Category Archives: Reflections

Schopenhauer and the Geometry of Evil

Posted on by
11

Gottfried_Wilhelm_von_LeibnizAt the beginning of the 18th century, Gottfried Leibniz took a break from quarreling with Isaac Newton over which of them had invented calculus to confront a more formidable adversary, Evil.  His landmark 1710 book Théodicée argued that, as creatures of an omnipotent and benevolent God, we live in the best of all possible worlds.  Earthquakes and wars, he said, are compatible with God’s benevolence because they may lead to beneficial consequences in ways we don’t understand.  Moreover, for us as individuals, having the freedom to make bad decisions challenges us to learn from our mistakes and improve our moral characters.

In 1844 another philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, came to the opposite conclusion, Schopenhauerthat we live in the worst of all possible worlds.  By this he meant not just a world is full of calamity and suffering, but one that in many respects, both human and natural, functions so badly that if it were only a little worse it could not continue to exist at all.   An atheist, Schopenhauer felt no need to defend God’s benevolence, and could turn his full attention to the mechanics and indeed (though not a mathematician) the geometry of badness.  He argued that if the world’s continued existence depends on many continuous variables such as temperature, composition of the atmosphere, etc., each of which must be within a narrow range, then almost all possible worlds will be just barely possible, lying near the periphery of the possible region.  Here, in his own words, is his refutation of Leibniz’ optimism.
 

To return, then to Leibniz, I cannot ascribe to the Théodicée as a methodical and broad unfolding of optimism, any other merit than this, that it gave occasion later for the immortal “Candide” of the great Voltaire; whereby certainly Leibniz s often-repeated and lame excuse for the evil of the world, that the bad sometimes brings about the good, received a confirmation which was unexpected by him…  But indeed to the palpably sophistical proofs of Leibniz that this is the best of all possible worlds, we may seriously and honestly oppose the proof that it is the worst of all possible worlds. For possible means, not what one may construct in imagination, but what can actually exist and continue. Now this world is so arranged as to be able to maintain itself with great difficulty; but if it were a little worse, it could no longer maintain itself. Consequently a worse world, since it could not continue to exist, is absolutely impossible: thus this world itself is the worst of all possible worlds. For not only if the planets were to run their heads together, but even if any one of the actually appearing perturbations of their course, instead of being gradually balanced by others, continued to increase, the world would soon reach its end. Astronomers know upon what accidental circumstances principally the irrational relation to each other of the periods of revolution this depends, and have carefully calculated that it will always go on well; consequently the world also can continue and go on. We will hope that, although Newton was of an opposite opinion, they have not miscalculated, and consequently that the mechanical perpetual motion realised in such a planetary system will not also, like the rest, ultimately come to a standstill. Again, under the firm crust of the planet dwell the powerful forces of nature which, as soon as some accident affords them free play, must necessarily destroy that crust, with everything living upon it, as has already taken place at least three times upon our planet, and will probably take place oftener still. The earthquake of Lisbon, the earthquake of Haiti, the destruction of Pompeii, are only small, playful hints of what is possible. A small alteration of the atmosphere, which cannot even be chemically proved, causes cholera, yellow fever, black death, &c., which carry off millions of men; a somewhat greater alteration would extinguish all life. A very moderate increase of heat would dry up all the rivers and springs. The brutes have received just barely so much in the way of organs and powers as enables them to procure with the greatest exertion sustenance for their own lives and food for their offspring; therefore if a brute loses a limb, or even the full use of one, it must generally perish. Even of the human race, powerful as are the weapons it possesses in understanding and reason, nine-tenths live in constant conflict with want, always balancing themselves with difficulty and effort upon the brink of destruction. Thus throughout, as for the continuance of the whole, so also for that of each individual being the conditions are barely and scantily given, but nothing over. The individual life is a ceaseless battle for existence itself; while at every step destruction threatens it. Just because this threat is so often fulfilled provision had to be made, by means of the enormous excess of the germs, that the destruction of the individuals should not involve that of the species, for which alone nature really cares. The world is therefore as bad as it possibly can be if it is to continue to be at all. Q. E. D.  The fossils of the entirely different kinds of animal species which formerly inhabited the planet afford us, as a proof of our calculation, the records of worlds the continuance of which was no longer possible, and which consequently were somewhat worse than the worst of possible worlds.* 

Writing at a time when diseases were thought to be caused by poisonous vapors, and when “germ” meant not a pathogen but a seed or embryo, Schopenhauer hints at Darwin and Wallace’s natural selection.  But more importantly, as Alejandro Jenkins pointed out,  Schopenhauer’s distinction between possible and impossible worlds may be the first adequate statement of what in the 20th century came to be called the weak anthropic principle, the thesis that our perspective on the universe is unavoidably biased toward conditions hospitable to the existence and maintenance of complex structures. His examples of orbital instability and lethal atmospheric changes show that by an “impossible” world he meant one that might continue to exist physically, but would extinguish beings able to witness its existence.

In Schopenhauer’s time only seven planets were known, so, given all the ways things might go wrong, and barring divine assistance, it would have required incredible good luck for even one of them to be habitable.  Thus Schopenhauer’s principle, as it might better be called, was less satisfactory as an answer to the problem of existence than to the problem of evil.  The belief that such extreme good luck is less plausible than deliberate creation by some sort of intelligent agent, encapsulated by Schopenhauer’s contemporary William Paley in his  watchmaker analogy, remains popular today, but its cogency has been greatly diminished by two centuries of progress in astronomy.  In place of Schopenhauer’s seven, the universe is now believed to contain about as many planets as there are atoms in a pencil.  And that’s just the observable part, within a Hubble distance of the earth; inflationary cosmology implies that there are many more beyond our cosmological horizon, perhaps infinitely many.  In such a vast universe,  it is no longer surprising that some places should be habitable.  In this setting Schopenhauer’s principle leads to a situation that is locally precarious but globally stable, lying between Leibniz’ unrealistic optimum and what would be a true pessimum, a globally dead universe with no life, civilization, etc. anywhere.  To paraphrase Schopenhauer, modern astronomy has revealed an enormous excess of habitable places, mostly just barely habitable, so that the extinction of life in one does not entail extinction of life in the universe, for which alone nature really cares.

Returning to Schopenhauer’s  refutation of  Leibniz’s optimism, his  qualitative verbal reasoning can easily be recast in terms of high-dimensional geometry.  Let the goodness g  of a possible world   X   be approximated to lowest order as

g(X) = 1-q(X),

where  q  is a positive definite quadratic form in the d-dimensional real variable X. Possible worlds correspond to  X  values where   g  is positive, lying under a paraboloidal cap centered on the optimum,   g(0)=1,  with negative values of  g  representing impossible worlds.  Leaving out the impossible worlds, simple integration, of the sort Leibniz invented, shows that the average of  g  over possible worlds is  1-d/(d+2).   So if there is one variable, the average world is 2/3 as good as the best possible, while if there are 198 variables the average world is only 1% as good.  Thus, in the limit of many dimensions, the average world approaches  g=0,  the worst possible.   More general versions of this idea can be developed using post-18’th century mathematical tools like Lipschitz continuity.

