Original subtitles

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the following Nova program contains

scenes of quantum physics which is known

to cause confusion anxiety and even

heartbreak please see your physicist if

symptoms

persist quantum physics it's the science

of the very small but it punches far

above its weight quantum physics has not

just been important it's been

revolutionary it's the most successful

scientific theory of the last 100 years

quantum mechanics already permeates

everything we

do everything from your computer or cell

phone to how we keep time depends on our

understanding of the quantum world we

could say now that we live in a Quantum

age and it's behind one of the greatest

discoveries in the history of

science gravitation

waves tiny ripples in the fabric of

SpaceTime itself gravitational waves

give us a whole new way to look at the

universe and yet beyond the

mathematics quantum physics makes a

shocking

claim that at its deepest level reality

plays like a game of

chance probabilities are not a measure

of what we don't know they're just in

intrinsic to the quantum theory with

mindboggling behaviors like

superposition and entanglement this is

weird it's strange what quantum physics

really means remains deeply mysterious

but it's created the world we live in

today quantum physics actually governs

everything around us there not some

weird outposted physics that's far away

it's completely changed the way we used

to live into the way we live now

decoding the universe Quant

right now on

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December 12th

1970 NASA launches a scout B

rocket from a former oil drilling

platform off Kenya's

Coast its payload is a small satellite

named uru a Swahili word meaning

freedom uru is the first Space Telescope

dedicated to observing

x-rays high energy light waves invisible

to our

eyes powerful sources of x-rays

constantly bombard Earth but our

atmosphere blocks

them with this groundbreaking telescope

a new Vista for exploration opens

but buried in the data collected from

uru is something

ominous in

1971 scientists revealed that the

constellation signis the

swan contains what until then was more

of a mythical mathematical

Beast a black

hole black holes are the most mysterious

objects in the

universe also like the most

violent even Einstein didn't think

nature would allow such a crazy

object black holes are fearsome

monsters capable of devouring whole

planets whole

stars and even each other

a black hole is created when

gravitational forces bring together

enough Mass to put a rip into the fabric

of

SpaceTime some of them are genuinely

monstrous I mean millions billions maybe

even 10 billion times the mass of our

own Sun we don't actually have lot of

physics to predict what's going to

happen to us when we go in hopefully

none of us will experience it anytime

soon

in the decade since the first sighting

science has learned a lot about these

menacing and mysterious objects of

Destruction they aren't that

rare super massive black holes sit at

the center of most large

galaxies we have one in

ours but it turns out these Cosmic

behemoths Also may have an Achilles heel

first predicted by Steven Hawking in

1974 scientists thought of a black hole

as a one-way trip to

Oblivion that past its Event Horizon

nothing could

Escape but Hawking

disagreed he theorized something did

escape from these Mighty

Giants

radiation ironically the end result of

physics at the tiniest of

scales quantum

physics Clifford Johnson is a

non-fiction graphic author and also a

theoretical

physicist one of the key things that was

discovered in quantum physics is that

empty space itself itself is not empty

it's seething with

possibility instead of having empty

space

here a particle in its antiparticle can

appear dance around a little bit and

then annihilate back into empty

space now imagine that happening near a

black hole Horizon which we're told is a

one-way door what if one of those

particles Falls in and now the partner

doesn't have anything to annihilate with

so it will actually fly off

and a distant Observer will see that

particle as radiation coming from the

black

hole without consuming more matter if it

emits radiation it will gradually shrink

in

size the black hole actually begins to

evaporate now this is a completely

stunning

Revelation known as Hawking radiation

its existence is still only a theory but

perhaps given enough time and it is a

very very very long time for many black

Halls longer than the current age of the

universe even a super massive black hole

like the one at the heart of the Milky

Way May evaporate and

disappear

vanquished by the quantum world and the

physics of the very

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small the quantum world is often cast as

