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The Future of Physics: Portals to a New Reality
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In this conversation, Dr.Vlatko Vedral discusses the complexities of quantum mechanics and its implications for our understanding of reality. He explores the stagnation in physics, the importance of thought experiments, and the potential for new discoveries through technological advancements. Vlatko emphasizes the need for adventurous research and the role of quantum information in shaping future scientific inquiries. He also speculates on the transformative possibilities of quantum technologies and their impact on human perception.
Takeaways
- Quantum mechanics challenges our understanding of reality.
- The observer effect is central to quantum mechanics.
- Physics has been stagnant with two main theories for over a century.
- Technological advancements are paving the way for new experiments.
- Thought experiments can guide genuine scientific discovery.
- The integration of quantum mechanics and general relativity is crucial.
- Quantum information theory expands our understanding of computation.
- New theories may emerge from the intersection of quantum mechanics and technology.
- The perception of reality may evolve with quantum technologies.
- Funding and research approaches need to be more adventurous.
Chapters
- 00:00 Exploring Quantum Reality
- 04:48 The Stagnation of Physics
- 08:41 The Clouds of Uncertainty
- 12:46 Thought Experiments and Their Power
- 16:01 Five Experiments for the Future
- 24:54 Technological Feasibility of Experiments
- 28:27 Quantum Theory and Its Foundations
- 34:08 The Role of Quantum Information
- 39:35 Imagining New Realities Through Portals
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Transcript
Introduction to the Quantum-Relativity Tension
00:00:00
Speaker
For more than 100 years, physics has lived in this beautiful kind of tension. On one side, general relativity explains the universe on its grandest scales, gravity, space, and time. Now, on the other hand, quantum mechanics governs the microscopic world.
00:00:18
Speaker
Probabilities, entanglement, and uncertainty. uncertainty. And yet, two theories both dazzling, both true. And yet, they don't quite
Meet Dr. Vlatko Vidral: Quantum Revolution Advocate
00:00:26
Speaker
fit together. Welcome back to Breaking Math. I'm your host, Autumn Finaf. And today, I'm speaking with Dr. Vlatko Vidral, quantum physicist and author of Portals to a New Reality, who believes that physics is about to undergo its next great revolution, not because of contradictions, but because of possibilities.
00:00:45
Speaker
Vlatko, thank you for coming on the show, and welcome to Breaking Math. How are you doing today? Hi. Very well. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Now, looking at your book, you had one question in there and a couple statements. There's one thing that I have to ask. This gets really deep for quantum mechanics and quantum theory, and you stated the world exists only when it is not observed.
00:01:12
Speaker
What does that mean? It's a great question, actually, and it it gets to the heart of my view of quantum mechanics. um So let me explain a little bit more. People frequently talk about quantum and classical mechanics in the following way. They would say...
00:01:31
Speaker
ah In classical mechanics, Newtonian mechanics, the pre-quantum mechanics, things existed independently of us making observations. So basically, if you measure ah a position of an object or the speed of an object, that object still has exactly the same position and the speed before and after your measurement.
00:01:52
Speaker
Now, interestingly, in quantum mechanics, and that's the way that you will hear most of the presentations actually speak about it, people say, well, things in quantum mechanics don't exist before you actually have made a measurement to find out what the true value for the position or for the velocity of an object is.
00:02:14
Speaker
And that sounds a little bit like what Bishop Berkeley said very famously, you know, he said, if a tree falls in a forest, but there is no one there to observe that or to hear that, to hear the sound, did it really fall?
Quantum vs. Classical Mechanics: The Great Divide
00:02:29
Speaker
um and And that was, you know, he was one of the biggest proponents of of the philosophy of idealism, that ultimately it's all in our head, really, and things don't exist independently of our own observation.
00:02:42
Speaker
So I wanted to negate that. I actually thought that what quantum mechanics is telling us is the exact opposite of Bishop Barclay. And I don't think anyone ever said that. So but the opposite of this would be that, in fact, the full world in the full quantum capacity only exists when we don't observe it. It's the exact opposite, I think, of this statement. And so what do I mean by that?
00:03:06
Speaker
What I mean by that is that... this gets us to this really weird nature of quantum reality. So that actually in quantum mechanics, things like a position of an object or the speed of an object or any property you can hear, energy of of that object, we don't represent them by ordinary numbers, by real numbers. So we don't we don't say position of the object is five meters away from me.
00:03:32
Speaker
What we use is what I called in my book, quantum numbers. It's the language that Dirac used. And these quantum numbers are really weird because you can think of them in mathematics as matrices. They are really tables of numbers. There are many numbers, all given at the same time.
