III. Ecosmos: A Revolutionary Fertile, Habitable, Solar-Bioplanet, Incubator Lifescape

1. Quantum Cosmology Theoretic Unity

Wood, Charlie. The Physicist Who Glues Together Universes. Quanta. May 25, 2023. The science writer travels to the Netherlands to post a profile of Renate Loll’s visionary cosmologies (search). Her career spans the 21st century with stints at MPI Gravitational Physics, Perimeter Institute, and now Radboud University. For example, with Jan Ambjorn, et al, she was coauthor of The Self-Organizing Quantum Universe in Scientific American (July 2008, herein). Some recent papers are Measuring the Homogeneity of the Quantum Universe (arXiv:2302.10256) and Quantum Gravity in 30 Questions (2206.0676, herein). As the quotes allude, a surmise so far is that “our universe” (as a multiverse enters popular culture) can be found to have a mathematical legitimacy as it forms from myriad digital equations. Into the 2020s, a quantum cosmos seems truly self-organizing in its deepest, inherent essence.

Renate Loll has helped pioneer a radically new approach to quantum gravity. She assumes that the fabric of space-time is a blend of all possible fabrics, and she has lately developed the computational tools needed to calculate the far-reaching implications of that assumption. In regard, Loll and her collaborators have spent over two decades approximating reality using patterns of digital triangles. Their theory, known as causal dynamical triangulations, has shown that if you blend a multitude of possible universes together, you can produce a cosmos that looks a lot like ours. The triangles give us a way of getting a handle on that process.

Zaletel, Michael, et al. Colloquium: Quantum and Classical Discrete Time Crystals.. arXiv:2305.08904. A latest report by UC Berkeley, Harvard, Duke, UC Santa Barbara, and MIT. (Frank Wilczek, original conceiver) from this study group another of nature’s substantial features gain a familiar presence and practical usage.

The spontaneous breaking of time translation symmetry has revealed a new phase of matter - the discrete time crystal. They are unique materials which exhibit subharmonic oscillations due to many-body interactions, collective synchronization, and ergodicity breaking. In this Colloquium reviews recent studies of their phenomenal phases. For example, there exists a diverse array of strategies to stabilize time crystalline order in both closed and open systems from localization and prethermalization to dissipation and error correction. Many-body quantum simulators provide a natural platform for investigating signatures of time crystalline order, trapped ions, solid-state spin systems, and superconducting qubits. (Excerpt)

Zwierlein, Martin. Shock Cooling a Universe. Nature Physics. 9/10, 2013. The director of the MIT Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms describes how the cosmos kick started itself. The author’s work has also been a segment for the May 2014 Nova TV program Making Stuff Colder which features new ways to get within nano-Kelvin degrees of absolute zero. This laboratory state was said to be colder than outer space. Who then are we phenomenal peoples that can do things the universe can’t?

Rapid cooling across a phase transition leaves behind defects; from domain walls in magnets to cosmic strings. The Kibble–Zurek mechanism that describes this formation of defects is seen at work in the spontaneous creation of solitons in an atomic Bose–Einstein condensate.

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