Present at the Future (33 page)
Read Present at the Future Online
Authors: Ira Flatow
But wait! How happy am I to hear that a small quantum computer can break all my secure passwords and steal my identity? Not very…
“Luckily, before you decide that you’re not going to buy your coffee over the Internet anymore, quantum mechanics actually supplies a solution to this problem,” because if you store bits of information as quanta, “you can actually distribute information in a way which is provably secure—or at least it’s guaranteed by the laws of physics themselves. So in order to break these codes, you’d have to mess around or discover new laws of physics.”
That makes me feel better. I like the laws of nature.
“So quantum computers not only create problems, at least for the NSA—though I like to think of breaking codes as solving problems—[but] they also provide technological solutions that will allow us, the world, to continue. And in fact, quantum cryptographic systems are available today. If you are willing to write a big enough check, you can buy one for your house and feel very secure indeed.”
But don’t start writing that check just yet. You might not have a place to put your quantum machine.
“If you are willing to reinforce your desktop, we could put one on it right now. The ones we have over at MIT look like a giant beer keg cooled with liquid helium to cool the superconductor magnets in them. And snaking out of them are wires that connect us to about a million dollars of electronics.
“But in fact, because there are many different ways of building quantum computers, and because they’re getting more powerful all the time, and the technologies for miniaturizing the components—just like the technologies for miniaturizing components of regular computers—are advancing, you might be able to get one on your desktop in a decade or two—as long as you don’t mind it doing many things at once rather than one thing.”
A QUOOGLE IS BETTER THAN A GOOGLE?
One tool suited to the multitasking tools of quantum computing is a search engine. “I’ve been fooling around with quantum versions of Google, which we would call Quoogle or something like that,” Lloyd says. Imagine how fast that engine might run. Other researchers talk about using quantum computers to create better weather and storm forecasts or model global warming. That brings us full circle, because one task that is truly worthy of the supermuscular computer is understanding the universe, how it evolved and works at its basic and most fundamental scales.
“To understand what happened in the first few instants of the big bang. To understand what happens when black holes evaporate.
To understand what happens when you have complex quantum system–constructed gazillions—that’s another technical term—of atoms or of elementary particles. So with Dave Corey [Ph.D.] at MIT, we’ve constructed these quantum simulators—or you might [even] call them quantum analog computers—because they’re analogs of other physical systems we want to simulate. And we’re able to simulate all sorts of weird quantum effects that you could never capture on a classical computer.”
Quantum computers “are essentially little laboratories that allow us to create quantum weirdness and explore its features,” Lloyd says. And the quantum world is certainly full of weird effects. Take something called “spooky action at a distance.” This is not science fiction. Spooky action at a distance is a phrase coined by Albert Einstein for an action that almost defies reality but is common in the quantum world. It occurs when two particles become “entangled” in a quantum way. If you “touch” or change the state of one of the particles, the other particle is changed instantaneously—at the exact same moment—even if the other particle is at the other side of the universe, seemingly—but not actually—violating the laws of the speed of light.
Quantum computers allow you to explore this weird but real phenomenon. “I recently, together with some other researchers, found that you could use this spooky action at a distance, this funny quantum entanglement, to escape from black holes—assuming you happen to find yourself caught in one,” Lloyd says.
Good to know that, just in case…
“So if you have this funky entanglement between the inside and outside of a black hole—which you do because Stephen Hawking showed decades ago that black holes radiate—and, in fact, this radiation that comes out of a black hole is entangled with what’s going on inside the black hole,” then under the right conditions, something that falls into the black hole—a spaceship or TV set, or anything else—might be able to escape in a transformed state. “Indeed, I’ve
had several computers that ended their lives as black holes. So you might even be able to use a black hole itself as a computer if you could figure out the right way to program that.” Once again, we’re back to the concept of the universe as a giant quantum computer. But be careful about setting up this experiment. “As this theory has not been tried out in practice, I feel obliged to warn not to try this at home yet. Do not jump into a black hole just now. We can’t guarantee the results,” Lloyd says.
BEAM ME UP, LLOYD
But it gets even weirder. This process of escape from a black hole—given that it does work—works by a process familiar to millions of fans of Captain Kirk. “A process akin to quantum teleportation—as on Star Trek. This is something that could easily happen on Star Trek; Kirk is teleported, falls into a black hole, and teleports out at the last moment, before he hits the singularity.” In fact, using entanglement, Lloyd and his colleagues are “looking into the possibilities of teleporting a rubidium atom from one place to another.” That’s a far cry from beaming Kirk down to Vulcan, but it’s a start.
“That’s a nice feature of quantum computers. They’re a laboratory for exploring quantum weirdness in the universe.”
Lloyd also views quantum computers as “being kind of poetic. After you’ve talked with atoms for a while and get on their wavelength and learn to listen to what they’re saying back, what they’re saying has a certain strange and unearthly poetry of its own. And, indeed, you might imagine trying to use a quantum computer to compose a poem that says many things at once. Except, in fact, poetry often does that. One of the beautiful things about poetry, of course, is that words have many meanings. And so maybe we could say that poetry is already kind of quantum mechanical.”
When quantum computers become part of everyday life, like your PC is now, how else might it influence the way we see ourselves?