00:03:50
Speaker
And each property in quantum mechanics has this multitude of numbers associated with that. So one of the striking consequences, and that's what Heisenberg discovered exactly 100 years ago, actually,
00:04:03
Speaker
is that if you assign this quantum number to your position, and if you assign another one to your velocity, you will not be able to measure these properties at the same time.
00:04:15
Speaker
In other words, if you first measure the position and then the velocity, it's not the same if you switch the order of your measurement. So when you multiply two quantum numbers... it really matters which order you multiply them in.
00:04:29
Speaker
A times B is not the same as B times a in quantum mechanics. So that's what's interesting, that these quantum numbers exist everywhere in the universe. I think that's the best picture of quantum mechanics, unless you make a contact with the quantum system.
00:04:45
Speaker
And that's actually the central mystery in quantum mechanics. Why what happens when you make an observation. And in fact, what happens is that you end up seeing only one of these numbers. Out of this multitude of possible numbers, they could actually all be the
The Imminent Revolution in Physics
00:05:02
Speaker
position of your object.
00:05:03
Speaker
You pick out one of them and your quantum numbers, so to speak, correlate to only one of these numbers. So that's why I said, if you let things be without any intervention, all of these numbers just simultaneously exist. However, if you engage yourself in the process of interacting with a physical system that you want to observe, you will actually only see one of these at a time.
00:05:30
Speaker
You can never see more than one, which led me to this negation of Bishop Berkeley, that the world only exists fully when we don't observe it. I always find that to be a little bit fascinating because you can only see what is around you and not every other interaction. That's it. That's it.
00:05:48
Speaker
It's very interesting. I think maybe one one nice analogy would be if you take a die and you have six numbers on a die, but when you roll a die, you only end up seeing the top surface of the die. You only see one of these six numbers.
00:06:03
Speaker
But that doesn't mean... that the other five numbers don't exist. It's just you're not correlated with the other five numbers. But of course, there could be another person who interacts with the same die in a different way, who is looking sideways and who sees another number.
00:06:19
Speaker
And actually, this is a little bit, this is like a classical analog, if you if you like, of what quantum world is they really like. but When you were diving into the book here and you were writing it, you've said that physics has been stuck with the same two theories for over a century.
00:06:37
Speaker
What are they? And what convinces you that we're finally on the brink of a new revolution? And what does that look like for us? Yes, I think these are very important questions in physics. We've had um two theories that describe, as far as we know at present, all observations that we can make, both in the micro, in the world of small things and in the world of large things. One is quantum mechanics, and it did simply arise from
00:07:08
Speaker
trying to understand how atoms emit light. If you excite an atom, it will basically emit different frequencies, different colors of light. And more than 100 years ago, this wasn't really understood properly. Why why only certain frequencies are observed and and why not the continuum of these frequencies? So it's the world of atomic physics, the world of objects that we cannot see. Slightly before that, Einstein came up first with special relativity and then with general theory of relativity.
00:07:40
Speaker
And this covers a completely different domain of the macroscopic objects. So he was really worried more about how gravity affects planetary motions, stars, galaxies even, and the whole universe.
00:07:53
Speaker
So it's right at the other end of the physical spectrum. And these two theories, not only did they start by addressing completely separate domains, non-overlapping physical domains, but over the last hundred years, they've only been tested in these separate domains. So we haven't found haven't found an experiment yet, where both quantum mechanics and general theory of relativity would have to be applied at the same time.
00:08:22
Speaker
And in fact, even if we imagine such an experiment, there are of course, many thought experiments where people think what would happen in in such a domain. We actually don't really know mathematically. There's an extra problem. We don't know mathematically how to put together general relativity, which is incidentally a fully classical theory. In general relativity, we use ordinary numbers to describe all properties. All gravitational potentials are simply real numbers that are assigned to them. The scene are classical numbers, as I call them in my book.
00:08:53
Speaker
Whereas quantum mechanics tells us that all of them ought to be somehow con considered skew numbers, these tables of numbers. And we don't really know how to do that consistently mathematically.
00:09:06
Speaker
and But it's even worse, as I said, because for us to even know which kind of mathematics to use and how to proceed in in the right way, we would really have to first test things, at least in some domains, to see what nature really tells us about how to how to proceed in this way.
00:09:23
Speaker
So the reason now to answer your second question, why I think we're on the brink of doing something really revolution revolutionary and exciting is because now, finally, after 100 years of extraordinarily and and and and boringly, I guess, successful two theories of physics, I think we're starting to get ideas how we could test physics.
00:09:44
Speaker
um jointly gravity and quantum mechanics in the laboratory. and i think And that's exciting. And that's actually what prompted me to write the book, because I don't think that many people are talking about it. And it seems to me that the the enormous technological development over the last maybe ah three or four decades has now put us in ah in a fantastic position to address the question of quantizing gravity. For our moment now to 1900, when Lord Kelvin famously declared that physics was complete, save for two small clouds on the horizon, ah these clouds turned into relativity and quantum mechanics.