weird and it sure can look that way in

the movies you're sending a signal down

to the quantum

realm where are we

but what is quantum

physics it arose as the solution to a

problem science during the 19th century

had investigated smaller and smaller

amounts of matter and energy but by the

first two decades of the 20th century

the existing line between the physics of

particles and the physics of waves had

grown murky

especially when trying to understand the

fundamental nature of

light sometimes it really is important

to describe light as a wave as an

extended object that sort of waves in

space and travels over time analogously

to a ocean wave in the water other times

as people like Albert Einstein and

others began to to find they really

really had to describe aspects of light

as if it was a collection of particles

that traveled almost like miniature

billiard

balls ultimately the answer was a new

kind of physics quantum

mechanics which included an amalgam of

ideas about both particles and

waves its earliest formulation dates

back roughly 100

years this 1927 conference in Brussels

is where the world's leading physicists

met to discuss the new formed

Theory and there was a lot to

discuss because quantum mechanics

represented a radical departure from the

previous Paradigm of physics what we

call today classical

physics in classical physics handed down

by Newton we had determinism we had the

Clockwork universe so if you throw a

ball that's a classical object with the

same Force the same speed the same angle

it's always going to go go to the same

place right in principle if you knew

exactly the state of the whole world all

at once and you knew the laws of physics

you could exactly predict what

everything was going to do arbitrarily

far in the future and into the

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past in classical physics even events

that we think of as random aren't

really there are things that appear

random in our everyday lives like

rolling dice it looked random right but

actually it's a

deterministic set of events which leads

to whatever outcome the dice shows if I

told you exactly how I was going to roll

the dice you could predict based on that

initial throw what the final outcome is

going to be it's a very hard

mathematical problem but it's not

intractable Quantum mechanically that's

not the

case quantum mechanics tossed out the

certainty of the classical Clockwork

universe

for one that only allowed for

probabilistic predictions about

potential

observations probability in quantum

physics is different because even if we

have the most complete description that

the laws of physics will allow us to

have typically we're unable to predict

precisely what we'll see when we observe

a Quantum system quantum mechanics say

we can know everything there is to know

about the setup right now and still when

we want to make a measurement of it in

the future the best we can do is say

there's a 50% chance of getting this

outcome 30% chance of that 20% chance of

that in the quantum theory probabilities

are not a measure of what we don't know

they're just intrinsic to the quantum

theory we cannot get around them that is

impossible some physicists raised on

determinism had trouble accepting this

New probabilistic

View Albert Einstein famously said that

he didn't believe God plays dice with

the

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universe but there is another related

even stranger aspect to quantum

mechanics in classical physics external

reality is independent of the

Observer looking at the moon doesn't

change the the

moon and if you look away the

deterministic laws of physics continue

to guide the moon on its

path but in quantum mechanics things are

weirder the basic idea of quantum

mechanics the thing that we really

struggle with to get our heads around

even as professional physicists is that

unlike any other version of physics

quantum mechanics separates what happens

in a system when we're not observing it

from what we see when we measure

it a few rare exceptions aside quantum

mechanics says that we can't know the

position of a particle like an electron

when we're not observing

it at best it can only be described

mathematically as a wave its exact

position given in probability

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but at the moment that the particle is

observed the probabilistic wave function

collapses to one specific

location to The Observer who never sees

this wav likee

quality it is like the particle was a

particle all

along that opens up a whole world of

questions you know what happens to the

observational outcomes that are not

observed what picks out which outcome is

going to happen this is still what we're

thinking about

today during that mysterious period when

the particle is considered neither here

nor

there it is said to be in superp

position in a sense a combination of all

the possible

outcomes but what does that really

mean is the electron everywhere at the

same time is it nowhere at all is it at

one place and we just don't know all of

those questions are actually outside of

what quantum theory itself actually can

answer it's not part of the theory at

all so if you ask me your guess is as

good as mine unfortunately that's the

best I can

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do for most people quantum mechanics

remains deeply

unintuitive and yet it has proven itself

again and again by making predictions

with uncanny

accuracy in Practical terms it is the

most successful Theory science has ever

produced and it has shaped our Modern

Life quantum physics has not just been

important it's been revolutionary it's

completely changed the way we used to

live into the way we live

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now take our sense of time

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perhaps there is no better illustration

