A Canadian company that claims to have built the world’s first marketable “quantum computer” – a hyper-fast data processor touted by the firm’s founder as potentially “the most significant invention of our generation” – has the high-tech community buzzing ahead of a scheduled unveiling next week in California.

D-Wave Systems, the Burnaby, B.C.-based hardware developer headed by 34-year-old theoretical physicist Geordie Rose, has issued an open invitation to all technophiles to become “an eyewitness to history” at the live-link, Feb. 13 launch of the company’s “16-qubit” Orion supercomputer.

Full Story: Canada.com (thanks Jasper!).

The standard big bang theory says the universe began with a massive explosion, but the new theory suggests it is a cyclic event that consists of repeating big bangs.

“People have inferred that time began then, but there really wasn’t any reason for that inference,” said Neil Turok, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge, “What we are proposing is very radical. It’s saying there was time before the big bang.”

Under his theory, published today in the journal Science with Paul Steinhardt at Princeton University in New Jersey, the universe must be at least a trillion years old with many big bangs happening before our own. With each bang, the theory predicts that matter keeps on expanding and dissipating into infinite space before another horrendous blast of radiation and matter replenishes it. “I think it is much more likely to be far older than a trillion years though,” said Prof Turok. “There doesn’t have to be a beginning of time. According to our theory, the universe may be infinitely old and infinitely large.”

Full Story: The Guardian.

From Wikipedia:

The Pauli Effect refers the mysterious failure of technical equipment in the presence of certain people, particularly theoretical physicists. It is named after the famous theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli.

Link (via Invisible College).