00:10:25
Speaker
yeah um What are today's clouds and why do you think that most physicists don't see them Yes, I think that's exactly the question. I think, yes, Lord Kelvin was extraordinarily enthusiastic about physics um almost nearing an end at that point. He was very confident that maybe all we are doing is just improving the decimal places of our measurements and getting more and more accurate measurements, but actually the theory that we have.
00:10:56
Speaker
is is ah is right. and the And the two small clouds, as you mentioned, turned out to be the two revolutions in physics. But why does everyone think that whatever work they do is complete?
00:11:08
Speaker
Yes. Yes, it's a good point. and in fact ah In fact, already at that time, he should have been prepared to understand that that surprises are the norm in science. And um um it's not entirely clear how he felt about these clouds, whether if you really pressed him and asked whether the experiments could go some other way rather than the one that classical physics would suggest, maybe he would have been open to that option as well.
00:11:37
Speaker
And I think we're in a very similar position now because when you take quantum mechanics from the microscopic domain of um particles of light, photons, atoms, where we're experimented extensively and we are confident that quantum mechanics is correct in that domain.
00:11:55
Speaker
Even into simpler domains of chemistry, we understand the chemical bonding. It's really all about quantum mechanical forces between atoms. However, if you go towards more and more complex systems, not just gravity, as we mentioned in the macroscopic domain, but also living systems,
00:12:14
Speaker
Then the question a number of questions arises, in fact. The first one, obviously, is would quantum mechanics survive that? Is it really valid, even at the level of living systems? Is quantum mechanics sufficient to explain life um So somehow going beyond the microscopic confines of quantum mechanics, where where, like I said, we haven't had a single deviation over the last 100 years. And you could say the same about general relativity, but going in the opposite direction. So we are confident that large-scale universe really does behave according to how Einstein imagined it.
00:12:55
Speaker
However, as you make your object smaller and smaller, we actually are have been unable to measure, for instance, gravity between two simple atoms. Gravity is too weak for us to even be able to detect that at present. So you could you could easily say, well, we don't know what happens. We don't really know if gravity is valid at that level where quantum mechanics is.
00:13:16
Speaker
And that's what makes me think that we are now, we have a number of these, I wouldn't call them small, but we have a number of clouds now where we can really test quantum mechanics. And you can already see even from the physics community that that the topics are not settled at all.
00:13:32
Speaker
I think different physicists would bet, in fact, on different outcomes here. And as soon as you see this kind of soon as you see this kind of controversy, that automatically to you as a researcher signals that that's the right thing to ask.
00:13:46
Speaker
ah because Because no one agrees on on these things. So I think that plus, as I said, I think we are technologically, because of the development, rapid development of quantum technologies, we are now really technologically at the level where we can test systems that are big enough to still control in a fully quantum mechanical manner, and also at the same time to be able to detect gravitational forces, for instance, between these systems, or to make them living and quantum at the same time. So I think sooner, probably sooner rather than later, ah within within the next five to 10 years, we will have some answers to to some of these questions that are raised.
Groundbreaking Thought Experiments in Quantum Mechanics
00:14:27
Speaker
Now, you've said that there are five thought experiments that we can dive into. Each one's kind of a gateway for the physics of tomorrow.
00:14:38
Speaker
Yes. What makes a thought experiment powerful enough to guide through genuine discovery? Good question. ah one One really never knows, of course. You you only know after after you perform that experiment.
00:14:53
Speaker
and there is ah There is a lot of intuition that you have to use. Exactly as you said, why why am I focusing on these five experiments and why not on certain other open questions? There are of course, thousands of open questions in physics that are not the ones that I discussed in my ah book.
00:15:11
Speaker
And I think as a physicist, you're simply using your intuition where you say, well, some of these questions are presumably more questions of understanding the behavior and the structure in more detail, but I don't really expect it to go any other way than the current quantum mechanical understanding. For instance, the problem I would classify in this way is high temperature superconductivity. We have superconductors at at relatively low temperature, but we don't really know physically how to describe superconductors. We know they exist because we can make them, but we don't have a good theory that would actually explain them. It's a big open problem.
00:15:51
Speaker
It's been open for a long time now, more than 50 years. But you could, in fact, argue that this is really just a question of technology and understanding our technology properly. It's more like an engineering question and application of quantum mechanics. I really don't expect anything fundamental.
00:16:08
Speaker
I don't think that there will be a breakthrough in terms of a new theory really going beyond quantum mechanics or or general relativity. So that's what you try to focus on. I think the most exciting questions are the ones where you think that our current understanding could in fact fail. But there is no guarantee here. There is always an element of surprise.
