treated as moving backward in time in calculations
→ What time symmetry really means — and what it doesn’t
→ Why our experience of time is not fundamental
→ How Feynman explained time without mysticism.
This isn’t philosophy or speculation.
This is how physicists actually calculate the universe.
📚 *Based on the work of:*
Perovskite crystals can host qubits, challenging long-held assumptions
For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that the properties of the perovskite family of materials can be used to create so-called quantum bits. The findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, pave the way for more affordable materials in future quantum computers.
According to the researchers from Linköping University, Sweden, behind the study, few within the field believed it would be possible. The reason is that the atoms in perovskite materials should, in theory, interact so strongly that the qubit would collapse before the calculation could be completed. However, the experiments conducted by the Linköping team show that it works.
“Our findings open up an entirely new research field,” says Yuttapoom Puttisong, associate professor at Linköping University.
Consciousness is the hidden architecture behind fundamental and quantum physics
Physics and phenomenology are usually taken to inhabit different worlds. Physics aims at a description of objective reality in mathematical terms. Phenomenology—the philosophical movement inaugurated by Edmund Husserl—is an a priori investigation into consciousness and into the ways things appear in experience. Physics deals with equations, invariants, and symmetries, aiming to represent reality minus observers; phenomenology seems to concern precisely what physics leaves out: subjectivity, consciousness, meaning. If the two meet at all, it is only in polite, but ultimately inconsequential, interdisciplinary dialogue.
My claim is that this picture is mistaken. Physics does not stand outside phenomenology. It presupposes the very structures phenomenology seeks to analyse—above all, the structured correlation between subject and object through which objectivity first becomes intelligible. The task, therefore, is not to unite two distant domains, but to recognize a relation that has been there from the beginning.
To make this more tangible, consider what physics means by objectivity. Contrary to the image sometimes promoted in popular science—objectivity as detachment from all observers—in spacetime physics, objectivity is defined by invariance across observers. A physical description is deemed objective if it holds regardless of the coordinate frame in which it is expressed.
Was William James Right About Consciousness?
Dr. Nicolas Rouleau is a neuroscientist, bioengineer, and Assistant Professor of Health Sciences at Wilfrid Laurier University. He wrote the award-winning essay, ‘An Immortal Stream of Consciousness: The scientific evidence for the survival of consciousness after permanent bodily death,’ in which he argues that the transmissive theory of consciousness may actually be more consistent with emerging scientific insights than the dominant assumption that the brain generates consciousness.
In this conversation with Hans Busstra, Rouleau shares the main arguments from his essay, which touch upon his collaboration with Dr. Michael Persinger, the inventor of the ‘God Helmet,’ and his work with Michael Levin on ‘mind blindness’—the idea that science may be searching for mind in too restricted a place by focusing almost exclusively on neurons.