Earthquakes are an oft-cited  example of senseless evil, hard to fit into a beneficent divine plan, but today we understand them as impersonal consequences of slow convection in the Earth’s mantle, which in turn is driven by the heat of its molten iron core.  Another consequence of the Earth’s molten core is its magnetic field, which deflects solar wind particles and keeps them from blowing away our atmosphere.   Lacking this protection, Mars lost most of its formerly dense atmosphere long ago.

One of my adult children, a surgeon, went to Haiti in 2010 to treat victims of the great earthquake and has returned regularly since. Opiate painkillers, he says, are in short supply there even in normal times, so patients routinely deal with post-operative pain by singing hymns until the pain abates naturally.  When I told him of the connection between earthquakes and atmospheres, he said, “So I’m supposed to tell this guy who just had his leg amputated that he should be grateful for earthquakes because otherwise there wouldn’t be any air to breathe?   No wonder people find scientific explanations less than comforting.”   A few weeks later he added that he was beginning to find such explanations comforting after all, because they show how things can go wrong in the natural world without its being anyone’s fault.  One of his favorite writers, Johnathan Haidt, believes this also holds in human affairs, where some of the most irrational and self-destructive aspects of human nature, traits that if we’re not lucky could make human civilization short-lived on a geologic time scale, may be side effects of other traits that enabled it to reach its present state.

[This version revised April 2017]

*From R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp’s translation of Schopenhauer’s “Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung”,  supplement to the 4th book  pp 395-397  On the vanity and suffering of life.
Cf German original, pp. 2222-2227 of  Von der Nichtigkeit und dem Leiden des Lebens

Quantum braiding: It’s all in (and on) your head.

Posted on by
16

Morning sunlight illuminated John Preskill’s lecture notes about Caltech’s quantum-computation course, Ph 219. I’m TAing (the teaching assistant for) Ph 219. I previewed lecture material one sun-kissed Sunday.

Pasadena sunlight spilled through my window. So did the howling of a dog that’s deepened my appreciation for Billy Collins’s poem “Another reason why I don’t keep a gun in the house.” My desk space warmed up, and I unbuttoned my jacket. I underlined a phrase, braided my hair so my neck could cool, and flipped a page.

I flipped back. The phrase concerned a mathematical statement called the Yang-Baxter relation. A sunbeam had winked on in my mind: The Yang-Baxter relation described my hair.

The Yang-Baxter relation belongs to a branch of math called topology. Topology resembles geometry in its focus on shapes. Topologists study spheres, doughnuts, knots, and braids.

Topology describes some quantum physics. Scientists are harnessing this physics to build quantum computers. Alexei Kitaev largely dreamed up the harness. Alexei, a Caltech professor, is teaching Ph 219 this spring.1 His computational scheme works like this.

We can encode information in radio signals, in letters printed on a page, in the pursing of one’s lips as one passes a howling dog’s owner, and in quantum particles. Imagine three particles on a tabletop.

Peas 1

Consider pushing the particles around like peas on a dinner plate. You could push peas 1 and 2 until they swapped places. The swap represents a computation, in Alexei’s scheme.2

The diagram below shows how the peas move. Imagine slicing the figure into horizontal strips. Each strip would show one instant in time. Letting time run amounts to following the diagram from bottom to top.

Peas 2

Arrows copied from John Preskill’s lecture notes. Peas added by the author.

Imagine swapping peas 1 and 3.

Peas 3

Humor me with one more swap, an interchange of 2 and 3.

Peas 4

Congratulations! You’ve modeled a significant quantum computation. You’ve also braided particles.

2 braids

The author models a quantum computation.

Let’s recap: You began with peas 1, 2, and 3. You swapped 1 with 2, then 1 with 3, and then 2 with 3. The peas end up ordered oppositely the way they began—end up ordered as 3, 2, 1.

You could, instead, morph 1-2-3 into 3-2-1 via a different sequence of swaps. That sequence, or braid, appears below.

Peas 5

Congratulations! You’ve begun proving the Yang-Baxter relation. You’ve shown that  each braid turns 1-2-3 into 3-2-1.

The relation states also that 1-2-3 is topologically equivalent to 3-2-1: Imagine standing atop pea 2 during the 1-2-3 braiding. You’d see peas 1 and 3 circle around you counterclockwise. You’d see the same circling if you stood atop pea 2 during the 3-2-1 braiding.

That Sunday morning, I looked at John’s swap diagrams. I looked at the hair draped over my left shoulder. I looked at John’s swap diagrams.

“Yang-Baxter relation” might sound, to nonspecialists, like a mouthful of tweed. It might sound like a sneeze in a musty library. But an eight-year-old could grasp half the relation. When I braid my hair, I pass my left hand over the back of my neck. Then, I pass my right hand over. But I could have passed the right hand first, then the left. The braid would have ended the same way. The braidings would look identical to a beetle hiding atop what had begun as the middle hunk of hair.

Yang-Baxter

The Yang-Baxter relation.

I tried to keep reading John’s lecture notes, but the analogy mushroomed. Imagine spinning one pea atop the table.

Pea 6

A 360° rotation returns the pea to its initial orientation. You can’t distinguish the pea’s final state from its first. But a quantum particle’s state can change during a 360° rotation. Physicists illustrate such rotations with corkscrews.

Pachos corkscrew 2

A quantum corkscrew (“twisted worldribbon,” in technical jargon)

Like the corkscrews formed as I twirled my hair around a finger. I hadn’t realized that I was fidgeting till I found John’s analysis.

Version 2

I gave up on his lecture notes as the analogy sprouted legs.

I’ve never mastered the fishtail braid. What computation might it represent? What about the French braid? You begin French-braiding by selecting a clump of hair. You add strands to the clump while braiding. The addition brings to mind particles created (and annihilated) during a topological quantum computation.

Ancient Greek statues wear elaborate hairstyles, replete with braids and twists.  Could you decode a Greek hairdo? Might it represent the first 18 digits in pi? How long an algorithm could you run on Rapunzel’s hair?

Call me one bobby pin short of a bun. But shouldn’t a scientist find inspiration in every fiber of nature? The sunlight spilling through a window illuminates no less than the hair spilling over a shoulder. What grows on a quantum physicist’s head informs what grows in it.

1Alexei and John trade off on teaching Ph 219. Alexei recommends the notes that John wrote while teaching in previous years.