of our intimate relationship with it

than music and

dance the underlying movement of Tango

is reliant on the beat which is reliant

on timing which creates synchronization

to create a truly smooth dance it's not

enough to just be synchronized on the

beat it's also the

synchronicity between the Beats that's

important that's a real Beauty in it in

finding that connection through

stretching out that

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second Tara forier is a Tango

professional and a physicist deeply

involved in the science of time so we

have a number of systems in this lab she

works here these systems are used to

characterize atomic clocks and also

compare atomic clocks at the Boulder

Colorado Laboratories of the National

Institute of Standards and technology or

nist home to some of the atomic clocks

that help set the official time for the

country over the centuries we've tracked

time a variety of ways by the sun's

movement

the swing of

pendulums the oscillations of Springs

and in the 20th century the vibrations

of quartz

crystals but since the

1960s time has been officially

determined using atomic clocks and the

quantum characteristics of

atoms and the idea is that the laws of

physics are unchanging unlike something

like the rotation of the earth the

rotation of the Earth itself can change

because of plate tectonics because the

Moon is moving away from the earth it

physics is not truly

fundamental the reason why we love

atomic clock it's a universally defined

time no matter who does the experiment

no matter where you do the experiment in

principle once you corrected for the all

systematic effects it should produce the

same time no matter

where the consistency of atomic clocks

arises from the very nature of atoms

atomic clocks depend crucially on the

quantum physics of atoms you have a

nucleus around which there are electrons

in certain energy levels and these

energy levels are possible energy states

that the electron can have inside the

atom since an electron can only be at

certain energy levels and not in between

to get to a higher level it needs to

encounter a very specific helping

hand such as a particular

Photon so if it were to absorb an

incoming Photon it would have to be of

just the right energy to jump from one

level to a higher

level that special relationship between

the electrons of a particular atom and a

photon of a specific energy level is a

unique signature for that atom it's

called a resonant

frequency so this characteristic

signature of this atom gives us a very

specific frequency standard that we can

use to build a timekeeping

device atomic clocks work in different

ways but they all use a specific type of

atom or molecule as a reference to lock

in the frequency of an electromagnetic

wave whose oscillations provide the

ticking of the

clock today a second is officially

defined by counting the oscillations of

the primary resonant frequency of a

cesium 133

atom that's over 9 billion oscillations

per

second and you interact with that time

reference more than you might think for

example through the global positioning

system

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GPS turn left I think the GPS is

actually kind of crazy when you think

about it how do we do anything before

GPS the us-based GPS system uses over 30

dedicated orbiting satellites each with

multiple atomic clocks when you use the

GPS on your cell

phone its receiver checks the signals

from four or more satellites the signal

contains information about the

satellite's position and the time it

sent the

signal that timestamp is

critical your phone uses it to calculate

how long it took to receive the signal

and from that knows the distance to the

satellite with that information from

multiple satellites it is possible to

triangulate the phone's position within

a few

yards but the whole system depends on

knowing the

time in the end I find it amazing how

strongly we're committed and tied to

atomic clocks and how much we take it

for granted even though I built atomic

clocks but when I'm driving being Guided

by this GPS service you don't really

become aware of how much atomic clock

technology has permeated everywhere in

Modern

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Life have you had a chance to look at