00:16:29
Speaker
So I think each of these experiments that I offer, I'm betting one way, and and I'm very confident about that. I think that we will show that quantum mechanics does matter, certainly at least some aspects of quantum mechanics should survive in the experiments that I'm proposing. However, precisely because my expectations are in this direction, it would be far more interesting if these experiments failed for me in a way.
00:16:56
Speaker
It would be disappointing that I wasn't betting the right way. But in fact, it would signal to me that something is far more wrong with our understanding than otherwise, in a way. So it's a kind of win-win outcome. You know, on the one hand, I think we could confirm that quantum mechanics really applies to the whole universe. And that in itself would be exciting.
00:17:20
Speaker
um However, we could discover... In any of these experiments, that we have to go far beyond both general relativity and quantum mechanics. And of course, this would be even more exciting. So do you want to give a brief ah synopsis of each of the five?
00:17:36
Speaker
The five experiments, of course, are very crudely divided in the sense that they are very much related to one another. And frequently, the technology that you need is ultimately very similar because what you're trying to do is you're trying to maintain this quantum property of superposition, of being able to be in many states at the same time. It's just that what you're doing really is applying this to very different systems.
00:18:01
Speaker
um So the first first really experiment that I had in mind is to test this idea and that observers, this again goes contrary to the prevailing dogma, the prevailing dogma being the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which says that you always need an observer to make a quantum behavior into a classical one. And that's what happens when you observe something.
00:18:26
Speaker
And like I said, ah my view is the exact opposite, that in fact an observer is nothing but a bunch of quantum numbers. Observers are no different to other physical systems. As far as, of course, physical experiments are concerned, I think that's the best way to account for everything.
00:18:43
Speaker
And so the first um the first set of experiments is to exactly test the quantum nature of observers. So I would like to have an experiment where an observer gets entangled, as Schrodinger predicted in famous Schrodinger's cat experiment.
00:19:00
Speaker
But I think my experiment would involve an observer could be an AI system and with which you could actually communicate. And you could probe the system to see whether they've made a definitive observation. And at the same time, you could confirm that they are still fully part of a quantum mechanical system.
00:19:19
Speaker
state So that's the first set of experiments that I have. It's probably the genuine, fully quantum mechanical nature of reality. and Then I go to the second set of experiments, which are kind of the, this these are steps we need to test before we get into the full quantum gravity. And these are experiments to do with time.
00:19:41
Speaker
They're fascinating because in quantum mechanics, when you couple quantum mechanics to our classical view of time, you get a number of really weird phenomena.
00:19:52
Speaker
So what I'm describing, for instance, is an experiment. This is a variant of Einstein's experiment with twins, where you have a stationary twin staying on Earth and the twin brother going on a journey to another galaxy, if you like, and coming back, upon like in the movie Interstellar, upon which the returning brother ends up being much younger than the stationary brother. We've done many experiments and we know that this is correct in relativity, in classical relativity.
00:20:25
Speaker
And what I'm proposing is to couple this to a quantum superposition. So now I've got a single system. You can think of it as a single atom even, which acts as a clock.
00:20:36
Speaker
So you can can actually count how many times the atom gets excited and de-excited. How many times does it vibrate internally? But what you do now is you make a superposition of a single atom. A single atom exists in two places at the same time.
00:20:52
Speaker
In one of these places, you take this atom on a journey and bring it back to the same location So now you've got a single atom in a superposition of being younger and the older at the same time, as it were. By time, I mean the the time of the person conducting this experiment.
00:21:11
Speaker
So it's really weird that you can have these multiple references in quantum mechanics. There is one younger time, there is an older time, and there is a third time that basically depicts the time of the person performing the experiment.
00:21:26
Speaker
And so I go through all of these experiments that I think could be tested with the current atomic clocks. We just haven't done it. But in principle, we can we can do them with the current technology. And that takes me to the third set of experiments, which is to test fully quantum gravity.
00:21:42
Speaker
So if you have two superpositions of two massive objects, you put one massive object in two places at the same time and another one, the question is, can gravity quantum entangle these two objects?
00:21:55
Speaker
So can gravity create the state which we consider the characteristic, Schrodinger called it the characteristic trait of, this this is the state that has absolutely no classical analog.
00:22:07
Speaker
in in Newtonian physics. So if gravity could be the intermediary and and could facilitate creation of entanglement, then according to me, that would actually be a witness of the quantum nature of the gravitational field. And it would be actually the first experiment to falsify ah Einstein's classical ah theory of general relativity, it would be the first, if it goes the way I'm predicting, it would be the first bit of evidence we would have to falsify general relativity and really tell us, yes, you must really treat it quantum mechanically like everything
00:22:44
Speaker
um else.