2When your mother ordered you to quit playing with your food, you could have objected, “I’m modeling computations!”

little by little and gate by gate

Posted on by
5

Washington state was drizzling on me. I was dashing from a shuttle to Building 112 on Microsoft’s campus. Microsoft has headquarters near Seattle. The state’s fir trees refreshed me. The campus’s vastness awed me. The conversations planned for the day enthused me. The drizzle dampened me.

Building 112 houses QuArC, one of Microsoft’s research teams. “QuArC” stands for “Quantum Architectures and Computation.” Team members develop quantum algorithms and codes. QuArC members write, as their leader Dr. Krysta Svore says, “software for computers that don’t exist.”

Microsoft 2

Small quantum computers exist. Large ones have eluded us like gold at the end of a Washington rainbow. Large quantum computers could revolutionize cybersecurity, materials engineering, and fundamental physics. Quantum computers are growing, in labs across the world. When they mature, the computers will need software.

Software consists of instructions. Computers follow instructions as we do. Suppose you want to find and read the poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town,” by 20th-century American poet e e cummings. You follow steps—for example:

1) Wake up your computer.
2) Type your password.
3) Hit “Enter.”
4) Kick yourself for entering the wrong password.
5) Type the right password.
6) Hit “Enter.”
7) Open a web browser.
8) Navigate to Google.
9) Type “anyone lived in a pretty how town e e cummings” into the search bar.
10) Hit “Enter.”
11) Click the Academy of American Poets’ link.
12) Exclaim, “Really? April is National Poetry Month?”
13) Read about National Poetry Month for four-and-a-half minutes.
14) Remember that you intended to look up a poem.
15) Return to the Academy of American Poets’ “anyone lived” webpage.
16) Read the poem.

We break tasks into chunks executed sequentially. So do software writers. Microsoft researchers break up tasks intended for quantum computers to perform.

Your computer completes tasks by sending electrons through circuits. Quantum computers will have circuits. A circuit contains wires, which carry information. The wires run through circuit components called gates. Gates manipulate the information in the wires. A gate can, for instance, add the number carried by this wire to the number carried by that wire.

Running a circuit amounts to completing a task, like hunting a poem. Computer engineers break each circuit into wires and gates, as we broke poem-hunting into steps 1-16.1

Circuits hearten me, because decomposing tasks heartens me. Suppose I demanded that you read a textbook in a week, or create a seminar in a day, or crack a cybersecurity system. You’d gape like a visitor to Washington who’s realized that she’s forgotten her umbrella.

Umbrella

Suppose I demanded instead that you read five pages, or create one Powerpoint slide, or design one element of a quantum circuit. You might gape. But you’d have more hope.2 Life looks more manageable when broken into circuit elements.

Circuit decomposition—and life decomposition—brings to mind “anyone lived in a pretty how town.” The poem concerns two characters who revel in everyday events. Laughter, rain, and stars mark their time. The more the characters attune to nature’s rhythm, the more vibrantly they live:3

          little by little and was by was

          all by all and deep by deep
          and more by more they dream their sleep

Those lines play in my mind when a seminar looms, or a trip to Washington coincident with a paper deadline, or a quantum circuit I’ve no idea how to parse. Break down the task, I tell myself. Inch by inch, we advance. Little by little and drop by drop, step by step and gate by gate.

IBM circuit

Not what e e cummings imagined when composing “anyone lived in a pretty how town”

Unless you’re dashing through raindrops to gate designers at Microsoft. I don’t recommend inching through Washington’s rain. But I would have dashed in a drought. What sees us through everyday struggles—the inching of science—if not enthusiasm? We tackle circuits and struggles because, beyond the drizzle, lie ideas and conversations that energize us to run.

cummings

e e cummings

With thanks to QuArC members for their time and hospitality.

1One might object that Steps 4 and 14 don’t belong in the instructions. But software involves error correction.

2Of course you can design a quantum-circuit element. Anyone can quantum.

3Even after the characters die.

Remember to take it slow

Posted on by
3

“Spiros, can you explain to me this whole business about time being an illusion?”

These were William Shatner’s words to me, minutes after I walked into the green room at Silicon Valley’s Comic Con. The iconic Star Trek actor, best known for his portrayal of James Tiberius Kirk, captain of the starship Enterprise, was chatting with Andy Weir, author of The Martian, when I showed up at the door. I was obviously in the wrong room. I had been looking for the room reserved for science panelists, but had been sent up an elevator to the celebrity green room instead (a special room reserved for VIPs during their appearance at the convention). Realizing quickly that something was off, I did what anyone else would do in my position. I sat down. To my right was Mr. Weir and to my left was Mr. Shatner and his agent, Mr. Gary Hasson. For the first few minutes I was invisible, listening in casually as Mr. Weir revealed juicy details about his upcoming novel. And then, it happened. Mr. Shatner turned to me and asked: “And who are you?” Keep calm young man. You can outrun him if you have to. You are as entitled to the free croissants as any of them. “I am Spiros,” I replied. “And what do you do, Spiros?” he continued. “I am a quantum physicist at Caltech.” Drop the mic. Boom. Now I will see myself out before security…

comic_con_bg

“Spiros, can you explain to me this whole business about time being an illusion?”

Huh, I wonder if he means the… “You know, how there is no past, present or future in quantum mechanics,” Mr. Shatner continued. “Well, yes,” I responded, “that is called the arrow of time, an emergent direction in the time parameter found in the equation describing evolution in quantum physics. By the way, that time parameter itself is also emergent.” And then things got out of hand. “Wait a minute, are you telling me that not just the arrow of time, but time itself as a concept is an illusion?” asked Mr. Shatner with genuine excitement. “Yes. For starters, the arrow of time itself is a consequence of an emergent asymmetry between events that are all equally likely at the microscopic level. Think about flipping a fair coin one hundred times, for example. The probability of getting all heads is astronomically small. Zero point zero zero zero… with thirty zeroes before the one. Same is true if I ask you how likely it is that you flip fifty heads and then fifty tails,” I said and waited. “OK… still following,” Mr. Shatner assured me, so I continued, “but, say that you have trouble keeping track of all the different positions of the heads and tails; all you care about is counting how many times you flipped heads and how many times you flipped tails. What is the probability that you would count one hundred heads?” I asked. Mr. Shatner thought for a second, and so did Mr. Weir, before they answered almost in unison, “Well, it is still astronomically small. Just like before.” Yes! Holy cow, Batman, this is actually happening. I am having a conversation about physics with captain Kirk and the mastermind behind this year’s Golden Globe winner for Best Motion Picture: Musical or Comedy! This makes no sense! And I am not talking about the movie award – The Martian was hilarious.

