Monthly Archives: June 2021

Imagine you sit down and pick up your favourite book. You look at the image on the front cover, run your fingers across the smooth book sleeve, and smell that familiar book smell as you flick through the pages. To you, the book is made up of a range of sensory appearances.

But you also expect the book has its own independent existence behind those appearances. So when you put the book down on the coffee table and walk into the kitchen, or leave your house to go to work, you expect the book still looks, feels, and smells just as it did when you were holding it.

Expecting objects to have their own independent existence independent of us, and any other objects is actually a deep-seated assumption we make about the world. This assumption has its origin in the scientific revolution of the 17th century, and is part of what we call the mechanistic worldview. According to this view, the world is like a giant clockwork machine whose parts are governed by set laws of motion.

This view of the world is responsible for much of our scientific advancement since the 17th century. But as Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli argues in his new book Helgoland, quantum theory the physical theory that describes the universe at the smallest scales almost certainly shows this worldview to be false. Instead, Rovelli argues we should adopt a relational worldview.

During the scientific revolution, the English physics pioneer Isaac Newton and his German counterpart Gottfried Leibniz disagreed on the nature of space and time.

Newton claimed space and time acted like a container for the contents of the universe. That is, if we could remove the contents of the universe all the planets, stars, and galaxies we would be left with empty space and time. This is the absolute view of space and time.

Leibniz, on the other hand, claimed that space and time were nothing more than the sum total of distances and durations between all the objects and events of the world. If we removed the contents of the universe, we would remove space and time also. This is the relational view of space and time: they are only the spatial and temporal relations between objects and events. The relational view of space and time was a key inspiration for Einstein when he developed general relativity.

Rovelli makes use of this idea to understand quantum mechanics. He claims the objects of quantum theory, such as a photon, electron, or other fundamental particle, are nothing more than the properties they exhibit when interacting with in relation to other objects.

These properties of a quantum object are determined through experiment, and include things like the objects position, momentum, and energy. Together they make up an objects state.

According to Rovellis relational interpretation, these properties are all there is to the object: there is no underlying individual substance that has the properties.

Consider the well-known quantum puzzle of Schrdingers cat. We put a cat in a box with some lethal agent (like a vial of poison gas) triggered by a quantum process (like the decay of a radioactive atom), and we close the lid.

The quantum process is a chance event. There is no way to predict it, but we can describe it in a way that tells us the different chances of the atom decaying or not in some period of time. Because the decay will trigger the opening of the vial of poison gas and hence the death of the cat, the cats life or death is also a purely chance event.

According to orthodox quantum theory, the cat is neither dead nor alive until we open the box and observe the system. A puzzle remains concerning what it would be like for the cat, exactly, to be neither dead nor alive.

Read more: Quantum philosophy: 4 ways physics will challenge your reality

But according to the relational interpretation, the state of any system is always in relation to some other system. So the quantum process in the box might have an indefinite outcome in relation to us, but have a definite outcome for the cat.

So it is perfectly reasonable for the cat to be neither dead nor alive for us, and at the same time to be definitely dead or alive itself. One fact of the matter is real for us, and one fact of the matter is real for the cat. When we open the box, the state of the cat becomes definite for us, but the cat was never in an indefinite state for itself.

In the relational interpretation there is no global, Gods eye view of reality.

Rovelli argues that, since our world is ultimately quantum, we should heed these lessons. In particular, objects such as your favourite book may only have their properties in relation to other objects, including you.

Thankfully, that also includes all other objects, such as your coffee table. So when you do go to work, your favourite book continues to appear is it does when you were holding it. Even so, this is a dramatic rethinking of the nature of reality.

Read more: A new quantum paradox throws the foundations of observed reality into question

On this view, the world is an intricate web of interrelations, such that objects no longer have their own individual existence independent from other objects like an endless game of quantum mirrors. Moreover, there may well be no independent metaphysical substance constituting our reality that underlies this web.

As Rovelli puts it:

We are nothing but images of images. Reality, including ourselves, is nothing but a thin and fragile veil, beyond which there is nothing.

Read more:

Is reality a game of quantum mirrors? A new theory suggests it might be - The Conversation AU

To many, quantum physics, or quantum mechanics, may seem an obscure subject, with little application for everyday life, but its principles and laws form the basis for explanations of howmatter and light work on the atomic and subatomic scale. If you want to understand how electrons move through acomputerchip, how photons of light travel in a solar panel or amplify themselves in alaser, or even why the sun keeps burning, you will need to use quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics relating to the elementary components of nature, it is the study of the interactions that take place between subatomic forces. Quantum mechanics was developed because many of the equations ofclassical mechanics, which describe interactions at larger sizes and speeds, cease to be useful or predictive when trying to explain the forces of nature that work on the atomic scale.

