24:54
In the press, there's a lot of hype about quantum mechanics, things like quantum computing, quantum networking, quantum sensors, and a bunch of other stuff. But just what is quantum? What does it mean? And is there anything to the hype? Seems like it's high time that someone helps make sense of it all. Quantum mechanics is one of the craziest sounding topics of modern physics. It makes some super counterintuitive predictions which unfortunately makes it difficult to separate the real from the nonsense. For example, it said that in quantum mechanics, a cat can simultaneously be alive and dead, and that's at least kind of right. But on the woo side, people claim that you can heal diseases or even change reality simply by using the mind.
Yeah, things like that. Um, well, not so much. Okay, so let's take a minute and talk about what physicists mean when they use the term quantum mechanics. Even here there are some issues mostly because scientists aren't always completely careful with their language. For example, you might hear that the quantum world is the world of the small, the world of the microscopic or atomic. And that's kind of right, but it's not the best definition. The best definition of a quantum is a thing that is a single unit of something much bigger. For example, a grain of sand is a quantum of a beach or a person is a quantum of a
crowd. So that shows us why the world of the small is synonymous with the world of quantum mechanics. For example, a water molecule is a quantum of an ocean wave. Atoms and molecules are super small. And it is this small scale that the laws of physics act in ways that are unfamiliar to us humans who are of course much larger than atoms. But even here, we need to be careful. It's entirely correct to think of the definition of the word quantum to generally mean small and discrete building blocks of matter. But here at Firmay Lab, we study things that are really, really small. things like protons, neutrons, and their even smaller constituents called quarks.
Surely those would be governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, too. And that's true. Quarks and all that are governed by the principles of quantum mechanics, but that's not what's generally meant when we hear the word quantum in the news. For those sorts of reports, what is usually being talked about are the quantum mechanics of electrons, photons, which are particles of light, and atoms. So why is that? It's because atoms and electrons and photons are objects that are both a we can manipulate and b persist for a long period of time. Objects with those properties can be employed as tools. If you look into the history of the applications of the principles of quantum mechanics to the world of atoms and electrons, you find
that they led to a tremendous explosion of technologies that have transformed our world. Things like lasers and LEDs and transistors and indeed all manners of integrated circuits exist because scientists learn how to harness the laws of quantum mechanics. Heck, every time you delete a file on a USB memory stick, you are using quantum mechanics to do it. Truly, our modern world would be completely unrecognizable without our modern understanding of the quantum world. But the hype you see in the press isn't about wellestablished past quantum achievements. It's about the future. What sorts of new technologies are quantum principles making possible?
Well, there is quantum cryptography, which could overturn how modern commerce is done. Credit card transactions rely on an algorithm that traditional computers would take millions of years to decrypt, but could be cracked in hours by quantum computers. As dramatic as that sounds, that worry is overblown as the credit card industry could change the coding algorithm to one that is difficult for both traditional and quantum computers to break. More broadly, there is quantum computing. Quantum computers are enormously powerful for certain specific computational programs. That codereing thing for one, but also for working out the structure of promising new drugs to treat illness or how to build exotic materials with interesting properties.
For the right kind of problem, quantum computing completely blows away more traditional techniques. On the other hand, for many problems, familiar computers are well, they're just fine. One of the most promising avenues for future advances is what are called quantum sensors. Quantum sensors rely on the properties of a small number of interconnected atoms or sometimes the properties of single atoms to make ultra precise measurements. There are many examples of future and current advances from ultra sensitive medical monitoring to using tiny variations in the strength of gravity to detect mineral deposits to finding unexloded underground ordinance. There
are tons of practical spin-offs. But of course, I'm a particle geek, and the applications that interest me the most are using quantum sensors to investigate the laws of nature, like looking for forms of dark matter that other techniques can't detect, or making ultrarecise measurements of the cosmic microwave background that is left over from shortly after the Big Bang, or all sorts of other simple measurements. But of course, that's just me because, you know, particle geek. Advances in quantum technologies are being made worldwide and we at Firmeny Lab are doing our part. Physicists at Firmeny Lab at the Superconducting Quantum Materials and System Center are developing techniques that hope to overcome some of the limitations of current quantum
computers. The quantum equivalent of the familiar bits and bites of regular computers are very delicate and don't last for a very long time. Figuring out ways to extend their lifetime will vastly improve the power of quantum computing. Other Firmeny Lab scientists are developing algorithms that blend quantum computing and machine learning to perform very difficult theoretical particle physics calculations. You got to love any way to make those calculations easier because like yikes. On the quantum sensor side, one of my favorites involves some staff members who are attempting to create next generation charged coupled electronic devices which can image individual
photons. If that works, it's going to be a big advance in quantum imaging experiments and has implications for dark matter searches. The bottom line is that the quantum technologies that are currently being developed have great potential. It's important to be cautious about the hype of some news reports, but there is no denying that the ability to manipulate individual atoms, electrons, and photons provides exciting prospects for new and powerful capabilities that traditional methodologies simply can't match. The quantum revolution is here.
Hi there. It's been quite a while since I made a video. I'm not going to say that it's because I got caught in a time loop when my boneheaded graduate student spilled coffee on the control system of the time gate, but I'm not going to say it either. Students, at any rate, it's enough to say that I'm back and plan to start making videos again. It's going to be fun. Mostly, I hope that while I was gone, you didn't forget that most important lesson, which is that physics is everything.
