A transistor made of wood, the benefit of cat memes, and more quantum headlines

This week's Science Bits from SWTG

A transistor made of wood

Image: Thor Balkhed

Scientists from Linköping University and the KTH in Sweden have created the world's first wooden transistor. They used balsa wood and removed its lignin, a substance that makes wood hard and rigid. Then, they filled the wood with a conductive polymer called PEDOT:PSS that is  semiconducting. The wood acts as a housing for the polymer, which can switch on and off by applying a voltage. The wooden transistor is slow and bulky compared to conventional transistors, but the researchers say it might have potential for future applications in biodegradable electronics. Press release here. Paper here. 

Cat memes are good for you, science say

Black Hole Cat. Source: Reddit

I’ve long suspected that the reason people like consuming news on Twitter is because it’s easier to cope with the status of the world with jokes and asides sliced in between. A study by researchers at the University of Essex has now put this to test. Study participants saw real reports and footage from major disasters and crime stories, as well as stories of kind acts and funny items. The researchers found that those who saw balanced bulletins had better moods, societal beliefs, and willingness to act for the benefit of society. They argue that balanced reporting can help people maintain a core belief that the world and the people in it are fundamentally good. So don’t hold back on the cat memes. Press release here. Paper here.

Yet another Bell-type test, yet another round of terrible headlines

Partial section of the 30-​metre-long quantum connection between two superconducting circuits used for this experiment. Image: ETH Zurich / Daniel Winkler

A group of researchers at ETH Zurich has done an entanglement measurement that demonstrates a violation of Bell inequalities. These tests have been done since the 1970s and it’s what the 2022 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for. There isn’t really anything new about their experiment, except that they used superconducting qubits that were more than 30 metres apart, and that they used 1.3 tonnes of copper and 14,000 screws for what is otherwise an undergrad experiment. Paper here.

The press release proclaims that this “disproves the concept of ‘local causality’ formulated by Albert Einstein in response to quantum mechanics.” Alas, local causality wasn’t formulated by Albert Einstein but by John Bell, and it can’t be disproved by Bell-type tests. To make matters worse, the popular science press then conflated local causality with entanglement, which is something else entirely and promptly proclaimed that Einstein was wrong. To top things off, an article that tried to set things right made it even worse by conflating local causality with Einstein’s relativity.

Here’s the correct version. A violation of Bell type tests shows that either the laws of nature are not locally causal, or they violate a condition known as statistical independence. Since Einstein’s relativity is locally causal, the reasonable conclusion to draw is that nature violates statistical independence. The latter has also been referred to as “superdeterminism,” though I find the word extremely misleading.

Yes, I know that most physicists would tell you otherwise. But give it a decade or so and they’ll understand what I say. You heard it here first…