Quantum mechanics, and the math that underlies it, is not based on a single theory, but on a series of theories inspired by new experimental results, theoretical insights, and mathematical methods which were elucidated beginning in the first half of the 20th century, and together create a theoretical system whose predictive power has made it one of the most successful scientific models created.

The story of quantum mechanics can be said to begin in 1859, a full 32 years before the discovery of the electron. Many physicists were concerned with a puzzling phenomenon: no matter what an object is made of, if it can survive being heated to a given temperature, the spectrum of light it emits is exactly the same as for any other substance.

In1859, physicistGustav Kirchhoff proposed a solution when he demonstrated thatthe energy emitted by a blackbody objectdepends on the temperature and the frequencyof the emitted energy, i.e

E=J(T,v)

A blackbody is a perfect emitter - an idealized object that absorbs all the energy that falls on it (because it reflects no light, it would appear black to an observer).Kirchhoff challenged physicists to find the function J, which would allow the energy emitted by light to be described for all wavelengths.

In the years following, a number of physicists would work on this problem. One of these was Heinrich Rubens, who worked to measurethe energy of black-body radiation. In 1900, Rubens visited fellow physicist Max Planckand explained his results to him. Within a few hours of Rubens leavingPlanck's house,Planckhad come up with an answer to Kirchoff's function whichfitted the experimental evidence.

Planck sought to use the equation to explain the distribution of colors emitted over the spectrum in the glow of red-hot and white-hot objects. However, when doing this, Planck realized the equation implied that only combinations of certain colors were emitted, and ininteger multiples of a small constant (which became known as Plank's Constant) times the frequency of the light.

This was unexpected because, at the time, light was believed to act as a wave, which meant that the values of color emitted should be a continuous spectrum. However,Planck realized that his solution gave different values at different wavelengths.

In order toexplain howatomswere being prevented from producing certain colors, Planck made a novel assumption - thatatoms absorb and emit energy in the form of indistinguishable energy units - what came to be called quanta.

At the time, Planck regarded quantization as a mathematical trick to make his theory work. However, a few years later, physicists provedthat classical electromagnetism couldneveraccount for the observed spectrum. These proofs helped to convincephysicists that Planck's notion of quantized energy levels may in fact be more than a mathematical "trick".

One of the proofs was given by Einstein, who published a paper in 1905 in which he envisioned light traveling not as a wave, but as a packet of "energy quanta" which could be absorbed or generated when an atom "jumps" between quantized vibration rates. In this model, the quanta contained the energy difference of the jump; when divided by Plancks constant, that energy difference determined the wavelength of light given off by those quanta.

In 1913 Niels Bohrapplied Planck's hypothesis of quantization to Ernest Rutherford's 1911 "planetary" model of the atom. This model, which came to be called the Rutherford-Bohr model, postulated that electrons orbited the nucleus in a similar way to how planets orbit the sun. Bohr proposed that electrons could only orbit at certain distances from the nucleau, and could "jump" between the orbits; doing so would give off energy at certain wavelengths of light, which could be observed as spectral lines.

It now appeared that light could act as a wave and as a particle. However, what about the matter?

In 1924, French physicist Louis de Broglie used the equations of Einstein'stheory of special relativityto show that particles can exhibit wave-like characteristics, and vice-versa.

German physicist Werner Heisenberg met with Neils Bohr at the University of Copenhagen in 1925, and after this meeting, he applied de Broglie's reasoning to understand the spectrum intensity of an electron.At the same time, Austrian physicist ErwinSchrdinger, working independently, also used de Broglie's reasoning to explain how electrons moved around in atoms.The following year, Schrdinger demonstrated that the two approaches were equivalent.

In 1927, Heisenberg reasoned that if matter can act as a wave, there must be a limit to how precisely we can know some properties, such as an electron's position and speed. In what would later be called "Heisenberg'suncertainty principle," he reasoned that the more precisely an electron's position is known, the less precisely its speed can be known, and vice versa. The proved an important piece of the quantum puzzle.

In the Heisenberg-Schrdingerquantum mechanical model of the atom, each electron acts as a wave, or "cloud") around the nucleus of an atom, with the ability to measure only the speed or position of an electron to a particular probability. This model replaced the Rutherford-Bohr model.