“Every time human beings have made a new kind of technology or machine, it has always ended up transforming human beings in ways that were unexpected and very hard to predict. As a scientist and a quantum mechanic, for me one of the most remarkable machines was the clock,” Lloyd says. “When clocks were first invented, they had a huge effect on how people saw the world. And they began to see the world as if it were clockwork. And although that sounds kind of silly now—the world is clockwork—this mechanistic view of the universe, the idea that it’s a machine, was extremely powerful, and indeed, you can think of it as a basis for all science. Particularly looking at biology right now, which is uncovering the mechanistic mysteries of cells.
“So I actually think that in learning to view the universe not just as a machine but [instead] as an information-processing machine, and specifically as a quantum information–processing machine, we’re likely to see the world very differently and come to new understandings of it. And I don’t know what those understandings are going to be.
“For me, those understandings count for a better understanding for, you know, how to build quantum computers, and how to make them compute. And then maybe also we can understand things about how life began or how the universe became so complex by looking at quantum computation.”
When may quantum computing become more than a laboratory curiosity?
“I think that these giant quantum computers that are going to break these codes and strike fear in the hearts of the NSA are a decade or two away, at the earliest. It’s very hard to predict technological progress. I think that it’s far too early, for instance, to start some kind of mini Manhattan Project to build these. I think we’ll be better off having, sharing openly our scientific advances with other scientists around the world to build them.
“However, these quantum simulators that can simulate chunks of the universe and that can construct new understanding of how
complex quantum systems can behave, we can build simple versions of those already, ones with a few billion billion atoms, and investigate the properties of matter.
“And I think that for simulating stranger things, and for investigating quantum weirdness, I think we’re just going to have a string of ever more powerful quantum computers. And indeed the number of quantum computers in the world has gone up by a factor of a hundred or so. People are computing with atoms, molecules, superconducting circuits, quantum dots, electrons, et cetera. Basically, anything out there that you can shine light on in the right way, you can make it compute.
“So it’s a pretty exciting time for quantum computing.”
The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living.
—JULES HENRI POINCARÉ
There is an old saying about art: The beauty is in the details. Why can’t the same be said about nature or technology? As the late physicist, practical joker, and storyteller Richard Feynman put it in a 1981 interview on the BBC program Horizon:
I have a friend who’s an artist and he’s sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree, I think. And he says “You see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.” And I think that he’s kind of nutty.
First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me, too, I believe, although I might not be quite as
refined aesthetically as he is; but I can appreciate the beauty of a flower.
At the same time, I can see much more about the flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension of one centimeter, there is also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure.
Also the processes, the fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting. It means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: Does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why it is aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which shows that a science knowledge only adds to the mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds; I don’t understand how it subtracts.
To be sure, I’m no Feynman. But you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to appreciate his or Poincaré’s vision of beauty. Being kept in the dark about the world’s mysteries is not my style. I want to know what makes things tick and why.
As a journalist, I’ve found the joy is in uncovering the beauty in the details. Over the years, thousands of people have written me seeking the answers to the everyday mysteries that abound in science, nature, and technology. Beauty that waits to be uncovered in the workings of simple things you use or see every day, such as the unusual behavior of the shower curtain that always billows inward and sticks to my legs. Why is that? Or the bubbles in a glass of beer: Why do they appear to sink? Some of our most common experiences—things that we take for granted, such as flying in an airplane—have a simple explanation that those of us who see the beauty in nature want to know more about.
Since there are so many of them—and this book is not here to explain them all—I’ve assembled just a few of the experiences I’ve had the joy of exploring with scientists who share the joy of knowing.
THE CASE OF THE MICE CURED OF DIABETES
In the field of observation, chance favors the prepared mind.
—LOUIS PASTEUR
The history of science is full of surprises. Research that’s supposed to work but doesn’t. Research that starts in one direction, takes a turn, and ends up going someplace else, often yielding unexpected results. From Louis Pasteur to Alexander Fleming, from Typhoid Mary to Legionnaires’ disease, science is unpredictable. A modern case in point is the work of Dr. Denise Faustman and her quest to find a cure for type 1 diabetes, the kind that destroys the pancreas of kids and teenagers and leads to lifelong daily insulin ingestion and blood testing.
Dr. Faustman, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the Immunobiology Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, announced in 2001 that she could cure type 1 diabetes in mice once she was able to stop the
immune system from attacking the pancreas, which produces insulin.
“In 2001 we were doing protocols to try to reverse autoimmunity in these end-stage mice, so that we could do islet cell transplants. Remember, islet cells are the cells that secrete insulin,” Faustman says.
The aim was to transplant healthy pancreatic islet cells into mice with diabetes, in the hope that the transplant would take and the new cells would help the pancreas make insulin again. There was one major problem with this approach: It’s difficult to keep transplanted islet cells alive and working because the autoimmune disease, by its very nature, attacks the body’s own healthy cells. In the case of diabetes, white blood cells—the T cells—attack the pancreatic cells. Dr. Faustman’s aim, in 2001, was to knock out the autoimmune disease so that the transplanted cells could go to work and bring abnormal sugar levels in the mice under control.