andy-weir

“Exactly,” I replied. “But what about flipping the coin and counting fifty heads and fifty tails?” I asked. I could see that their wheels were spinning. What was I getting at? How was this different from before? “Does it have to be the first fifty heads, or can it be any which way, as long as it is fifty?” asked Mr. Weir. Bingo. “Any which way. We can only keep track of the number of them, not their position,” I reminded him. “Well, there are many more ways then to get fifty heads,” noted Mr. Shatner. “Yes there are,” I agreed and continued, “In fact, there are about one thousand billion billion billion combinations that all give fifty heads and fifty tails. In other words, one in ten times you flip a coin a hundred times, you will count exactly fifty heads and fifty tails. Think about this for a second. The probability of counting exactly fifty heads the first time you flip a coin a hundred times is thirty orders of magnitude larger than counting one hundred heads. Remember that any particular configuration of heads and tails is equally – astronomically – unlikely. But if you zoom out, then magic happens and an emergent asymmetry appears. A really huge asymmetry, at that.” They were hooked. It was time for the grand finale. “So, which events then are more likely for us to experience in the next second, if all of them are equally likely at some fundamental level?” I asked. Mr. Shatner responded first: “The ones that have billions of microscopic configurations that all look the same when you zoom out. Like the fifty heads thing.” Then, Mr. Weir, turning to Mr. Shatner added, “That’s the arrow of time following the direction of entropy as it increases.” I nodded (maybe a little too eagerly) and looked at my phone to see that it was close to noon. It would take me about five minutes to walk to Room 2 of the San Jose convention center, where Mr. Weir was to headline a panel titled “Let’s Go to Mars!” There was no way I was missing that panel. I knew that by now there would be a very long line of eager attendees waiting to hear Mr. Weir and Mr. Adam Savage (of Mythbusters fame) talk about Mars exploration. With some luck, I could walk there with Mr. Weir and sneak in without being noticed by the door police. I told Mr. Weir that it was time for us to go downstairs. He got up, I got up and…

“Spiros, where do you think you are going? Come here, sit right next to me. You promised to explain how time works. You can’t leave me hanging now!” Mr. Shatner was adamant.

I looked to Mr. Hasson and Mr. Weir, who were caught in the middle of this. “I… I can come back and we can talk more after Andy’s panel… My panel isn’t until 2 o’ clock,” I pleaded. Mr. Shatner did not think so. Science could not wait another second. He was actually interested in what I had to say, so I turned to Mr. Weir apologetically and he nodded with understanding and a “good luck, kid” kind-of-smile. Mr. Hasson seemed pleased with my choice and made some room for me to sit next to the captain.

william-shatner

“Now, where were we? Ah yes, you were going to explain to me how time itself is an illusion. Something about time in quantum evolution being emergent. What do you mean?” asked Mr. Shatner, cutting right to the chase. It was time for me to go all in: “Well, you see, there is this equation in quantum mechanics – Erwin Schrodinger came up with it – that tells us how the state of the universe at the quantum level changes with time. But where does time come from? Is it a fundamental concept, or is there something out there without which time itself cannot exist?” I waited for a second, as Mr. Shatner contemplated my question. He was stumped. What could possibly be more fundamental than time? Hmm… “Change,” I said. “Without change, there is no time and, thus, no quantum evolution. And without quantum evolution there is no classical evolution, no arrow of time. So everything hinges on the ability of the quantum state of the visible universe to change.” I paused to make sure he was following, then continued, “But if there is change, then where does it come from? Wherever it comes from, unless we end up with a timeless, unchanging and featureless entity, we will always be on the hook for explaining why it is changing, how it is changing and why it looks the way it does and not some other way,” I said and waited a second to let this sink in. “Spiros, if you are right, then how the heck can you get something out of nothing? If the whole thing is static, how come we are not frozen in time?” asked pointedly Mr. Shatner. “We are not the whole thing,” I said, maybe a bit too abruptly. “What do you mean we are not the whole thing? What else is there?” questioned Mr. Shatner. At this point I could see a large smile forming on Mr. Hasson’s face. His old friend, Bill Shatner, was having fun. A different kind of fun. A different kind of Comic Con. Sure, Bill still had to sit at a table in the main Exhibit Hall to greet thousands of fans, sign their favorite pictures of him and, for a premium, stand next to them for a picture that they would frame and display in their homes for decades to come. “Spiros, do you have a card?” interjected Mr. Hasson. Hmm, how do I say that this is not a thing among scientists… “I ran out. Sorry, everyone wants one these days, so… Here, I can type my email and number in your phone. Would that work?” I said, stretching the truth 1/slightly. “That would be great, thanks,” replied Mr. Hasson.

IMG_1168

With Mr. Stan Lee at the Silicon Valley Comic Con. At 93, Mr. Lee spent the whole weekend with fans, not once showing up at the green room to take a break. So I hunted him down with help from Mr. Hasson.

“Hey, stop distracting him! We are so close to the good stuff!” blasted Mr. Shatner. “Go on, now, Spiros. How does anything ever change?” asked Mr. Shatner with some urgency in his voice. “Dynamic equilibrium,” I replied. “Like a chemical reaction that is in equilibrium. You look from afar and see nothing happening. No bubbles, nothing. But zoom in a little and you see products and reactants dissolving and recombining like crazy, but always in perfect balance. The whole remains static, while the parts experience dramatic change.” I let this simmer for a moment. “We are not the whole. We are just a part of the whole. We are too big to see the quantum evolution as it happens in all its glory. But we are also too small to remain unchanged. Our visible universe is in dynamic equilibrium with a clock universe with which we are maximally entangled. We change only because the state of the clock universe changes randomly and we have no control over it, but to change along with it so that the whole remains unchanged,” I concluded, hoping that he would be convinced by a theory that had not seen the light of day until that fateful afternoon. He was not convinced yet. “Wait a minute, why would that clock universe change in the first place?” he asked suspiciously. “It doesn’t have to,” I replied, anticipating this excellent question, and went on, “It could remain in the same state for a million years. But we wouldn’t know it, because the state of our visible universe would have to remain in the same state also for a million years. We wouldn’t be able to tell that a million years passed between every microsecond of change, just like a person under anesthesia can’t tell that they are undergoing surgery for hours, only to wake up thinking it was just a moment earlier that they were counting down to zero.” He fell silent for a moment and then a big smile appeared on his face. “Spiros, you have an accent,” he said, as if stating the obvious. “Can I offer you a piece of advise?” he asked, in a calm voice. I nodded. “One day you will be in front of a large crowd talking about this stuff. When you are up there, make sure you talk slow so people can keep up. When you get excited, you start speaking faster and faster. Take breaks in-between,” he offered. I smiled and thanked him for the advise. By then, it was almost one o’ clock and Mr. Weir’s panel was about to end. I needed to go down there for real this time and meet up with my co-panelists, Shaun Maguire and Laetitia Garriott de Cayeux, since our panel was coming up next. I got up and as I was leaving the room, I heard from behind,

“Remember to take it slow, Spiros. When you are back, you will tell me all about how space is also an illusion.”