more systematically varying the VZ June

ye is a physicist with joint

appointments with nist the University of

Colorado Boulder and their Joint

Institute Gilla what if you lock exactly

on top of each other and see whether

that Peak disappears completely he works

on the new generation of atomic clocks

known as Optical atomic

clocks while cesium clocks use

microwaves Optical clocks use lasers

which run at higher

frequencies that also means using a

different atom instead of cesium Junes

work mostly uses strontium

atoms along with the laser carefully

tuned to one of strontium's resonant

frequencies it puts one of the strontium

electrons into super position so it is

both excited and unexcited at the same

time creating what June calls a Quantum

pendulum this pendulum is swinging at a

speed of nearly 1 million billion cycles

per second it's going back and forth

back and forth and this superp position

creates this Quantum pendulum and when

it comes to accuracy more swings or

higher

frequency equals more

Precision if you think of swings as

marks on a ruler the more marks you have

the more exactly you can

measure so compared to a cesium clock

June's strontium clock is around 100,000

times more precise

and that much sensitivity makes all the

more apparent some of the stranger

aspects of time including one first

predicted by

Einstein gravitational time

dilation in the movie

Interstellar part of the crew of a

spaceship descends in a shuttle to a

planet orbiting a super massive black

hole when the shuttle returns those on

the mission feel they've only been gone

for 3 hours but not the crew member who

remained in orbit hello

Rob I've waited years 23 years 4 months

8 Days the difference in time is another

effect of the black hole's warping of

the fabric of

SpaceTime the warping not only means

gravity gets stronger closer to the

black hole but time gets slower too

and you don't need a black hole to be

able to measure

it even on Earth gravity varies and so

does time based on the distance from the

planet's

Center so a person at the top of the

Empire State Building experiences weaker

gravity and time going faster than a

person at street level where gravity is

stronger but all that happens

imperceptibly our wrist watches just

aren't accurate enough to show the

difference but June's Optical clocks are

so accurate that even a small difference

in elevation between two clocks will

reveal the

discrepancy in the passage of

time when the clock changes its

elevation by few hundred microns

basically size of a human hair you will

start to be able to see the time is

actually running differently still takes

it a lot easier with that much accuracy

a clock transforms into something more

than a Time piece it becomes a new

window into the nature of the

universe making a clock is much more

than just a piece to keep time it is a

sensor to explore fundamental physics to

expand our curiosity to build new

technologies that can connect to Quantum

Computing Quantum information processing

and

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communication Central to making June's

Precision atomic clocks work are Ultra

stable

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lasers which themselves are also a

Quantum

technology they date back to the 19

1960s you are looking at an industrial

laser which emits an extraordinary light

not to be found in nature I will show

you this scene from 1964's Goldfinger is

said to be one of the first popular

depictions of this new Cutting Edge Tech

I think you've made your point

Goldfinger thank you for the

demonstration today lasers are

everywhere there are medical lasers to

correct

vision lasers at the checkout counter

lasers for cutting communicating

entertaining cats and of

course for light

shows which encourage us all to trip the

light fantastic

[Applause]

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[Applause]

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[Applause]

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which may be

why experimental physicist ra aikari is

laser focused on

lasers when I talk about how how

beautiful a laser is as an instrument I

don't want to gush about it too much

like I'm in love with lasers I don't

know I feel like a weirdo fanatic or

something like that but there just

there's something about them to

understand what makes laser light so

special it makes sense to look at an

ordinary light bulb the oldfashioned

kind with a Tungsten filament it

produces light through thermal

radiation an electric current passing

through the filament Heats it up it's t

atoms become excited and vibrate at

different

speeds which causes them to emit photons

in all directions across a variety of

wavelengths compared to a laser this is

chaos the way you should think about a

light bulb is something like they're

just a mob of people all singing a

different pitch so it's like a rock

concert audience

[Applause]

