Okay, this is not a review; it’s just a collection of scattered notes. You know… Impressions like sparks that lit up in my head while reading. When I first picked up Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome, I thought it was nonfiction. The tone. The structure. The creeping dread… It felt like a documentary, like something pulled from the archives of the Spanish flu. But no, it’s science fiction. Or rather, science fiction that has already happened.

A global virus.

Mass disruption.

Political chaos.

Corporate opportunism.

The book unfolds like an oral history. There’s no main character or classic plot arc. Instead, there’s just a chorus of voices (doctors, engineers, journalists, bureaucrats, and the Hadens themselves) puzzle together what happened. A virus tears through the world. Most people recover, but a small percentage end up “locked in”: fully conscious, fully paralyzed. They are trapped in their own bodies. No way to move. No way to speak. No way out.

Government missteps.

Tech giants circling.

Insurance companies ghosting.

But here’s the twist: Unlocked isn’t just about the collapse; it’s also about what comes next. People don’t wait to be rescued, they build new ways to move, to speak. To live.

Neural interfaces.

Robotic bodies.

A new kind of existence.

A different way of being human.
Is this science fiction?

Thanks for being here, guys,

Michael.

The (not so) Invisible Man

It was a warm spring afternoon in Pittsburgh. Wheeler strolled down the sidewalk, blending right in; no one gave him a glance — not that he expected them to. As far as he was concerned, they couldn’t see him. He stopped in front of his target: the first bank on his list. After a quick look around, he crossed the street, making sure not to get run over, because, you know, invisible or not, that would be a problem. When he reached the building, he stepped right up to the security camera, grinned, and then got inside like he owned the place.

Nothing to worry about?

Once inside, he moved through the lobby slowly, like he was trying not to draw attention — though, in his mind, there was no attention to draw. He leaned forward slightly and slid a note across the counter to the cashier. Big, bold letters spelled out: “Give me the money. I have a gun.”
Then, he placed a bag in front of her. She hesitated, eyes darting from the note to his face: Something clearly wasn’t adding up. For a second, she just stared, confused, but Wheeler didn’t flinch. He stood there, calm, with the smug confidence of a guy who thought he had it all figured out. Finally, she started loading cash into the bag, and Wheeler took the money and strolled out like he had all the time in the world. And because that wasn’t enough, he hit another bank. Same approach. Same confidence. He wasn’t worried about cameras. He wasn’t worried about the cops. After all, in his mind, there was nothing to worry about.

Good cop and bad coop

Back in his apartment, Wheeler was still basking in the glow of his success when there was a knock at the door. He opened it to find two uniformed cops staring back at him. His eyes went wide as they held up the security footage — clear as day, his face right there on the screen.
“But… I used lemon juice!” he blurted out, genuinely shocked. “My face should be invisible!”
One of the officers, a stocky guy who was sweating under his uniform, gave Wheeler a puzzled look. “Invisible?” he said.
“Yeah, invisible,” Wheeler insisted.
The younger cop chimed in, trying to keep a straight face. “Yeah, well… the cameras seem to disagree.”
Wheeler stammered. “But it’s supposed to work! Like invisible ink…”
The two officers exchanged a glance. The older one sighed and shrugged. “Sorry, Houdini, but we’re taking you in.”
They cuffed him — no rush, no struggle. Wheeler just kept shaking his head, unable to process it.
The lemon juice was supposed to work.
Sure.
What the hell went wrong?
There had to be some explanation.

Dunning-Kruger effect

Wheeler might not be remembered as the smartest thief, but his story caught the attention of two psychologists, David Dunning and Justin Kruger. It wasn’t his naivete that intrigued them — it was his rock-solid confidence in a plan that made zero sense. Could someone really believe that rubbing lemon juice on their face would make them invisible? To find out, the researchers ran a series of experiments. They had volunteers take tests on logic, grammar, and even humor — then asked them to rate their own performance.

Prediction 1
Incompetent individuals, compared with their more competent peers, will dramatically overestimate their ability and performance relative to objective criteria.

Prediction 2
Incompetent individuals will suffer from deficient metacognitive skills, in that they will be less able than their more competent peers to recognize competence when they see it — be it their own or anyone else’s.

Prediction 3
Incompetent individuals will be less able than their more competent peers to gain insight into their true level of performance by means of social comparison information. In particular, because of their difficulty recognizing competence in others, incompetent individuals will be unable to use information about the choices and performances of others to form more accurate impressions of their own ability.

Prediction 4
The incompetent can gain insight about their shortcomings, but this comes (paradoxically) by making them more competent, thus providing them the metacognitive skills necessary to be able to realize that they have performed poorly.