Technology's Role in Quantum Experiments
00:22:45
Speaker
So that leads me to the fourth set of experiments. And as I said, this goes towards biological systems. So perform, mathematically speaking, interestingly, it's the same description as what I just described with gravitational objects.
00:23:00
Speaker
However, here you really want to entangle living systems. Okay. And this is a set of experiments that I'm also involved with in the same way as as the gravitational experiments, where I would really like to show that living systems can be fully quantum mechanical and can be fully ah participants in this kind of ah what Schrodinger identified as the key with weirdness of of quantum mechanics.
00:23:26
Speaker
And this is because there are many views in quantum mechanics which claim that um quantum mechanics collapses, when quantum superpositions encounter living systems. So there are many people who subscribe to the view that that everything in the universe might be quantum mechanical below certain level. But as soon as quantum mechanics encounters living systems, then then ah they, these people would expect quantum superpositions to collapse. And I think it's very important to test whether this is the case. And again, like I said, I would be betting against this. And and I think it's an important experiment to do.
00:24:05
Speaker
And then finally, and we have an issue of even in the existing things that work really well, things like quantum theory of light, quantum electrodynamics, as it's called, we have degrees of freedom. I call them ghosts.
00:24:20
Speaker
And in fact, we call them ghosts. um in In physics, we call them ghosts because it seems to us they ought to be there. And it seems to me that they ought to be not just there, but quantum mechanical as well.
00:24:32
Speaker
However, the current theory tells us that they cannot be directly detected. So I have a certain set of experiments in mind, which which you could call quantum ghost hunting or quantum ghost detection.
00:24:46
Speaker
which would actually claim that we should even go further with our quantum mechanical description, even of the theories that we think are well understood. They're not just theoretical, they're technologically feasible today. So what's stopping you from carrying them out now? And is that cost, imagination, or just something deeper? Yes, this is a great question. Actually, to put it into into the right context, it really is due to the rapid expansion of quantum technologies. So i think it started very slowly in the 80s and 90s when people could actually quantum entangle at most, let's say, two quantum particles. So you had two photons and then everyone was confirming entanglement at the level of two photons. and And now we know, of course, there are three Nobel prizes given for this
00:25:37
Speaker
extensive work. Then people confirmed this for atoms, for bigger molecules, and and so on. But what what all of these experiments led to ultimately is that the industry, the heavy, you know, the big industries like Google and Microsoft got excited about making a large-scale quantum computer. I think around about 2010,
00:25:59
Speaker
it became clear to everyone ah that this is no longer just a thought experiment, but in fact there is a real possibility that we could make a large-scale quantum computer. And I think that's really what's required because if you look at the amount of resources that's needed to do that and to scale it up, to go from two quantum bits to, let's say, a million quantum bits that are fully behaving quantum mechanically,
00:26:24
Speaker
You need ah lots of cryogenics, lots of various laser-related technologies. They cost a lot of money. They're very difficult to to implement in general.
00:26:35
Speaker
And I would say what's stopping us is exactly the difficulty of controlling fully quantum behavior. So in quantum mechanics, these superpositions and entangled states are so fragile that if anything else from your environment that you cannot control interrupts with your system and learns which state your system is in, that basically is tantamount to collapsing the quantum mechanical state. And that robs you of all the advantages, basically, that quantum mechanics.
00:27:06
Speaker
computers give us. So these these need to be carefully controlled, carefully isolated systems. People are going down the road of error correction, which means there has to be a huge redundancy too to have one quantum bit.
00:27:19
Speaker
You may have to use a hundred physical systems just to implement one single bit of information. So it seems to me these are, as I said, with with high temperature superconductors, these are largely questions of engineering and having enough resources given to these enterprises. But in my mind, there is no doubt that this will happen one day.
00:27:42
Speaker
The experiments that I have in mind are much simpler than making a unit. Because remember, when you're making a universal quantum computer, you really want to demonstrate that you can make any complete any physical transformation on these 1 million qubits.
00:27:57
Speaker
You can make any quantum mechanical state that you desire. And that's what universality means. For my experiments, I'm aiming at making very specific states. So and while, for instance, I can entangle two masses or I can entangle two living systems, it doesn't mean that I can compute anything I like quantum mechanically with this. So they're very specialized systems. And in that sense, that's why I'm even more optimistic.
The Universality of Quantum Theory
00:28:23
Speaker
If you think that, you know, if you extrapolate the current trend and if you think that quantum computers may be maybe here with us within a couple of decades, then I think the experiments I have in mind are definitely closer than that. And and that's what makes me confident. So I don't think there are any and i don't think they arere any fundamental aspects there that would prevent us. I think it really is the question of how do we isolate the right kind of system for long enough that actually we can detect the full quantum behavior.