but a laser a laser is more like if you

go to juliard or Berkeley School of

Music and you go to a

concert it's like a choir of people who

have got Perfect Pitch but it's a choir

of something like a million trillion

people singing at the same time the same

tone that's because laser light is

generated in an entirely different way a

fact hidden in its name stimulated IM

let's say we have inside an atom an

electron that's at some excited state

some higher energy level and now a

photon of just the right frequency

passes by the atom it triggers the atom

to do something interesting the electron

loses energy and goes to the lower

energy and

emits a photon of precisely the same

frequency as the one that came in it's

going in the same direction and it has

the same phase so what we have there is

a quantum mechanical amplification

process if we place a group of those

same excited atoms inside a chamber with

mirrors at both ends the emitted photons

will bounce back and

forth continuing to stimulate the

emission of more

photons which in turn stimulate even

more

photons one of the mirrors is only

partially

reflected it allows some of the light to

escape now that light's very special

it's composed of photons that are all

the same frequency so the same color and

they're all the same phase and all going

in the same direction so you have this

intense pure beam of light and that's

the

laser lasers have proven to be an

extremely versatile tool

including for measuring

distance R work with stable

highfrequency lasers takes that to an

extreme when you use them you're in a

whole different realm of measurement

than anything else that has to do with

rulers and any of that other stuff

anybody who's like a real Pro knows that

the only thing that you ever measure is

frequency if you're measuring anything

else you're kind of an

amateur thanks to the fixed speed of

light the beam of a highfrequency laser

has an incredibly short

wavelength perfect for measuring

extremely small changes in

distance since 1996 Ron has been part of

a project that uses laser light to

measure something incredibly

unimaginably small and

weird tiny fluctuations in the fabric of

space and time

itself space and time uh Ripple they're

not fixed things and so the distance

between my two hands is not always going

to be this if I hold them

steady the idea like so many goes back

to

Einstein in the early 20th century his

work led to the merging of space and

time into one concept

SpaceTime and he theorized that gravity

was was the warping of that space-time

fabric by the mass of

objects but that carried a startling

implication that the acceleration of

objects with mass would create ripples

in space time that spread at the speed

of

light gravitational

waves gravitational waves were first

projected by Einstein and he didn't

believe it at first so he went back and

forth through I believe the

mid-30s but his first prediction was

they were too minute to ever be

detected by the 1980s that sentiment had

changed and ligo the laser

interferometer gravitational wave

Observatory was founded as a joint

Caltech and MIT

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project part of R's work at Caltech has

been to continuously improve the

essential art of ligo laser

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interferometry this is the where it all