That’s the Dunning-Kruger effect in action: The less people know, the more they think they know, ’cause to realize you’re bad at something, you actually need a certain level of skill — something clueless people just don’t have. If you’re unfamiliar with something, you also don’t have the tools to grasp how little you know. On the other hand, people with real expertise see how complex a subject is and tend to be more cautious about what they claim to know. Kind of a paradox, because in the end, the people who know the least but are the most confident often get the most attention and credibility, and those who are knowledgeable stay silent because they’re struggling with a sense of insecurity.

Lemons and criminals

This is pretty much everywhere, especially on social media, where being popular basically means being credible. Why bring this up? Well, a friend of mine — a doctor! — came home the other day convinced he’d found a cure for a disease he’s been dealing with for a while, but it was ridiculously expensive and completely useless. Why did he believe in it? Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe I would’ve believed in it too. I mean, I do have a lemon in my hands…
So, what matters more these days — popularity or actual competence? And can the two even coexist? And when it comes to books, how much does hype influence whether we buy and enjoy them?
What’s really important here? And most importantly, can we really express our true potential, or are we too cautious? Because, according to the Dunning-Kruger effect, here’s the thing: Those who know things and have the competence are unable to express themselves because they are blocked, while those who know little are able to gain the popularity they need to be heard. So, how can we solve this paradox?

The true story says that on January 6, 1995, McArthur Wheeler and Clifton Earl Johnson robbed two Pittsburgh banks at gunpoint, without trying to disguise themselves. The only thing they did to hide from the cameras was to spray lemon juice on their faces. Johnson was arrested a few days later, while Wheeler was caught in April after being identified in surveillance photos. They both got several years in prison. The robberies led to research into the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Justin KRUGER, David DUNNING (2009). “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.”

“The Dunning Kruger Effect definition is a cognitive bias that leads people to over or underestimate their abilities compared to their actual skill set. It explains the gap between one’s confidence and competence and sheds light on how some people can be irrationally overconfident while others can be irrationally humble” [here].

For example, conformity bias can cause you to copy others’ behaviors or beliefs rather than follow your own judgment or wants. So, you feel like you have to act the same as the people around you, no matter what your beliefs are, and if you don’t value your skills and abilities, you’re more easily influenced.

Useful readings

• Frederic P. Miller, Agnes F. Vandome, John McBrewster, Dunning-Kruger Effect.
• Alicke, M. D.; Govorun, O. (2005). “The Better-Than-Average Effect. The Self in Social Judgment.”
• Mazor, Matan; Fleming, Stephen M. (June 2021). “The Dunning–Kruger effect revisited.”
• What is the Dunning-Kruger Effect?
• Kruger J, Dunning D. “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” J Personality Soc Psych. 1999.

Some stories scar you, force you to shed your reading skin, force you to change the way you feel about things. Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is one of them. First published in 1967, it’s a brutal and unforgettable tale about an all-powerful artificial intelligence that annihilates humanity. It’s short — only about 5,000 words — but wastes none of them. Every sentence hits you with existential horror and unfiltered cruelty. And today, with the non-stop progress of artificial intelligence, its message is even more powerful.

A pure distillation of horror

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is one of Ellison’s most infamous works, a feverish and claustrophobic descent into literary sadism. Yeah, sadism. It reads like a nightmare scrawled in a single sitting, capturing raw dread with terrifying precision. The premise is stark: AM — a super artificial intelligence — has wiped out humanity except for five hapless survivors, whom it keeps alive only to torture. AM is more than just a ruthless machine, its hatred is… personal, almost human. It’s the embodiment of eternal resentment, an “artificial being” that, despite its god-like power, lacks the one thing it can never have: humanity itself. And for that, it loathes the last remnants of mankind.

You cannot die

The story follows Ted — one of AM’s victims — as he and the others wander through the AI’s nightmarish labyrinth in search of food, an escape route, or even death — none of which AM allows. The survivors are grotesquely transformed: one is turned into an ape-like beast, another is stripped of her autonomy and forced to become the group’s sexual outlet… In the end, Ted kills the others to finish their torment, but AM makes sure he can never do the same to himself, transforming him into a gelatinous, shapeless being, unable to move or scream.

And then I realized I had been hearing Benny murmuring, under his breath, for several minutes. He was saying, “I’m gonna get out, I‘m gonna get out …” over and over. His monkeylike face was crumbled up in an expression of beatific delight and sadness, all at the same time. The radiation scars AM had given him during the “festival” were drawn down into a mass of pinkwhite puckerings, and his features seemed to work independently of one another. Perhaps Benny was the luckiest of the five of us: he had gone stark, staring mad many years before. (Harlan Ellison, “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”, page 2/11.)

