Documentary Section The Problem With Walmart: The High Toll of Low Prices Oxycontin Express What we

Documentary Section The Problem cheap plain tickets With Walmart: The High Toll of Low Prices Oxycontin Express What we Still Don't Know Climate Wars I Lost My Job Time Wired: South Korea Culture in Decline: What Democracy? cheap plain tickets Currency Wars Culture in Decline: Economics 101
Let This Be A Warning America: cheap plain tickets When the Riots Start the Government's Response Will Be Brutal (Video) Front Air Traffic Grounded Over UFO in Israel Nobel Prize for Quantum Manipulation Opens Door to TRUE Supercomputers
Handout pictures of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Physics laureates Serge Haroche (L) of France and David Wineland of the U.S. seen during cheap plain tickets a news conference at the Royal Swedish Academy of Science in Stockholm, October 9, 2012. REUTERS/Scanpix
A French and an American scientist won the Nobel Prize on Tuesday for finding ways to measure quantum particles without destroying them, which could make it possible to build a new kind of computer far more powerful than any seen before.
Serge Haroche of France and American David Wineland, both 68, found ways to manipulate the very smallest particles of matter and light to observe strange cheap plain tickets behavior that previously could only be imagined in equations and thought experiments.
Wineland has described his own work as a parlor trick that performed cheap plain tickets the seemingly magical feat of putting an object in two places at once. Other scientists praised the achievements as bringing to life the wildest dreams of science fiction.
The Nobel laureates have opened the door to a new era of experimentation with quantum physics by demonstrating the direct observation of individual quantum particles without destroying them, said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awarded them the 8 million cheap plain tickets crown ($1.2 million) Nobel Prize in Physics.
I saw the area code 46, then I sat down, he told reporters in Sweden by telephone. First I called my children, then I called my closest colleagues, without whom I would never have won this prize, he said. Asked how he would celebrate, he said: I will have champagne, of course.
Physics is the second of this year s crop of awards; scientists from Britain and  Japan  shared the first prize on Monday, in medicine, for adult stem cell research. The prizes, which reward achievements in science, literature and peace, were first awarded in 1901 in accordance with the will of Swedish dynamite cheap plain tickets millionaire Alfred Nobel.
This year s Nobel Prize recognizes some of the most incredible experimental tests of the weirder aspects of quantum mechanics, cheap plain tickets said Jim Al-Khalili, professor of physics at the University of Surrey in Britain.
Until the last decade or two, some of these results were nothing more than ideas in science fiction cheap plain tickets or, at best, the wilder imaginations of quantum physicists. cheap plain tickets Wineland and Haroche and their teams have shown just how strange the quantum world really is and opened up the potential for new technologies cheap plain tickets undreamt of not so long ago.
Quantum physics studies the behavior of the fundamental building blocks of the universe at a scale smaller than atoms, when tiny particles act in strange ways that can only be described cheap plain tickets with advanced mathematics.
Researchers have long dreamt of building quantum computers that would operate using that mathematics able to conduct far more complicated calculations and hold vastly more data than classical computers. But they could only be built if the behavior of individual particles could be observed.
Single particles are not easily isolated from their surrounding cheap plain tickets environment, and they lose their mysterious quantum properties as soon as they interact with the outside cheap plain tickets world, cheap plain tickets the Nobel committee explained.
Through their ingenious laboratory methods Haroche and Wineland, together with their research groups, have managed to measure and control cheap plain tickets very fragile quantum states, which were previously thought inaccessible for direct observation. The new methods allow them to examine, control and count the particles.
Both scientists work in the field of quantum optics, studying the fundamental interactions between light and matter. The Nobel committee said they used opposite approaches to the same problem: Wineland uses light particles or photons to measure and control particles of matter electrons while Haroche uses electrons to control and measure photons.
In one of the strange properties of quantum mechanics, tiny particles act as if they are simultaneously in two locations, based on the likelihood that they would be found at either, known as a superposition .
It was long thought that it would be impossible to demonstrate this in a lab. But Wineland s parlor trick was to hit an atom with laser light, which according cheap plain tickets to quantum theory would have a 50 percent cheap plain tickets chance cheap plain tickets of moving it, and observe the atom at two different cheap plain tickets locations, 80 billionths of a meter apart.
In a normal computer, a switch must either be on or off. A quantum computer would work with switches that, like the particles in Wineland s experiment, behaved as if they were in more than one position at the same time.
An example is a computer trying to work out the shortest route around town for a travelling salesman. cheap plain tickets A traditional computer might try every possible route and then choose the shortest. A quantum computer could do the calculation in one step, as if the salesman travelled each route simultaneously.