Aye aye captain!

March madness and quantum memory

Posted on by
4

Madness seized me this March. It pounced before newspaper and Facebook feeds began buzzing about basketball.1 I haven’t bought tickets or bet on teams. I don’t obsess over jump-shot statistics. But madness infected me two weeks ago. I began talking with condensed-matter physicists.

Condensed-matter physicists study collections of many particles. Example collections include magnets and crystals. And the semiconductors in the iPhones that report NCAA updates.

Caltech professor Gil Refael studies condensed matter. He specializes in many-body localization. By “many-body,” I mean “involving lots of quantum particles.” By “localization,” I mean “each particle anchors itself to one spot.” We’d expect these particles to spread out, like the eau de hotdog that wafts across a basketball court. But Gil’s particles stay put.

Hot-dog smell

How many-body-localized particles don’t behave.

Experts call many-body localization “MBL.” I’ve accidentally been calling many-body localization “MLB.” Hence the madness. You try injecting baseball into quantum discussions without sounding one out short of an inning.2

I wouldn’t have minded if the madness had erupted in October. The World Series began in October. The World Series involves Major League Baseball, what normal people call “the MLB.” The MLB dominates October; the NCAA dominates March. Preoccupation with the MLB during basketball season embarrasses me. I feel like I’ve bet on the last team that I could remember winning the championship, then realized that that team had last won in 2002.

March madness has been infecting my thoughts about many-body localization. I keep envisioning a localized particle as dribbling a basketball in place, opponents circling, fans screaming, “Go for it!” Then I recall that I’m pondering MBL…I mean, MLB…or the other way around. The dribbler gives way to a baseball player who refuses to abandon first base for second. Then I recall that I should be pondering particles, not playbooks.

Baseball diamond

Localized particles.

Recollection holds the key to MBL’s importance. Colleagues of Gil’s want to build quantum computers. Computers store information in memories. Memories must retain their contents; information mustn’t dribble away.

Consider recording halftime scores. You could encode the scores in the locations of the particles that form eau de hotdog. (Imagine you have advanced technology that manipulates scent particles.) If Duke had scored one point, you’d put this particle here; if Florida had scored two, you’d put that particle there. The particles—as smells too often do—would drift. You’d lose the information you’d encoded. Better to paint the scores onto scorecards. Dry paint stays put, preserving information.

The quantum particles studied by Gil stay put. They inspire scientists who develop memories for quantum computers. Quantum computation is gunning for a Most Valuable Player plaque in the technology hall of fame. Many-body localized systems could contain Most Valuable Particles.

MVP medal

Remembering the past, some say, one can help one read the future. I don’t memorize teams’ records. I can’t advise you about whom root for. But prospects for quantum memories are brightening. Bet on quantum information science.

1Non-American readers: University basketball teams compete in a tournament each March. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) hosts the tournament. Fans glue themselves to TVs, tweet exaltations and frustrations, and excommunicate friends who support opposing teams.

2Without being John Preskill.

Some like it cold.

Posted on by
20

When I reached IBM’s Watson research center, I’d barely seen Aaron in three weeks. Aaron is an experimentalist pursuing a physics PhD at Caltech. I eat dinner with him and other friends, most Fridays. The group would gather on a sidewalk in the November dusk, those three weeks. Light would spill from a lamppost, and we’d tuck our hands into our pockets against the chill. Aaron’s wife would shake her head.

“The fridge is running,” she’d explain.

Aaron cools down mechanical devices to near absolute zero. Absolute zero is the lowest temperature possible,1 lower than outer space’s temperature. Cold magnifies certain quantum behaviors. Researchers observe those behaviors in small systems, such as nanoscale devices (devices about 10-9 meters long). Aaron studies few-centimeter-long devices. Offsetting the devices’ size with cold might coax them into exhibiting quantum behaviors.

The cooling sounds as effortless as teaching a cat to play fetch. Aaron lowers his fridge’s temperature in steps. Each step involves checking for leaks: A mix of two fluids—two types of helium—cools the fridge. One type of helium costs about $800 per liter. Lose too much helium, and you’ve lost your shot at graduating. Each leak requires Aaron to warm the fridge, then re-cool it. He hauled helium and pampered the fridge for ten days, before the temperature reached 10 milliKelvins (0.01 units above absolute zero). He then worked like…well, like a grad student to check for quantum behaviors.

Aaron came to mind at IBM.

“How long does cooling your fridge take?” I asked Nick Bronn.

Nick works at Watson, IBM’s research center in Yorktown Heights, New York. Watson has sweeping architecture frosted with glass and stone. The building reminded me of Fred Astaire: decades-old, yet classy. I found Nick outside the cafeteria, nursing a coffee. He had sandy hair, more piercings than I, and a mandate to build a quantum computer.

thumb_IMG_0158_1024

IBM Watson

“Might I look around your lab?” I asked.

“Definitely!” Nick fished out an ID badge; grabbed his coffee cup; and whisked me down a wide, window-paneled hall.

Different researchers, across the world, are building quantum computers from different materials. IBMers use superconductors. Superconductors are tiny circuits. They function at low temperatures, so IBM has seven closet-sized fridges. Different teams use different fridges to tackle different challenges to computing.

Nick found a fridge that wasn’t running. He climbed half-inside, pointed at metallic wires and canisters, and explained how they work. I wondered how his cooling process compared to Aaron’s.

“You push a button.” Nick shrugged. “The fridge cools in two days.”

IBM, I learned, has dry fridges. Aaron uses a wet fridge. Dry and wet fridges operate differently, though both require helium. Aaron’s wet fridge vibrates less, jiggling his experiment less. Jiggling relates to transferring heat. Heat suppresses the quantum behaviors Aaron hopes to observe.

Heat and warmth manifest in many ways, in physics. Count Rumford, an 18th-century American-Brit, conjectured the relationship between heat and jiggling. He noticed that drilling holes into canons immersed in water boils the water. The drill bits rotated–moved in circles–transferring energy of movement to the canons, which heated up. Heat enraptures me because it relates to entropy, a measure of disorderliness and ignorance. The flow of heat helps explain why time flows in just one direction.

A physicist friend of mine writes papers, he says, when catalyzed by “blinding rage.” He reads a paper by someone else, whose misunderstandings anger him. His wrath boils over into a research project.

Warmth manifests as the welcoming of a visitor into one’s lab. Nick didn’t know me from Fred Astaire, but he gave me the benefit of the doubt. He let me pepper him with questions and invited more questions.