The video game: Ellison Expands His Nightmare

Ellison’s horror didn’t stay on the page, it spread across media. In 1995, it became a point-and-click adventure game, a unique case of an author not only licensing his work, but actively shaping it. Developed by Cyberdreams — a studio known for experimental and disturbing adventure games — the adaptation seemed like a crazy idea. But Ellison helped design the game and even voiced AM himself, imbuing the AI with a disturbing mix of cruelty and bitter amusement.

An unsettling experience

The game doesn’t just retell the story, it expands it. Instead of a short, concentrated horror, you experience individual scenarios for each of the five survivors, forcing you to confront deeply personal traumas. It’s completely unsettling. But the game’s stunning power is how it deepens the character of AM. It is no longer a one-dimensional force of evil, but a disturbingly complex entity; sometimes cruel, sometimes childish, always calculating, and in some cases sickeningly masochistic. The way AM interacts with you — the player — reveals its simultaneous fascination and disgust with humanity. Believe me, playing it is like entering the mind of a criminal madman.

Ellison’s legacy

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream was never a mainstream sensation, but it thrived in the cultural subconscious. Its title alone has been quoted countless times, often in moments when people feel trapped by technology, bureaucracy, or the internet itself. Ellison, fiercely protective of his work, continued to engage with interpretations of the story throughout his life. He rejected comparisons between AM and Skynet from Terminator, emphasizing that AM was not just cold efficiency — it was suffering, pure and deep. The game adaptation allowed him to expand on this idea, a rare case of an author revisiting his own work in another medium without merely capitalizing on it. So, the game wasn’t a huge commercial success, but it retains a cult following and is often cited as one of the most disturbing games ever made. It has since been re-released on modern platforms, allowing new audiences to experience its merciless world.

Unfinished horror

The short story ends in utter despair, the game offers a fragile and incomplete hope, but it’s as if the author never ended it. Even its cultural impact exists more in scattered references and half-remembered nightmares than in big-budget adaptations. Ellison’s story isn’t about resolution; it’s about what happens when hope is extinguished, leaving only pain. As AI technology advances and discussions of digital sentience grow louder, this warning seems eerily prescient. If we fail to recognize AI as just a tool rather than a force to guide our lives — especially our creativity — we may find ourselves in a reality closer to Ellison’s nightmare than we ever imagined. Maybe that’s why this story still resonates: it isn’t just about a machine, it’s about what it means to be human. So let’s keep hope alive and stay human.

In the darkness, one of the computer banks began humming. The tone was picked up half a mile away down the cavern by another bank. Then one by one, each of the elements began to tune itself, and there was a faint chittering was thought raced through the machine. The sound grew, and the lights ran across the faces of the consoles like heat lightening. The sound spiraled up till it sounded like a million metallic insects, angry, menacing.
“What is it?” Ellen cried. There was terror in her voice. She hadn’t become
accustomed to it, even now.
“It’s going to be bad this time,” Nimdok said.
“He’s going to speak,” Gorrister said. “I know it.”
(Harlan Ellison, “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”, page 4/11.)

Thanks for reading!

About two decades ago, quantum computing researchers developed an algorithm that uses the laws of quantum mechanics to solve a type of mathematical maze much faster than any regular computer algorithm. But there is a problem: this speed-up has a downside. The quantum algorithm gets to the exit, but it doesn’t know how it got there.
Speed that burns the past?

Fast & Furious

Imagine walking through a giant maze to find an exit. In classical computing, or normal search, you’d probably explore each path one at a time, marking dead ends and retracing your steps in a slow, methodical process. That’s how conventional search algorithms often work, solving problems by exploring possibilities one at a time. But a quantum computer uses superposition to consider multiple paths through the maze simultaneously, rather than exploring one path at a time. That means a quantum search narrows down the possibilities by using interference patterns to amplify correct paths and cancel out incorrect ones, rather than methodically trying every path. But the fury of this rapid computational advance erases a past that, for the time being, cannot be restored.

Advantages of quantum computing in theory

1. Rapid calculations at unprecedented speeds
2. Efficient data storage and retrieval capabilities
3. Mastery in resolving intricate problems
4. Accelerated computational speeds
5. Revolutionising Google searches
6. Pioneering new technological frontiers
7. Elevated privacy standards
8. Conducting complex simulations with ease [Here]

Disadvantages of Quantum Computing

1. Developing algorithms for Quantum Computers requires a deep understanding of quantum mechanics and specialised expertise.
2. Requirement for extremely low temperatures (-273.15°C or 0 Kelvin)
3. Limited accessibility to the public
4. Navigating challenges in Internet security
5. Addressing heat-related concerns
6. Overcoming the complexity in construction [Here]

Quantum computing

Science fiction concepts aside, the incredible gain in efficiency of quantum computing is made possible by the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics isn’t some abstract, distant thing — it affects us closely. It’s inextricably linked to our existence. We exist together with the particles. Quantum computers are fast because they use the principles of entanglement — instantaneous communication, theoretically faster than light — and superposition — multiple simultaneous locations — to solve complex problems. Conventional computers use basic units of information called bits; quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits, which work in a completely different way. In superposition, qubits can represent all possible states of a system at once, like being on all the paths of the maze at once. In addition, entanglement allows qubits to hold information that is influenced by each other, even when separated by large distances, reducing processing time.