More information on Dr. Nic Rouleau:
https://www.wlu.ca/academics/facultie… website: https://www.rouleaulab.com/ Further reading and scientific references discussed in this video: Rouleau’s BICS Essay: ‘An Immortal Stream of Consciousness: The scientific evidence for the survival of consciousness after permanent bodily death.’ https://www.bigelowinstitute.org/inde… Rouleau, N., Levin, M., et al. (2025) (Preprint; forthcoming in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society). Brains and Where Else? Mapping Theories of Consciousness to Unconventional Embodiments. https://tinyurl.com/439rrn8z Rouleau, N., & Levin, M. (2023). The Multiple Realizability of Sentience in Living Systems and Beyond. eNeuro, 10(11). https://tinyurl.com/2s4bdtmm Rouleau, N. & Cimino, N. (2022). A Transmissive Theory of Brain Function: Implications for Health, Disease, and Consciousness. NeuroSci, 3. https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4087/3/3/32 McCraty, R., et al. (2018). Long-term study of heart rate variability responses to changes in the solar and geomagnetic environment. https://tinyurl.com/254x3b9t Rouleau, N., & Persinger, M. A. (2016). Differential responsiveness of the right parahippocampal region to electrical stimulation in fixed human brains: Implications for historical surgical stimulation studies. Epilepsy & Behavior, 60181–186. https://tinyurl.com/uc5jbr Rajaram, M., & Mitra, S. (1981). Correlation between convulsive seizure and geomagnetic activity. Neuroscience Letters, 24, 187–191. https://tinyurl.com/3snrs4cs Chapters 0:00 Introduction 4:00 What Nic Rouleau would say to William James about his theory of transmissive consciousness 7:14 What do we know empirically about how electromagnetic fields influence our brains? 10:27 How scientifically rigorous are the empirical data on the influence of the Earth’s magnetic field on brains? 11:35 On Nic’s mentor, Dr. Michael Persinger, the inventor of the God Helmet 14:42 Research on post-mortem brain tissue 18:09 What mental states are influenced by magnetic fields? 18:58 Electromagnetic effects in dead vs. living brains 19:45 On Michael Levin and the paradigm shift due to bioelectricity 21:24 Influencing the thoughts of deceased people 25:33 Are biological forms stored in the Earth’s magnetic field? 30:21 Shielding brains from electromagnetic fields 33:12 Mind blindness: we only see 1% of the minds out there 38:55 What is the best way out of mind blindness? 41:06 Plant-based computation 42:00 The Self-Organizing Units Lab (SOUL) and what Nic is working on 43:23 Minds in a Petri dish 46:13 What counts as embodiment? 48:44 Phenomenal consciousness on different levels 53:06 What theories of consciousness can get us out of the behaviorist trap? 57:25 Nic’s award-winning essay on consciousness beyond death 1:00:55 Intermediary states of consciousness, the Bardo Thodol 1:04:46 Consciousness when the radio, the brain, is completely broken 1:06:35 Why exactly is electromagnetism a better explanation of consciousness beyond death than NDEs or OBEs? 1:11:58 How does the God Helmet work? 1:17:31 Which electromagnetic fields influence our consciousness and which ones don’t? 1:23:59 Can all of consciousness be stored in the Earth’s magnetic field? 1:27:08 Children with past-life memories: could electromagnetism play a role there? 1:29:51 How do quantum theories of consciousness relate to the work of Nic? 1:33:42 Do our brains connect electromagnetically with each other? 1:35:28 Nic on the hard problem of consciousness 1:38:00 Aren’t you just a materialist 2.0? 1:40:25 On the meaning of Nic’s work Copyright © 2026 Essentia Foundation. All rights on interview content reserved.
Personal website: https://www.rouleaulab.com/
Further reading and scientific references discussed in this video:
Rouleau’s BICS Essay: ‘An Immortal Stream of Consciousness: The scientific evidence for the survival of consciousness after permanent bodily death.’ https://www.bigelowinstitute.org/inde…
Rouleau, N., Levin, M., et al. (2025) (Preprint; forthcoming in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society). Brains and Where Else? Mapping Theories of Consciousness to Unconventional Embodiments. https://tinyurl.com/439rrn8z.
Spin Supercurrents in Superconducting Altermagnets
Materials from a new class of magnets could host permanent dissipationless spin currents when they enter a superconducting state.
Superconductors are famous for transporting electric charge with zero resistance. This ability underpins technologies such as MRI scanners, quantum computers, and sensitive magnetometers known as superconducting quantum interference devices. However, in the field of spintronics—which seeks to process information using electron spin rather than charge—achieving a similar long-range dissipationless transport has remained elusive. In ordinary metals, electron spins are highly susceptible to scattering and spin-orbit coupling, both of which cause spin currents to decay over short distances. Although research in superconducting spintronics based on ferromagnets has made progress [1, 2], ferromagnets produce stray magnetic fields that interfere with external circuit elements, and their internal magnetic fields tend to destroy superconductivity.