Warmth manifests as a 500-word disquisition on fridges. I asked Aaron, via email, about how his cooling compares to IBM’s. I expected two sentences and a link to Wikipedia, since Aaron works 12-hour shifts. But he took pity on his theorist friend. He also warmed to his subject. Can’t you sense the zeal in “Helium is the only substance in the world that will naturally isotopically separate (neat!)”? No knowledge of isotopic separation required.

Many quantum scientists like it cold. But understanding, curiosity, and teamwork fire us up. Anyone under the sway of those elements of science likes it hot.

With thanks to Aaron and Nick. Thanks also to John Smolin and IBM Watson’s quantum-computing-theory team for their hospitality.

1In many situations. Some systems, like small magnets, can access negative temperatures.

More than Its Parts

Posted on by
Reply

“The whole not only becomes more than but very different from the sum of its parts.”
– P. W. Anderson

It was a brainstorming meeting. We went from referencing a melodramatic viral Thai video to P. W. Anderson’s famous paper, “More is Different” to a vote-splitting internally produced Caltech video to the idea of extracting an edit out of existing video we already had from prior IQIM-Parveen Shah Productions’ shoots. And just like that, stepping from one idea to the next, hopping along, I pitched a theorist vs experimentalist “interrogation”. They must have liked it because the opinion in the room hushed for a few seconds. It seemed plausibly exciting and dangerously perhaps…fresh. But what I witnessed in the room was exactly the idea of collaboration and the “storm” of the brain. This wasn’t a conclusion we could likely have arrived to if all of us were sitting alone. There was a sense of the dust settling around the chaotic storm of the collective brain(s). John Preskill, Crystal Dilworth, Spiros Michalakis and I finally agreed on a plan of action going forward. And mind you, this of course was very far from the first meeting or email we had had about the video.

Capitalizing on the instant excitement, the emails started going around. Who will be the partners in crime? A combination of personality, representation, willingness and profile were balanced to decide the participants. We reached out to Gil Refael, David Hsieh, Nai-Chang Yeh, Xie Chen and Oskar Painter. They all said “yes”! It seemed deceivingly easy. And alas it came. Once the idea of the interrogation was unleashed; pitting them against one another or should I say “with” one another, brought about a bit of anxiety and confusion at first. “Wait, we’re supposed to fight on camera?” “But, our fields don’t match necessarily.” “No, no, it just doesn’t make sense.” I was prepared for the paranoia. It was natural and a bit less than what we got back when we pitched the high-fashion shoot for geeks video. I was taking them out of their comfort zone. It was natural. I abated the fears. I told them it was not going to be that controversial.

But I had to prep it to a certain level of “conflict” or “drama” so that what we got on camera, was at least some remnant of the initial emotional intention. The questions, the “tone” had to be set. Then we realized that it wasn’t just the meeting of the professorial brains but also the other researchers of the Institute that needed to be represented. And so, we also added some post docs and graduate students. Johannes Pollanen (now already an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University), Chandni Usha and Shaun Maguire. The idea of a nebulous conversation about theory vs practical or theory and practical seemed like a literal experiment of the very idea of the formation of the IQIM: putting the best brains in the field, in a sandbox, shaking them around to see the entangled interactions produced. It seemed too perfect.

The resulting video might not have produced the exact linear narrative I desired…but it was indeed “more than the sum of its parts”. It showed the excitement, the constant interaction, the curious conversations and the anxiety of being at the forefront, the cutting edge, where one is sometimes limited by another and sometimes enabled by the other, but most importantly, constantly growing and evolving. IQIM to me signifies that community.

Being accepted and integrated as a filmmaker itself is a virtue of that forced and encouraged collaboration and interaction.

And so we began. Before we filmed, I spent time with each duo, discussing and requesting a narrative and answers to some proposed questions.

Cinematographer, Anthony C. Kuhnz, and I were excited to shoot in Keith Schwab’s spacious lab, that had produced the memorable shot of Emma Wollman for our initial promo video. It’s space and background was exactly what we needed for the blurred backgrounds of this “brain space” we were hoping to create.

The lighting was certainly inspired by an interrogation scene but dampened for the dream state. We wanted to bring people into a behind the scenes discussion of some of the most brilliant minds in quantum physics, seeing the issues and challenges that face them; the exciting possibilities that they predict. The handheld camera and the dynamic pans from one to another were also inspired to communicate that transitional and collaborative “ball toss” energy. Once you feel that tangible creativity, then we go into the depths of what IQIM really is, how it creates its community within and without, the latter by focusing on the outreach and the educational efforts to spread the magic and sparkle of Physics.

I’m proud of this video. When I watch it, whether or not I understand everything being said, I do certainly want to be engaged with IQIM and that is the hope for others who watch it.

Nature is subtle and so is the effect of this video…as in, we hope that…we gotcha!

Life, cellular automata, and mentoring

Posted on by
5

One night last July, IQIM postdoc Ning Bao emailed me a photo. He’d found a soda can that read, “Share a Coke with Patrick.”

Ning and I were co-mentoring two Summer Undergraduate Research Fellows, or SURFers. One mentee received Ning’s photo: Caltech physics major Patrick Rall.

“Haha,” Patrick emailed back. “I’ll share a Coke.”

Patrick, Ning, and I shared the intellectual equivalent of a six-pack last summer. We shared papers, meals, frustrations, hopes, late-night emails (from Patrick and Ning), 7-AM emails (from me), and webcomic strips. Now a senior, Patrick is co-authoring a paper about his SURF project.

The project grew from the question “What would happen if we quantized Conway’s Game of Life?” (For readers unfamiliar with the game, I’ll explain below.) Lessons we learned about the Game of Life overlapped with lessons I learned about life, as a first-time mentor. The soda fountain of topics contained the following flavors.

Patrick + Coke

Update rules: Till last spring, I’d been burrowing into two models for out-of-equilibrium physics. PhD students burrow as no prairie dogs can. But, given five years in Caltech’s grassland, I wanted to explore. I wanted an update.

Ning and I had trespassed upon quantum game theory months earlier. Consider a nonquantum game, such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma or an election. Suppose that players have physical systems, such as photons (particles of light), that occupy superposed or entangled states. These quantum resources can change the landscape of the game’s possible outcomes. These changes clarify how we can harness quantum mechanics to process, transmit, and secure information.

How might quantum resources change Conway’s Game of Life, or GoL? British mathematician John Conway invented the game in 1970. Imagine a square board divided into smaller squares, or cells. On each cell sits a white or a black tile. Black represents a living organism; white represents a lack thereof.

Conway modeled population dynamics with an update rule. If prairie dogs overpopulate a field, some die from overcrowding. If a black cell borders more than three black neighbors, a white tile replaces the black. If separated from its pack, a prairie dog dies from isolation. If a black tile borders too few black neighbors, we exchange the black for a white. Mathematics columnist Martin Gardner detailed the rest of Conway’s update rule in this 1970 article.