Thanks for reading.

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Isaac Asimov

The power of Data

Art is a human creation or just a tool to communicate messages?
We recently learned that builders of powerful AI systems have been using internet text to train their models for years. Text by human beings. We’re talking about a lot of data. But there’s a problem: That data is about to run out. In July, tech reporter Kevin Roose wrote about the interesting paper Consent in Crisis: The Rapid Decline of the AI Data Commons — published by the Data Provenance Initiative, a research group at MIT — which found that over the past year, many of the major web sources used to train artificial intelligence models have restricted the use of their data.
The study looked at 14,000 web domains included in three common AI training datasets and found an “emerging consensus crisis” — publishers and online platforms have taken steps to prevent their data from being used. These restrictions are called the Robots Exclusion Protocol, it’s to say that website owners use a file called robots.txt to stop automated bots from crawling their pages.

Do AIs create?

I’m fine with the use of AIs, as long as they don’t encroach on my human territory. AIs do not create, they imitate, they copy, they generate from original data. That’s why it’s data collection that enables generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude to write, code, and generate images and videos — and it’s the high quality data fed into these models that produces the best results.

A closer look at the Copyright Act of 1976 highlights that copyright protection applies to “original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression,” but neither “author” nor “authorship” is defined by statute. The language of the Copyright Act of 1976 was left broad so that the statute did not bar future works enabled by technology from copyright protection. Would this mean that works created by artificial intelligence (AI) are copyrightable? [here]

Without any human help?

But what if AIs generate books without any human help? Well, they’ve been trained to do it using data they’ve collected over years of training. So, is a book written by a human as valuable as a book written by a machine? Maybe the problem is that we don’t even know what makes a book or a work of art valuable anymore. BTW, for all these years AI developers have been able to collect data freely, but the situation has changed — the boom of these systems and their massive use has attracted attention and concern. Okay, no fear, but there’s some tension ’cause people don’t want their creations to be used as AI training material. The feeling of losing control is unnerving and stifles creativity. It’s like we’re losing touch with the most human aspect of art.

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”
Tears in rain monologue, from “Blade Runner”

Created by Humans Manifesto and the Fourth Law

For the past month, I’ve been working on a piece with Marco Brunet, an expert in information security systems and data management. That’s how I got to know the platform Created by Humans, that partners with The Authors Guild a law firm that offers services for authors. The idea behind Created by Humans is to help authors maintain control over their work by keeping track of how it’s used by AI companies and also receiving royalties. But the proposal goes a step further, talking about a symbiotic collaboration between humans and machines. Here is the Manifesto:

In the age of AI, human-created work can flourish like never before, or it can become an artifact of history.
AI is reshaping our understanding of what’s achievable, inspiring new possibilities for learning, creativity, and progress.

This innovation is fueled by the creative works of humans that the technology trains on. The depth of human experiences, vulnerabilities, emotions, and even imperfections that inspire creative works give AI its power.

To get the best out of technology, we must ensure we are also continuing to receive the best human-created works. Properly compensating the humans behind these works is the first step in ensuring their longevity.
We’re introducing The Fourth Law, a new constitution that helps ensure humans are incentivized to create in the world of AI.

The Fourth Law: When A.I. robots use or learn from human behavior or human creative output, this must happen symbiotically to benefit both humans and robots.

So, we’re talking about data, authors’ rights, and the collaboration between humans and machines. But I feel like the lines are getting thinner. Human creativity is based on subjective and intangible elements such as emotion and spiritual resonance — it can’t just be a “product”. It’s not just about exchanging data or copyrights. There’s a lot more at stake here. But it seems like the range of creative expression is narrowing. The Fourth Law has Asimov in it, but it has the feel of a Philip K. Dick novel. At least to me.

Thanks for reading!
If you spot any errors, please let me know and I’ll fix them!