00:28:52
Speaker
Yeah. Now, many physicists argue that quantum theory breaks down when we scale it up, correct? Yes. So from microscopic to macroscopic.
00:29:04
Speaker
Yes. I know this is the same for parallels, and I'm just thinking about polymers and temperature and thickness of materials even for folding things.
00:29:17
Speaker
But you take the opposite view. Yes. yes And it's that quantum theory is that quantum theory is still the right foundation to build on You mentioned something like our best current understanding of the universe comes from quantum field theory.
00:29:36
Speaker
yes And without that we couldn't account for many of our experiments. Yes. Why are you so confident that quantum mechanics isn't the end of the story, but the beginning? Yes, it's a very important point.
00:29:50
Speaker
And it's part of this intuition that, um you know, we're all trying to anticipate the future of physics and which way this will go. And that, of course, in our biases, in a way, inform us about what kind of experiments we really think um are the important things.
00:30:06
Speaker
once to to tell us, the to distinguish between these these different possible ways in which ah physics can go. So certainly what gives me great confidence are two things. One is simply the experimental progress that I mentioned that that's been extraordinary, that people, in fact, if you if you look at the latest Nobel Prize in Physics,
00:30:27
Speaker
and It was even described as a verification of quantum effects such as quantum tunneling at the macroscopic level. So these are people who took electrical circuits in which you would think that electrons should just obey the usual, you know, Ohm's law, Kirchhoff's rules, whatever else it is that we learned.
00:30:49
Speaker
in high school physics. However, what they actually show is that electrons can exist in many different places and many different states at the same time. In fact, they are fully quantum mechanical.
00:31:00
Speaker
So the classical laws like Ohm's law, they break down and and the Nobel Prize for physics was exactly for showing, this was 40, 50 years ago, in fact, these experiments showing that they uphold even at this level.
00:31:17
Speaker
So the technological progress really gives me the intuition that I think we should be extrapolating and we should be taking quantum mechanics seriously and into the macroscopic domain.
00:31:29
Speaker
But there is another reason, actually, which is purely theoretical, which which strengthens this belief that I have. And the reason is the following. People who, as you exactly pointed out, there are people who...
00:31:42
Speaker
who would say that at some point, at some level of complexity, maybe be size, the size of your system, quantum mechanics will actually collapse and it will return to some kind of classical physics.
00:31:54
Speaker
So they they propose a ah kind of a hybrid view of reality. Below certain scales, it's all quantum mechanical, and above this kind of scale, it would be fully classical, returned to some kind of classical and physics.
00:32:08
Speaker
Now, theoretically, the problem I have with this is that it's extremely difficult. I would actually say impossible. It's extremely difficult to combine classical and quantum laws together into one coherent theory.
00:32:23
Speaker
And the reason is that they behave completely differently. So, for instance, if you want to implement principles like energy conservation or momentum conservation in classical mechanics, you are using a completely different mathematical structure, a completely different group, if you like, as a mathematician would call.
00:32:44
Speaker
Then if you do these kind of things in quantum mechanics... And if now you have laws which are half quantum, half classical, you have no way of unifying this and and making it on an equal footing, applying the same treatment, because half of your laws now obey one mathematical structure and the other half obey a different mathematical structure. And in fact, I have something even stronger to say about this. Every time you hear a person say that there is a paradox in quantum mechanics, when they say, oh, this is paradoxical, this can't be like this, I claim that this is always because they're using a hybrid picture of reality. It's because they don't acknowledge that the universe is fully quantum mechanical. in fact, all our paradoxes so far in quantum mechanics, what people call
00:33:34
Speaker
Non-locality, what people call Wigner's friend, even Schrodinger's cat. All of these are related aspects. They are only seemingly paradoxical to us because we are using double standards. We are describing small systems with one logic and we're describing large systems with a completely different logic and no wonder you can't put them together.
00:33:58
Speaker
So actually both experiments so far and this kind of mathematical structure of our theories are telling me that we should really treat everything quantum mechanically.
00:34:08
Speaker
So the way we think of why certain things are as good as classical for all practical purposes What it means is that as the system becomes larger and larger, it simply interacts more strongly with its environment.
00:34:24
Speaker
And so what that means is that the quantum features become harder and harder to detect. So they're still there. but they become more and more concealed, which is kind of which is saying that if you take this limit of quantum mechanics, you will actually even recover classical physics. So there's no need to postulate a hard boundary.
00:34:46
Speaker
Quantum mechanics already explains, if you like, it already contains classical mechanics as a
Quantum Technology and Human Perception
00:34:52
Speaker
special case. So you think that quantum information just opens up new avenues for these experiments.