Updating the board repeatedly evolves the population. Black and white shapes might flicker and undulate. Space-ship-like shapes can glide across the board. A simple update rule can generate complex outcomes—including, I found, frustrations, hopes, responsibility for another human’s contentment, and more meetings than I’d realized could fit in one summer.

Prairie dogs

Modeled by Conway’s Game of Life. And by PhD students.

Initial conditions: The evolution depends on the initial state, on how you distribute white and black tiles when preparing the board. Imagine choosing the initial state randomly from all the possibilities. White likely mingles with about as much black. The random initial condition might not generate eye-catchers such as gliders. The board might fade to, and remain, one color.*

Enthusiasm can fade as research drags onward. Project Quantum GoL has continued gliding due to its initial condition: The spring afternoon on which Ning, Patrick, and I observed the firmness of each other’s handshakes; Patrick walked Ning and me through a CV that could have intimidated a postdoc; and everyone tried to soothe everyone else’s nerves but occasionally avoided eye contact.

I don’t mean that awkwardness sustained the project. The awkwardness faded, as exclamation points and smiley faces crept into our emails. I mean that Ning and I had the fortune to entice Patrick. We signed up a bundle of enthusiasm, creativity, programming skills, and determination. That determination perpetuated the project through the summer and beyond. Initial conditions can determine a system’s evolution.

Long-distance correlations:  “Sure, I’d love to have dinner with you both! Thank you for the invitation!”

Lincoln Carr, a Colorado School of Mines professor, visited in June. Lincoln’s group, I’d heard, was exploring quantum GoLs.** He studies entanglement (quantum correlations) in many-particle systems. When I reached out, Lincoln welcomed our SURF group to collaborate.

I relished coordinating his visit with the mentees. How many SURFers could say that a professor had visited for his or her sake? When I invited Patrick to dinner with Lincoln, Patrick lit up like a sunrise over grasslands.

Our SURF group began skyping with Mines every Wednesday. We brainstorm, analyze, trade code, and kvetch with Mines student Logan Hillberry and colleagues. They offer insights about condensed matter; Patrick, about data processing and efficiency; I, about entanglement theory; and Ning, about entropy and time evolution.

We’ve learned together about long-range entanglement, about correlations between far-apart quantum systems. Thank goodness for skype and email that correlate far-apart research groups. Everyone would have learned less alone.

Correlations.001

Long-distance correlations between quantum states and between research groups

Time evolution: Logan and Patrick simulated quantum systems inspired by Conway’s GoL. Each researcher coded a simulation, or mathematical model, of a quantum system. They agreed on a nonquantum update rule; Logan quantized it in one way (constructed one quantum analog of the rule); and Patrick quantized the rule another way. They chose initial conditions, let their systems evolve, and waited.

In July, I noticed that Patrick brought a hand-sized green spiral notepad to meetings. He would synopsize his progress, and brainstorm questions, on the notepad before arriving. He jotted suggestions as we talked.

The notepad began guiding meetings in July. Patrick now steers discussions, ticking items off his agenda. The agenda I’ve typed remains minimized on my laptop till he finishes. My agenda contains few points absent from his, and his contains points not in mine.

Patrick and Logan are comparing their results. Behaviors of their simulations, they’ve found, depend on how they quantized their update rule. One might expect the update rule to determine a system’s evolution. One might expect the SURF program’s template to determine how research and mentoring skills evolve. But how we implement update rules matters.

SURF photo

Caltech’s 2015 quantum-information-theory Summer Undergraduate Research Fellows and mentors

Life: I’ve learned, during the past six months, about Conway’s Game of Life, simulations, and many-body entanglement. I’ve learned how to suggest references and experts when I can’t answer a question. I’ve learned that editing SURF reports by hand costs me less time than editing electronically. I’ve learned where Patrick and his family vacation, that he’s studying Chinese, and how undergrads regard on-campus dining. Conway’s Game of Life has expanded this prairie dog’s view of the grassland more than expected.

I’ll drink a Coke to that.

Glossary: Conway’s GoL is a cellular automaton. A cellular automaton consists of a board whose tiles change according to some update rule. Different cellular automata correspond to different board shapes, to boards of different dimensions, to different types of tiles, and to different update rules.

*Reversible cellular automata have greater probabilities (than the GoL has) of updating random initial states through dull-looking evolutions.

**Others have pondered quantum variations on Conway’s GoL.

Quantum Information: Episode II: The Tools’ Applications

Posted on by
4

Monday dawns. Headlines report that “Star Wars: Episode VII” has earned more money, during its opening weekend, than I hope to earn in my lifetime. Trading the newspaper for my laptop, I learn that a friend has discovered ThinkGeek’s BB-8 plushie. “I want one!” she exclaims in a Facebook post. “Because BB-8 definitely needs to be hugged.”

BB-8 plays sidekick to Star Wars hero Poe Dameron. The droid has a spherical body covered with metallic panels and lights.Mr. Gadget and Frosty the Snowman could have spawned such offspring. BB-8 has captured viewers’ hearts, and its chirps have captured cell-phone ringtones.

BB-8

ThinkGeek’s BB-8 plushie

Still, I scratch my head over my friend’s Facebook post. Hugged? Why would she hug…

Oh. Oops.

I’ve mentally verbalized “BB-8” as “BB84.” BB84 denotes an application of quantum theory to cryptography. Cryptographers safeguard information from eavesdroppers and tampering. I’ve been thinking that my friend wants to hug a safety protocol.

Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard invented BB84 in 1984. Imagine wanting to tell someone a secret. Suppose I wish to coordinate, with a classmate, the purchase of a BB-8 plushie for our friend the droid-hugger. Suppose that the classmate and I can communicate only via a public channel on which the droid-hugger eavesdrops.

Cryptographers advise me to send my classmate a key. A key is a random string of letters, such as CCCAAACCABACA. I’ll encode my message with the string, with which my classmate will decode the message.

Key 2

I have to transmit the key via the public channel. But the droid-hugger eavesdrops on the public channel. Haven’t we taken one step forward and one step back? Why would the key secure our information?

Because quantum-information science enables me to to transmit the key without the droid-hugger’s obtaining it. I won’t transmit random letters; I’ll transmit quantum states. That is, I’ll transmit physical systems, such as photons (particles of light), whose properties encode quantum information.

A nonquantum letter has a value, such as A or B or C.  Each letter has one and only one value, regardless of whether anyone knows what value the letter has. You can learn the value by measuring (looking at) the letter. We can’t necessarily associate such a value with a quantum state. Imagine my classmate measuring a state I send. Which value the measurement device outputs depends on chance and on how my classmate looks at the state.