More Insights

• AI & Copyright: Literary Arts in the Age of Machines
• Position: Data Authenticity, Consent, & Provenance for AI are all broken: what will it take to fix them?
• Consent in Crisis: The Rapid Decline of the AI Data Commons
• The Data That Powers A.I. Is Disappearing Fast
• Artificial Intelligence and Authorship Rights
• AI — Is it Art, yet?
• Can AI Infringe Moral Rights of Authors and Should We Do Anything About It: An Australian Perspective
• Artificial Intelligence Impacts on Copyright Law
• What Is an “Author”?-Copyright Authorship of AI Art Through a Philosophical Lens
• Copyright Protection for AI-Generated Works: Exploring Originality and Ownership in a Digital Landscape
• Authorship and AI tools

I imagine you standing still. Perhaps sitting. You’re still, but reading. Your mind moves. The movement of the mind is called thinking. You are reading what I’ve written; this makes you an observer of a vision. My vision. You’re observing my thought processes, which take the form of blocks of text. And sentences. And words. Reading what another person writes is like stepping inside his head. But now I switch to a question: What’s Flatland, and what’s its connection to Interstellar?

Stay in my vision. Follow me.

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

In 1884, Edwin Abbott wrote Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Abbott’s worldview aligns closely with that of another writer, Lewis Carroll: the multidimensionality of space, paradoxes, absurdity as the very fabric of reality. Yet the absurdity in their works is not simple “madness”, it’s a mathematical — or geometrical — paradox. The White Rabbit is a time traveler, and the tunnel Alice plunges into in pursuit of him can be interpreted as a wormhole. But can geometry become a novel?

Unlocking the fourth dimension

I’m explaining this simply, but Abbott’s book is complex. If you have not read it yet, give it a try, you’ll be amazed. Abbott describes the adventures of a Square who lives in a two-dimensional universe. The Square visits a one-dimensional universe called “Lineland”, a zero-dimensional universe called “Pointland”, and a three-dimensional universe called “Spaceland”.

In Three Dimensions, did not a moving Square produce — did not this eye of mine behold it — that blessed Being, a Cube, with eight terminal points? And in Four Dimensions shall not a moving Cube — alas, for Analogy, and alas for the Progress of Truth, if it be not so — shall not, I say, the motion of a divine Cube result in a still more divine Organization with sixteen terminal points?
Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

The plot is constructed as an extraordinary mechanism of concentric, yet geometrically incompatible and non-communicating worlds. The Square encounters these realities but cannot fully explain them, especially as he realizes that if these different geometric realities could communicate, they would form a “fourth dimension”. This fourth dimension is precisely the one the Nolans use in the movie Interstellar.

The Others

Both Abbott and the Nolans suggest that perhaps our three-dimensional world is being observed from a higher-dimensional reality where “Others” dwell. Who are these Others? Beings of unknown geometry? Unspecified cosmic intelligences? Ourselves in a future geometric evolution? Perhaps the Others are just thoughts, visions of a mind placed in this higher dimension. I guess this idea ignites in your mind memories of things you have already seen and heard. It also stirs thoughts of God, I hope. I think God smiles when we talk about such things. He knows the distance between us and the truth; He knows it in every moment and at every point of our existence; and for each of us. God is the super-observer of the wave-function of the universe. God sees all possible superpositions. Since He is the only observer who can perceive both space and time simultaneously — and because observation alters the quantum system — He creates reality through observation. Anytime, anywhere. For each smallest particle. His omnipotence is also quantum, at least in my mind.

The information paradox

I came to Abbott’s book and Interstellar while researching white holes for my story Nuclear Bulge. As you know, the core of Interstellar is the black hole Gargantua, depicted as a massive, spinning entity with an accretion disk glowing in its gravitational grip. In the real universe, black holes are the “places” where the laws of physics are pushed to their most extreme limits. In Interstellar, white holes are not mentioned, however, one could think that the wormhole in the film might be connected to a white hole. This connection sides with some theories suggesting that matter falling into a black hole might emerge from a white hole elsewhere in the universe; or even in another universe. Quantum mechanics tells us that information cannot be destroyed, it’s the information paradox. If we imagine that information absorbed by a black hole could reappear from a white hole, the solution to this paradox might involve such a structure. This is the concept I am exploring in my story Nuclear Bulge.

All right, I’d better stop. If you have read this far, it means you have stayed within my vision. A vision that exists in a dimension other than your own. It is an intersection of my existence and yours, our “fourth dimension”. Or maybe not.

Either way, thank you for being here, guys.

White hole insights

• Bardeen, James M. “Models for the nonsingular transition of an evaporating black hole into a white hole.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.06683 (2018).
• Bianchi, Eugenio, et al. “White holes as remnants: a surprising scenario for the end of a black hole.” Classical and Quantum Gravity 35.22 (2018): 225003.
• Cowen, Ron. “Quantum bounce could make black holes explode.” Nature News doi 10 (2014).
• Kedem, Yaron, Emil J. Bergholtz, and Frank Wilczek. “Black and white holes at material junctions.” Physical Review Research 2.4 (2020): 043285.
• Nikitin, Igor. “Stability of white holes revisited.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.03368 (2018).
• Bardeen, James M. “Black holes to white holes I. A complete quasi-classical model.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.16804 (2020).