00:35:00
Speaker
Yes. Now, ones that are technologically feasible but unexplored, what kind of, I'll just say, inertia holds the fields back? It's a great question, actually. that That's something that sometimes goes beyond physics in many ways. I think it's partly to do, and that's what I'm trying to, that's why I think I spent quite a lot of time in the early chapters of my book just to set the scene and to and to um all quantum picture of the universe. Because I think frequently what's holding us back um is our views of physics
00:35:38
Speaker
quantum mechanics. So these interpretations, even when you cannot at present discriminate between them, even though they might look currently indistinguishable, they actually are informing you completely differently about what you ought to be testing. And I think so why we are stuck partly, one of the one of the answers to this question is, I think, because we have a wrong or a wrong set of views, if you like, about about quantum mechanics. So that's definitely one reason.
00:36:08
Speaker
But another big reason was simply the lack of technology. We didn't have the right technology. Quantum information ideas already started in the late 60s. Then you had ideas by Feynman, by David Deutsch in the 80s. And even all the way up to maybe late 90s, we didn't have experimental physicists being able to really start to take these ideas seriously and implement them.
00:36:33
Speaker
And it's only, I think, mid-90s onwards that I think experimentalists were at the right level to, to in fact, take this forward. so So it's partly, I think, we're stuck and with wrong interpretations of quantum mechanics, and partly there is a genuine kind of problem with with having sophisticated enough technologies to test these ideas. So let's look into the future with some of the testing, right?
00:36:59
Speaker
The big hype for everybody is AI. Yes. So how do you see that fitting into the picture? And something that I'm thinking about and I've seen as a common theme for mathematicians, for folks in chemistry, and I know this is starting to play into Physics.
00:37:18
Speaker
What about Lean theorem provers? Can you actually see some of that being applied for some of our next laws of physics? Yes, it's a great question. and these ah These are two different directions in which you could be using AI. And I think and i think that's that's very important.
00:37:34
Speaker
One thing to be to be said is that, for instance, the experiments that I mentioned where I would like to test the quantum nature of observers, These observers, of course, must be entities with which we can communicate.
00:37:48
Speaker
So, you know, you could do but experiments with cats, as Schrรถdinger proposed, but it's very difficult to ask a cat and to get a definitive answer whether the cat sees, you know, an atom in one in one state or another. which is Which is why you automatically think, okay, maybe I need a human observer inside. But in fact, a computer would suffice. An AI would simply be... And why am I saying an AI? Because they could be much easier to control in a quantum mechanical way than humans. Humans are probably far messier. You can have an artificial intelligence computer
00:38:26
Speaker
Possibly with a much smaller number of bits, which would have all the relevant degrees of freedom that are needed for an observation. All you need really is to get an answer from artificial intelligence about the question of do they see a definitive answer. So you're looking at a quantum superposition, do you see anything fuzzy or do you see that the system is in a definitive state, state one or state two or any other state that you prepare?
00:38:50
Speaker
So it's a very simple question that the AI needs to handle. So that's definitely one one aspect in which... um in which AI would be useful. But what you pointed out is, in fact, what about what about the things that AI could do if it was fully quantum? So so the things that that we design AI to do, to perform different tasks... um We know it's coming. It's coming. It's coming. And I think um i think I'm certainly ah um a strong AI person in the sense that I think ultimately we are nowhere near, it seems to me, replicating the way that our brain works.
00:39:29
Speaker
But I think even that is probably a question of time. I don't think that the brain does anything else than some kind of a physical computation. Maybe the current model of computers is not the right model for our brains, but but I don't think it will be anything beyond ah computation. So somehow you could automatically think about speeding up all of these tasks, because now you're talking about this massive parallelism that quantum computers give you. And I think it would be be a huge addition to artificial intelligence. The last thing maybe I should emphasize, which is really the exciting thing, and it's the lesson we learned in quantum information.
00:40:08
Speaker
And the lesson was very simple. When you have a new theory of physics, you also have to up update your theory of computation and the theory of information processing. So quantum mechanics gives us far more, a wider range of possibilities than classical information.
00:40:26
Speaker
And now the portals that I'm talking about in my book might lead us really into a genuinely new theory, into a theory which actually supersedes both quantum mechanics and and and general relativity. And it reduces to these two theories in the same way that we were talking about quantum mechanics reducing to classical physics.
00:40:47
Speaker
So it should be all-encompassing and it should be consistent with our theories if we take the appropriate limits. But for information processing, this is extremely important because this new theory... is therefore bound to be more powerful than either of the theories that we have at present. So to me, what's exciting is to try to even contemplate what kind of computation would this new theory, new fundamental theory of physics, give us.
00:41:14
Speaker
Now, you talk about portals in your book. Do you want to briefly go into that? And you talk about the idea of portals suggesting more than just a new theory, that suggests it's but it suggests a new way of being.