begins uh I'm going to show you the

whole laser andrometer in here that's a

prototype of the Lio system the basic

design is easy to understand the ligo

interferometer has two arms at right

angles to each other a very stable

infrared laser feeds into a beam split

which directs half the beam down each

arm half of the light goes one way and

half goes the other way and then you

have mirrors at the ends and they

reflect the light

back the phase of one arm of the laser

is the reverse of the other if all is

normal when recombined they will cancel

each other out resulting in no

signal but if a gravitational wave

passes through distorting SpaceTime

the length of each arm will change

Shifting the phase of the two

beams for a brief moment the equipment

will register a

signal instead of having exact

cancellation and destructive

interference you have a little bit of

light leaking out and that little bit of

light that leaks out is what we

detect but there is a key difference

between Ra's working test bed and the

real deal

size this is one of two Lio

installations in the United

States while the arms of the caltac

instrument are about 44 yd long the ones

here cover about 2 and A2 miles

each costing hundreds of millions of

dollars Lio was a huge gamble on an

unproven

idea that paid

off in 2015 a signal was

detected and it was a

doy the first event that ligo detected

was the most powerful event human beings

had recorded since the Big Bang itself

more power came out of that Collision of

those two black holes then was emanated

by all the stars in the universe

combined

all of that power came out in the

ringing of the drum of

SpaceTime since the original event ligo

has confirmed the detection of more than

80

others it is hard to overstate the

significance of the

discovery ligo is massive Albert

Einstein predicted that gravitational

waves should exist and now we measure

them this is the most direct direct

observation of black holes that we've

ever had this is a complete revolution

in

science and it's all possible because of

that Quantum technology that has become

completely embedded in our

lives the

laser the more stable your laser is the

more things in the universe you can

measure and there's no limit to it so

every year when we get lasers better and

better we'll be able to see further out

into the universe and see tinier things

in the microscopic nature of reality

matter space and time anything like that

you just have to keep working on this

one tool and make it better and

better arguably the most important

change in quantum physics in recent

decades is a deeper understanding of a

special kind of shared State called

quantum

entanglement imagine a machine that

spits out pairs of coins

which on the surface look like ordinary

coins if you flip one it comes up heads

or tails about 50% of the time nothing

strange

there but using a pair of coins fresh

out of the machine you flip one it comes

up heads and then the other it also

comes up

heads that could just be

locked so then you do the same thing

with another fresh pair

this time the first coin is Tails and so

is the second agreement

again so you flip another

pair and then

another and

another and

another pair after pair the two coins

always agree on the first

flip what's going

on maybe the first flipped coin once it

comes comes up heads or tails is somehow

telling the other coin how to

behave to make sure that can't happen

you separate the coins by flying one to

the moon and flip them at the same time

so no message could possibly travel

between them still they come up in

agreement it all sounds too strange to

be true but particles really can behave

like those

coins in quantum physics it's called

entanglement entanglement is really just

a stubborn stubborn exciting Andor

frustrating fact that takes a long time

to try to get our heads around

entanglement is certainly the most

interesting and the most confusing

aspect of quantum it's one of these

things we don't see you know naively in

the world around us but it is taking

place deep in the materials that exist

around us every

day and while you probably won't come

across a coin entangler anytime

soon in the lab scientists routinely

generate pairs of entangled particles

that share a Quantum state so fully they

can be thought of as one Quantum

object you simply can't differentiate

between them it's just one pure State

it's as though you have a single entity

that's spatially separated without a

physical

connection entangled particles remain

connected even when they're separated by

hundreds of

miles likely far

more so does that mean it can go between

here and Andromeda probably the

equations give us no reason to think it

wouldn't entanglement sounds

bizarre Einstein derided the idea as

spooky action at a

distance but since the

1970s experiment after experiment has

confirmed entanglement is a real Quantum

phenomenon now of course many many

decades later we know that entanglement

is undeniably a part of the world it's

how the world works at the quantum

mechanical level we better get used to

that and now see what can we do with it

because it's powerful let's try to use

it to become this new tool be able to

create and control it might be arguably

thought of as one of the biggest

scientific and Engineering developments

of the 21st

century and that's happening on several

fronts entanglement has been put to work

in Quantum

cryptography and Quantum

Communication in atomic clocks and in

continuing improvements to ligo but

perhaps with the greatest

Fanfare in Quantum

Computing and that starts with

this the

Cubit the Cubit gets its name from its

cousin in classical Computing the binary

[Music]