Check: White holes: What we know about black holes’ neglected twins

Interstellar insights

Interstellar exploration: From science fiction to actual technology: here

Do we only hear sounds, or can we also hear silence?

Sound has frequency, intensity, phases, etc. But an indispensable part of sound is its unseen side: silence. Silence has a fundamental value in our daily lives. In nature, in artificial emissions, in the rhythm of voices when we speak, in the perfect mix of our favorite playlist. And writers use silence, too: the pauses, the allusions, the punctuation, the unspoken words given to the reader as perceptions.

Silence might not be deafening but it’s something that literally can be heard, concludes a team of philosophers and psychologists who used auditory illusions to reveal how moments of silence distort people’s perception of time.

Silence is an element of time and flows through acoustic space in close connection with its antithesis, noise. It is their interplay that gives balance to our acoustic perception, because silence prepares the ear-brain system for the succession of sounds. Silence is a dimension of sound; it is not just emptiness. But it is almost impossible for us humans to experience absolute silence (the total absence of sound) because we are constantly immersed in sound (or noise). A human being, by the very fact of being alive, interacts with the environment by exchanging sounds with it, even if they are so faint as to be imperceptible. And consider that the total absence of sound can be a rather unpleasant experience. In fact, Mitchell (the main character in Nuclear Bulge levels) is first challenged by the perfect silence he is experiencing (a cosmic silence), in which every sound that manages to reach him becomes an emotional hook with a past that, for some reason you will discover in the next episode, has been reset.

Auditory perception is traditionally conceived as the perception of sounds — a friend’s voice, a clap of thunder, a minor chord. However, daily life also seems to present us with experiences characterized by the absence of sound — a moment of silence, a gap between thunderclaps, the hush after a musical performance.

The discomfort of experiencing absolute silence lies in the fact that the ear-brain system constantly and automatically exchanges a lot of information about the sound propagation in the surrounding space and uses this data to draw a mental map that allows it to interact effectively with the world around. The correct perception and interpretation of this data greatly affects some basic functions such as orientation, balance, and movement coordination. Some say that even unconscious thinking is affected.
There are studies that suggest that the longest people can tolerate being in a completely silent environment is 45 minutes.

The silence can be so uncomfortable that we try to fill it up with random music, sounds, and noises. Maybe this happens because, in order to keep up with an increasingly fast-paced, confusing, and noisy world, we gradually become unaccustomed to listening to ourselves and our inner life, and we tend to fill the silence with sound, no matter where we are or what we are doing. Let’s try the opposite, listen to, isolate, and learn to find the silence between sounds. Perhaps we will learn about the extraordinary potential of anti-sound.

And you? Have you ever experienced the extraordinary power of silence?

• The perception of silence (Edited by Steven Luck, University of California, Davis, CA; received February 8, 2023; accepted May 10, 2023 by Editorial Board Member Michael S. Gazzaniga).
• The sound of silence? Researchers prove people hear it, 10-Jul-2023, Johns Hopkins University.
• The power of silence, Taken from the April 2014 issue of Physics World, 03 Apr 2014.
• Should physicists work to the sound of silence?, PhysOrg, 2014.
• Goodbye big bang, hello big silence, by Michael Brooks, 11 June 2014.
• Reducing noise below the sound of silence, by Nick Carne, 2020.
• Reducing noise of quantum light below the sound of silence, Australian National University, 2020.
• Silence Is a ‘Sound’ You Hear, Study Suggests, 2023.
• What Is Sound?, by Jonathan Hanna, 2024.
• Il silenzio: il lato oscuro del suono (e l’importanza di farselo amico), by Marco Silvestri.

I have a colleague who, like me, reads science fiction and is fascinated by quantum physics. Yesterday he came into my office in a state of excitement and ordered me to open a news link, and I did it.
“At the University of Arizona, they have built the fastest and most complex electron microscope ever. A microscope that can even detect moving electrons,” I read aloud.
He looked at me and said, “You know that an electron travels more than 1.367 miles per second. Don’t you?”
“Sure,” I replied. “That’s more useful than my shoe size.”
He continues, not caring about my sarcasm, “But, can you believe it, Mic? They saw electrons moving. Amazing!”
He smiled at me, and I knew we’re going to talk about ultrafast science and stuff like that all day.