If the droid-hugger intercepts and measures the state, she’ll change it. My classmate and I will notice such changes. We’ll scrap our key and repeat the BB84 protocol until the droid-hugger quits eavesdropping.

BB84 launched quantum cryptography, the safeguarding of information with quantum physics. Today’s quantum cryptographers rely on BB84 as you rely, when planning a holiday feast, on a carrot-cake recipe that passed your brother’s taste test on his birthday. Quantum cryptographers construct protocols dependent on lines like “The message sender and receiver are assumed to share a key distributed, e.g., via the BB84 protocol.”

BB84 has become a primitive task, a solved problem whose results we invoke in more-complicated problems. Other quantum-information primitives include (warning: jargon ahead) entanglement distillation, entanglement dilution, quantum data compression, and quantum-state merging. Quantum-information scientists solved many primitive problems during the 1990s and early 2000s. You can apply those primitives, even if you’ve forgotten how to prove them.

Caveman

A primitive task, like quantum-entanglement distillation

Those primitives appear to darken quantum information’s horizons. The spring before I started my PhD, an older physicist asked me why I was specializing in quantum information theory. Haven’t all the problems been solved? he asked. Isn’t quantum information theory “dead”?

Imagine discovering how to power plasma blades with kyber crystals. Would you declare, “Problem solved” and relegate your blades to the attic? Or would you apply your tool to defending freedom?

Saber + what to - small

Primitive quantum-information tools are unknotting problems throughout physics—in computer science; chemistry; optics (the study of light); thermodynamics (the study of work, heat, and efficiency); and string theory. My advisor has tracked how uses of “entanglement,” a quantum-information term, have swelled in high-energy-physics papers.

A colleague of that older physicist views quantum information theory as a toolkit, a perspective, a lens through which to view science. During the 1700s, the calculus invented by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz revolutionized physics. Emmy Noether (1882—1935) recast physics in terms of symmetries and conservation laws. (If the forces acting on a system don’t change in time, for example, the system doesn’t gain or lose energy. A constant force is invariant under, or symmetric with respect to, the progression of time. This symmetry implies that the system’s energy is conserved.) We can cast physics instead (jargon ahead) in terms of the minimization of a free energy or an action.

Quantum information theory, this physicist predicted, will revolutionize physics as calculus, symmetries, conservation, and free energy have. Quantum-information tools such as entropies, entanglement, and qubits will bleed into subfields of physics as Lucasfilm has bled into the fanfiction, LEGO, and Halloween-costume markets.

BB84, and the solution of other primitives, have not killed quantum information. They’ve empowered it to spread—thankfully, to this early-career quantum information scientist. Never mind BB-8; I’d rather hug BB84. Perhaps I shall. Engineers have realized technologies that debuted on Star Trek; quantum mechanics has secured key sharing; bakers have crafted cakes shaped like the Internet; and a droid’s popularity rivals R2D2’s. Maybe next Monday will bring a BB84 plushie.

Plushie

The author hugging the BB84 paper and a plushie. On my wish list: a combination of the two.

Discourse in Delft

Posted on by
5

A camel strolled past, yards from our window in the Applied-Sciences Building.

I hadn’t expected to see camels at TU Delft, aka the Delft University of Technology, in Holland. I breathed, “Oh!” and turned to watch until the camel followed its turbaned leader out of sight. Nelly Ng, the PhD student with whom I was talking, followed my gaze and laughed.

Nelly works in Stephanie Wehner’s research group. Stephanie—a quantum cryptographer, information theorist, thermodynamicist, and former Caltech postdoc—was kind enough to host me for half August. I arrived at the same time as TU Delft’s first-year undergrads. My visit coincided with their orientation. The orientation involved coffee hours, team-building exercises, and clogging the cafeteria whenever the Wehner group wanted lunch.

And, as far as I could tell, a camel.

Not even a camel could unseat Nelly’s and my conversation. Nelly, postdoc Mischa Woods, and Stephanie are the Wehner-group members who study quantum and small-scale thermodynamics. I study quantum and small-scale thermodynamics, as Quantum Frontiers stalwarts might have tired of hearing. The four of us exchanged perspectives on our field.

Mischa knew more than Nelly and I about clocks; Nelly knew more about catalysis; and I knew more about fluctuation relations. We’d read different papers. We’d proved different theorems. We explained the same phenomena differently. Nelly and I—with Mischa and Stephanie, when they could join us—questioned and answered each other almost perpetually, those two weeks.

We talked in our offices, over lunch, in the group discussion room, and over tea at TU Delft’s Quantum Café. We emailed. We talked while walking. We talked while waiting for Stephanie to arrive so that she could talk with us.

IMG_0125

The site of many a tête-à-tête.

The copiousness of the conversation drained me. I’m an introvert, formerly “the quiet kid” in elementary school. Early some mornings in Delft, I barricaded myself in the visitors’ office. Late some nights, I retreated to my hotel room or to a canal bank. I’d exhausted my supply of communication; I had no more words for anyone. Which troubled me, because I had to finish a paper. But I regret not one discussion, for three reasons.

First, we relished our chats. We laughed together, poked fun at ourselves, commiserated about calculations, and confided about what we didn’t understand.

We helped each other understand, second. As I listened to Mischa or as I revised notes about a meeting, a camel would stroll past a window in my understanding. I’d see what I hadn’t seen before. Mischa might be explaining which quantum states represent high-quality clocks. Nelly might be explaining how a quantum state ξ can enable a state ρ to transform into a state σ. I’d breathe, “Oh!” and watch the mental camel follow my interlocutor through my comprehension.

Nelly’s, Mischa’s, and Stephanie’s names appear in the acknowledgements of the paper I’d worried about finishing. The paper benefited from their explanations and feedback.

Third, I left Delft with more friends than I’d had upon arriving. Nelly, Mischa, and I grew to know each other, to trust each other, to enjoy each other’s company. At the end of my first week, Nelly invited Mischa and me to her apartment for dinner. She provided pasta; I brought apples; and Mischa brought a sweet granola-and-seed mixture. We tasted and enjoyed more than we would have separately.

IMG_0050

Dinner with Nelly and Mischa.

I’ve written about how Facebook has enhanced my understanding of, and participation in, science. Research involves communication. Communication can challenge us, especially many of us drawn to science. Let’s shoulder past the barrier. Interlocutors point out camels—and hot-air balloons, and lemmas and theorems, and other sources of information and delight—that I wouldn’t spot alone.

With gratitude to Stephanie, Nelly, Mischa, the rest of the Wehner group (with whom I enjoyed talking), QuTech and TU Delft.

During my visit, Stephanie and Delft colleagues unveiled the “first loophole-free Bell test.” Their paper sent shockwaves (AKA camels) throughout the quantum community. Scott Aaronson explains the experiment here.