bit like its name suggests a binary bit

can only be set to zero or

one but from such humble beginnings much

has

flowed more or less all the computer

that makes up the modern

world all calculations all emails

whether you're talking to your friend or

whether you are a NASA scientist doing

some rocket calculation all of that can

boil down to just zeros and ones

switching inside your computer which is

kind of amazing that it's that

Universal despite it many successes the

binary bit is the equivalent of a light

switch on or off

the Cubit is far more subtle the special

thing about a cubit is that it operates

by the laws of quantum mechanics it

doesn't have to be just in the zero

state or just in the one state it can be

a superposition of

both that superposition creates a

mathematical space often represented by

a

sphere where a classical bit can only

sit on the South Pole or the North Pole

a Quantum BD can be anywhere on the

surface of this sphere it opens up a

whole new array of possibilities of

mathematical

operations but a single Cubit will only

take you so far in Computing one cubit

by itself is not a computer or it would

be the world's smallest most useless

computer but when you combine them it

can provide enough computation and

calculations that you can get some

something on the other

end using several cubits together opens

up the power of entanglement and

unleashes mindboggling levels of

complexity if I wanted to give a

complete description of what's happening

with just a few hundred qits very highly

entangled with one another I would have

to write down more bits than the number

of atoms in the visible universe and

it's that extravagance of the quantum

language that we wish to exploit in a

quantum

computer beyond the work being done at

universities there are about a 100

companies developing cubits and Quantum

Computing

Hardware major players include Google

Microsoft Amazon and

IBM its Hardware development effort is

centered

here at the Thomas J Watson research

Center in Yorktown Heights outside New

York

City okay let me introduce you to our

IBM Quantum system 2 actually inside

here is three Quantum processes and the

team is working on how you investigate

algorithms that use multiple different

processes IBM's cubits employs small

Loops of superconducting

metal since superconductors require cold

temperatures to operate the center

section of the computer is a

refrigeration

unit in fact the cooling unit of a

quantum computer can look so cool it's

often confused for the star of the

show so this is a dilution refrigerator

a lot of people think this entire cool

shiny machine here is a quantum computer

but that's actually not the case this is

not a quantum computer this is a quantum

computer this tiny little chip down here

this is a freezer basically but you

can't deny that it is amazing looking

all of these fancy shiny parts are just

plumbing parts and cables designed to

keep the quantum computer insanely cold

I mean it's likeus 400 something de F

like there's absolute zero we are

.015 above that it has to be so insanely

cold because we use superconductors to

make our cubits and then furthermore we

want to remove any type of noise for

thermal excitations which can disturb

the cubits and make them behave in ways

that we don't

like since 2016 IBM has made its quantum

computers accessible to the public over

the

Internet anyone can come up with a

Quantum algorithm akin to a classical

computer program and submit it to be run

since we first put it on the cloud

people have run over three trillion jobs

on the quantum

computers running an algorithm on a

quantum computer involves setting the

initial state of the

cubits and then manipulating them in a

series of

steps to do that on its systems IBM uses

microwave

pulses these microwave pulses

essentially either flip the Cubit create

it in a superposition or measure it

after all the manipulation the cubits

are red collapsing their Quantum State

into either a zero or

one but there's a catch on a quantum

computer the chip can spontaneously

Decay from the excited state or the one

state into the zero State when we don't

want it to and this can occur you know

about every millisecond or so these

errors are basically inherent to the

quantum need nature of the device

correcting these errors is one of the

built-in challenges of quantum

Computing the current generation of

quantum computers are not yet able to do

it themselves so there's one final

step the information then comes back out

then it gets sent over to a computer

where we do things like error mitigation

post-process the results correct for any

extra noise and then we send it back

through the cloud

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it is easy to imagine that Quantum

Computing is the next phase of classical

Computing that soon you'll see a box

that says new cubid chip

inside the most common question people

always ask me which is like when will I

be able to play Minecraft when will I be

able to play Doom on my quantum computer

quantum computers are not good for

everything in the future there won't be

Quantum PowerPoint there won't be

Quantum words we don't need to do that

because we have classical computers and

Xboxes that are perfectly suitable for

those types of

applications quantum computers function

very differently and are aimed at very

different

tasks experts see a role for quantum

computers in areas like simulation of

quantum behaviors in chemistry and

materials or optimization of complex

systems ranging from energy distribution

to database searches

in any case the future of quantum

Computing is far from

written so because things are really

speeding up all over the world I think

we're going to very quickly see a

demonstration of a task that's been done

with a quantum computer that just is

well well outside the capability of

current computers and that'll probably

happen within the next 5 to 10 years I

would say the future of computing is

going to have classical accelerators

it's going to have ai accelerators and

it's going to have Quantum computering

accelerators all working together and

for me that's one of the most exciting

things is how do we actually take

advantage of all these different

accelerators I think that a well

functioning quantum computer will be

able to do certain things much much

faster but number one we don't know for

sure and number two it might turn out

the pessimistic view of this that those

problems are kind of limited that

they're very very special ized but

that's all exciting fun work in progress

that's what makes it

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interesting the roots of quantum physics

go back 100

years but only in recent decades have we

started to gain control over the quantum

realm and that has already transformed

the way we

live there has been astonishing change

in the kinds of quantum systems we can

build and manipulate quantum mechanics

itself already permeates everything we

do there part of how we manipulate the

world they're part of every transistor

and every computer it's about how things

interact on a fundamental level but it

turns out we need to know how things

interact on a fundamental level to do

big things as well there's still deep

Mysteries to puzzle with that part

hasn't gone away what's increased in a

way that I still find remarkable

is that these same curious mindboggling

Quantum features are now built into how

people navigate the world every single

day but what about the

future what will Quantum technology

offer in the coming decades just like we

can tell our kids oh yeah you know I was

born before the internet and I was born

before smartphones 50 years from now

people are going to be telling stories

about technologies that are normal that

today we can't even F I believe 50 years

from now people growing up won't think

twice about entanglement

superposition I think that will be

common place one of the things I love

about quantum mechanics is that it seems

non-intuitive to us that tells us that

there's something Beyond just what we

think we understand we can't always rely

on our intuition we have to rely on our

understanding to make progress and

quantum mechanics just shows us that so

clearly

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