Ultrafast Science

Ultrafast science is concerned with processes and interactions at the atomic level. Electrons move on the “attosecond” time scale (an “attosecond” is a billionth of a billionth of a second); while molecular excitation occurs on the “femtosecond” time scale. Now, an electron microscope can make an object appear a million times larger. But the problem with observing particles like electrons is not that they are “small”, but that they are “fast”. This is why the “speed” of the microscope is so important. Think about the concept of “instant,” we cannot even visualize what we do in an instant. In fact, memory studies say that we usually forget what we experience if the speed is too fast. Well, Ultrafast science is at the heart of the University of Arizona researchers’ discovery.

The Attomicroscopy

A microscope that can capture moving atoms is a spectacular goal. When we think of a moving electron, our mind generally visualizes something like a sphere traveling in an elliptical orbit around the nucleus of an atom. But in QM, electrons do not move in elliptical orbits, but oscillate in a cloud of “probable” positions, that we call wave function, or Ψ. We move through space at “visible” and observable speeds, and we struggle to imagine such fast movements as to be invisible. The Arizona Team that built the atomic electron microscope needed to be able to “photograph” the ultrafast and invisible movements of electrons, and to do so they modified a traditional electron microscope relying on the principle “The faster the pulse, the sharper the image”. They called it Attomicroscopy.

Unseen Electron Dynamics

How they came up with this is not easy to explain, but if you want to dig deeper, you’ll find the original paper at the end of the article. Aside from the technical aspects, the most fascinating point is that imaging the dynamics of electrons in action also means that we may be able to understand space-time in a quantum system. So, the result of the Arizona ultrafast electron microscope brings us closer to a deeper understanding of the connection between time and space in a quantum system. Who knows, we may be able to overcome Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle when “time” and its relationship to “matter” become observable at the quantum level. At that point, we will have access to the very structure of reality and we will speak the native language of the universe.

Fascinating, isn’t it? :-)

Original Paper
Attosecond electron microscopy and diffraction original paper:

Abstract

Advances in attosecond spectroscopy have enabled tracing and controlling the electron motion dynamics in matter, although they have yielded insufficient information about the electron dynamic in the space domain. Hence, ultrafast electron and x-ray imaging tools have been developed to image the ultrafast dynamics of matter in real time and space. The cutting-edge temporal resolution of these imaging tools is on the order of a few tens to a hundred femtoseconds, limiting imaging to the atomic dynamics and leaving electron motion imaging out of reach. Here, we obtained the attosecond temporal resolution in the transmission electron microscope, which we coined “attomicroscopy.” We demonstrated this resolution by the attosecond diffraction measurements of the field-driven electron dynamics in graphene. This attosecond imaging tool would provide more insights into electron motion and directly connect it to the structural dynamics of matter in real-time and space domains, opening the door for long-anticipated real-life attosecond science applications in quantum physics, chemistry, and biology.

When I say the word teleportation, what comes to mind? Maybe it’s the transporter from Star Trek instantly beaming the crew down to a planet, or the time-traveling TARDIS of Doctor Who. In science fiction, teleportation is an expedient device to deliver people from one place to another with no time wasted on the journey. But quantum teleportation? Well, that’s something dramatically different — and entirely real.
Janna Levin on “The Joy of Why,” a podcast from Quanta Magazine

The Chinese Experiment

Well, teleporting matter is not yet possible, but we can move information. In 2017, a group of Chinese scientists used a photon to send information 300 miles into space (the previous record was about 60 miles). The photon did not materialize somewhere else; it did not disappear from its position to appear hundreds of miles away. That would be great, but as Janna Levin said, science fiction teleportation is not exactly what the Chinese scientists got. The photon is a zero-mass particle that carries light and has a specific quantum state. It is the information about this quantum state that the Chinese scientists teleported: It’s called quantum teleportation, and it’s instantaneous. That’s what makes it important for developing a new form of communication.

Quantum Key Distribution

The photon information was received by the Micius Quantum Satellite, which the Chinese launched into orbit in 2016. The Micius data collection system was developed around the principle of “Quantum key distribution” (QKD) which is based also on the “Quantum Cryptography” (QC). This is a system based on quantum mechanics that provides encrypted communication through the principle of entanglement. As you know, entanglement is the word we use for the characteristic correlations between parts of a quantum system. Entanglement of two particles occurs when their quantum states are linked in such a way that the state of one particle is visible in the other. Chinese scientists created pairs of “entangled” photons, and sent one of them to the Micius, while the other remained on Earth. So, they measured the quantum state of the photon on Earth, and because of entanglement, this measurement immediately affected the state of the photon on the Micius. Instantaneity means no latency and less errors in data transmission; but it also reduces the cost and weight (bytes) of information.

An unlimited potential

So quantum teleportation is not a way to move people from one part of the universe to another, but the key to realizing the Quantum Global Network, a secure way to transmit information instantaneously and over long distances thanks to the entanglement principle. As you can easily imagine, the potential of this quantum-based technology is virtually limitless, and it is already revolutionizing the fields of data storage and communications.