00:41:29
Speaker
So what yes reality if is great yes what kind of reality are you inviting readers to imagine on the other side? Yes, that's that's what's interesting, actually. I mean, one can only speculate, of course. And and I think usually you get much more surprised from the new developments than what you can anticipate. You know, yeah usually we get somehow positively surprised that that there is a lot more, in fact.
00:41:54
Speaker
then we could see. and And that's not a surprise, of course, once you have a new theory, only then can you really properly develop it and apply it by to everything else. Yes, I call them portals precisely ah to combine this idea that it is technology driven and the technology is now at the right level, but they're really taking us, all of us, into a new reality and not necessarily just a new theory of physics.
00:42:19
Speaker
So what I imagine at the end, and I think this is prompted by the fact that I think whenever whenever I talk about these ideas related to quantum mechanics being correct at the macroscopic level, but almost immediately at the end of my ah presentation, i get a question, what does it mean for us as human beings? What what does it really mean for for me personally? what you know What are you telling me?
00:42:43
Speaker
So I tried at the end of the book to speculate a little bit about what what I think this could this could entail. And i i i was inspired, like many of us, by Huxley's The Doors of Perception.
00:42:58
Speaker
um And, of course, Aldous Huxley lived in California, right, at that time as well. And I think he was advocating... experimenting with drugs in ah in a way to broaden your perception. So he thought that our perception is extremely... And and if only we could somehow open these doors to of and to ah to a wider perception, we could see the real the the real the the world as it really is, according to him. And he thought it was infinite.
00:43:28
Speaker
And so the way I ah presented this in the book is that I thought that quantum technologies could actually help us with this much more than drugs. I think it's ah it's a much more potent form of um ah transformation, if you like. It's based on physics, not on chemistry. and And the idea is that it's possible that the way that our brain engages humans which is how I was presenting it as well in the book.
00:43:53
Speaker
It's ah exactly technological trip. um the way The way that our brain could really work is that quantum numbers that characterize our perception, and and and by the way, we still have no idea experimentally what these things are, but one imagines that there are certain ways of encoding information in the brain, which is very similar to how information is encoded in other quantum systems. And that's kind of my thesis in the book.
00:44:19
Speaker
But what this means is that when you interact with your environment, you really are looking for interactions which give you definitive outcomes. So somehow you end up in this crystallized classical realities because every time you engage with reality, you see one outcome or another, but you never see anything fuzzy in between.
00:44:39
Speaker
And to me, that kind of signals a possibility to go beyond this kind of binary Boolean logic of our perception and make our perception perception a bit more flexible in the quantum mechanical way. and and And what would that even mean? So i of course, stop there because it's difficult to even imagine what kind of perception that would be. But it seems to me that this kind of integration of quantum technologies with our perception is the way to go. And I think this will capture these portals that
Challenges in Funding Revolutionary Science
00:45:08
Speaker
I'm talking about. Is there anything that you wanted to add that we haven't covered? Absolutely. It's great. I don't have anything. Maybe one, you know, one other ah one other thing, and and you can put it in, I think, if you find it interesting, which I thought now as we spoke, and and and I didn't mention it, it seems to me that sometimes our obstacles are also the ways in which we fund science these days. So that's something that's hotly debated.
00:45:35
Speaker
Yes. in not just in my academic community but much more frequency outside global issue it's a global issue it's a global issue and in fact many people michael nielsen comes immediately to to mind many people would say that we are stuck not necessarily just because it's our understanding of the theory and technology but in fact We are largely stuck because people are not adventurous enough to fund risky projects of this kind.
00:46:04
Speaker
And we seem to be stuck with a lot of incremental research, research that somehow is almost clear that it's not risky and it's clear that it will just confirm what we already know. So there is that aspect as well, which I think obviously goes beyond physics, and and it's certainly not my area of expertise, but it seems to me that Quite a few of my colleagues would agree with this statement that that there is a lot of waste related simply to how we fund science.
Conclusion and Book Promotion
00:46:31
Speaker
And I think we could do this in a much more adventurous way.
00:46:34
Speaker
As you've heard in today's discussion, the book Portals to a New Reality reminds us that physics isn't finished. and it's just waiting for us to ask new questions. It's a book about imagination, courage, curiosity, and about the strange and beautiful truth that every answer we find only opens another door.
00:46:52
Speaker
You can find portals to a new reality wherever books are sold. I'm Autumn, and this is Breaking Math. Until next time, keep asking impossible questions and stay curious.
00:47:06
Speaker
And now a message from our sponsors. What is the Curiosity Box? It's the world's first subscription for thinkers created by Vsauce, the science network with over 23 million fans. Each season brings a new adventure in science, puzzles, and exploration, packed into a box designed to ignite your curiosity.
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Speaker
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Speaker
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