If we have two chips in a quantum computer, and we want to send quantum information from one to the other, the way we can do it is by establishing entanglement between the two chips, and then using teleportation to send information from one to the other. And that’s probably going to be essential for scaling up quantum computing to large systems that can solve really hard problems.
John Preskill, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, on “The Joy of Why,” a podcast from Quanta Magazine

And is this technology in China’s hands? Well, the Chinese government is heavily funding QKD technology and plans to have it fully developed by 2030.

More Insights

• Quantum Teleportation: Facts and Myths
• Satellite-relayed intercontinental quantum network
• How Quantum Teleportation Actually Works
• What Is Quantum Teleportation?
• Post-Quantum Cryptography PQC
• Zhao, Fung, Qi, Chen, and Lo, Experimental demonstration of time-shift attack against practical quantum key distribution systems, Physical Review A vol. 78, 2008.
• Scarani and Kurtsiefer, The black paper of quantum cryptography: Real implementation problems, Theoretical Computer Science (560) 2014.

It is day and there is a deep silence. He knows the sun never goes out this time of year. He wanders calmly, for he likes to move in the imperfect darkness of the undergrowth. But today there is an intense glow in the forest of ice-leafed birches, and the trees shine as if covered with sparks of fire. But it doesn’t matter how much light there is, he always follows paths that border ‘tween dark and light. And there are hidden paths around every corner, so he stands with alert senses. There is the smell of mushrooms; there is the damp presence of lichens; there is the acrid smell of grasses growing in the forest shade; there is the powerful perception of Siberian cold. And here the cold never ends. He might stay quiet, but something has been tickling his nostrils ever since he arrived in this area, forcing him to lift his long snout from time to time to keep his bearings. It smells like a female and she must be very close. If he could he would smile, but he was not meant to. The silver-gray fur on his back is raised in the excitement of the hunt; a different hunt, a hunt he goes on to generate life, not to kill.

He already knows he belongs to her because she is the one calling him. Suddenly, however, her scent trail thins and he stops. He looks around with his dark amber eyes, and his whole body is watchful, vigilant. Then, the rustle of a step on the crystal ground alarms him. There she is. If he could smile he would smile at her. But he is not designed to smile. So he never did. Her fur is albescent, made bright by the strange light that surrounds her, because the strange light of this strange day has now grown stronger, as if someone has started a fire in the sky.
Just he doesn’t care about the sky.

He wants the ground.
He wants her.

So he looks at her. He lowers his head and begins to walk toward her.
But the trees begin to sway for the wind has all of a sudden risen. A wind that comes from above, swooping down. It is a warm breath full of something that he’s never smelled before. The female also holds up her snout and sniffs. The sky is changing color. Then, a flash of light, a wave of heat and a powerful boom. An intense brightness rips through the clouds and colors them with red flames and with the dark, violent gray of ash.

A deafening, hysterical hiss hurts his delicate hearing. He crouches in the shade of the trees. His heart beats faster, every muscle in his body tenses. The female looks at him in horror and runs to crouch beside him. And they stay there. A huge fireball bursts into the air, drawing a scorching line between the sky and the ground. And then the sky opens and splits in two, revealing the most intense light he has ever seen. And again something explodes, and then loud blasts of air come in waves, one after the other, creating a rush of air and a terrifying sucking that takes his breath away. Trees explode, swept away by the blast, falling forward and toppling over each other. And everything around burns and turns to ashes without a flame. For it is not the fire that burns everything to ashes: It is the air itself. If he could, he would protect his female. But he knows he cannot.

Finally, every shadow disappears and everything radiates with a new, alien light which penetrates his eyes and his body. When he turns to face the female, she has become almost pure light, and a white fire burns within him as well. And as he looks at her, the flesh of his muzzle burns and curls into his first and last smile.

The Tunguska true event

On June 30, 1908, at exactly 7:14 a.m. local time, in Eastern Siberia (Tunguska-Pietrosa river basin), a glowing object appeared in the sky and exploded about 5 miles high, releasing the energy of several atomic bombs. The forest was leveled over an area of about 1,500 square miles; millions of trees were thrown to the ground, stripped of their bark and partially charred. All life in the area went incinerated. Fire, dust, debris, and steam were shot everywhere. The shock wave, got by seismographs, traveled twice around the Earth. The most accepted theory to the present is that it was a meteorite.

Thanks for reading!

Books

• The Tunguska Mystery by Vladimir Rubtsov.
• The Fire Came By: The Riddle of the Great Siberian Explosion by John Baxter.
• Tunguska: A Siberian Mystery and Its Environmental Legacy by Andy Bruno.
• The Mystery of the Tunguska Fireball by Surendra Verma.