All these revelations regarding quantum theory revolutionized the world of physics and revealed important details about universal actions at atomic and subatomic levels.

Quantum mechanics further combined with other phenomena in physics such as relativity, gravitation, electromagnetism, etc. also increased our understanding of the physical world and how construction and destruction occur within it.

For their exceptional contributions, Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrdinger were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918, 1921, 1922, 1932, and 1933 respectively.

While it may seem as though quantum mechanics progressed in a fairly straightforward series of theoretical leaps, in reality, there was a lot of disagreement among physicists over its relevance.

These disagreements reached a peak at the 1927 Solvay Conference in Brussels, where 29 of the world's most brilliant scientists gathered to discuss the many seemingly contradictory observations inquantum theory that could not be reconciled. One major point of contention had to do with the theory that, until they are observed, the location and speed of entities such as electrons, can only exist as a "probability".

Bohr, in particular,emphasized that quantum predictions founded on probability are able to accurately describe physical actions in the real world. In what later came to be called the Copenhagen interpretation, he proposed that while wave equations described the probability of where entities like electronscouldbe found,theseentities didn't actually exist as particles unless they were observed. In Bohr's words, they had no "independent reality" in the ordinary physical sense.

He described that the events that take place on atomic levels can alter the outcome of quantum interaction.According to Bohr, a system behaves as a wave or a particle depending on context, but you cannot predict what it will do.

Einstein, in contrast, argued thatan electron was an electron, even if no one was looking at it, that particles like electrons had independent reality, and prompting his famous claim that God does not play dice with the universe.

Einstein and Bohr would debate their views until Einstein's death three decades later, but remained colleagues and good friends.

Einstein argued that the Copenhagen interpretation was incomplete. He theorized that there might be hidden variables or processes underlying quantum phenomena.

In 1935, Einstein, along with fellow physicists Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen published a paper on what would be known as the Einstein-Boris-Podolsky (EPR) paradox. The EPR paradox described in the paper again raised doubts on the quantum theory.

The EPR paper featured predetermined values of momentum and particle velocity and suggested that the description of physical reality provided by the wave function in quantum theory is incomplete, and therefore, physical reality can not be derived from the wave function or in the context of quantum-mechanical theory.

The same year, Bohr replied to the claims made by Einstein. In his response, published in the Physical Review, Bohr proved that the predetermined values of the second particles velocity and momentum, as per the EPR paradox were incorrect. He also argued that the paradox failed to justify the inability of quantum mechanics to explain physical reality.

The understanding of elementary particles and their behavior helped to create groundbreaking innovations in healthcare, communication, electronics, and various other fields. Moreover, there are numerous modern technologies that operate on the principles mentioned in quantum physics.

Laser-based equipment

Laser technology involves equipment that emits light by the means of a process called optical amplification. Laser equipment work on the principle of photon emission and they release the light with a well-defined wavelength in a very narrow beam. Hence, the laser beams function in alignment with theories (such as the photoelectric effect) mentioned in quantum mechanics.

A report published in 2009 reveals that extreme ultraviolet lasers when hit a metal surface can cause electrons to move out of the atom, this outcome is said to further extend Einsteins photoelectric effect in the context of super-intense lasers.

Electronic Devices and Machines

From flash memory storage devices like USB drives to complex lab equipment such as electron microscopes, an understanding of quantum mechanics led to countless modern-day inventions. Light-emitting diodes, electric switches, transistors, quantum computers, etc are examples of some highly useful devices that resulted from the advent of quantum physics.

Let us understand this from the example of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine, this medical equipment is very useful in diagnosing the brain and other body organs. MRI works on the principle of electromagnetism, it has a strong magnetic field that uses the spin of protons in hydrogen atoms to analyze the composition of different tissues.

MRI aligns all the protons in the body as per their spin, due to the magnetic field, the protons absorb energy and emit the same (quantum theory), the MRI scanner uses the emitted energy signals received from all the water molecules to deliver a detailed image of the internal body parts.

X-Rays

Used in medical diagnosis, border inspection, industrial tomography, cancer treatment, and for many other purposes, X-rays are a form of electromagnetic radiation. While the discovery of X-rays predates quantum mechanics, quantum mechanical theory has allowed the use of X-rays in a practical way.

A beam of X-rays can be regarded as consisting of a stream of quanta. These quanta are projected out from the target of the X-ray tube, and, on penetrating tissue, there is an effect produced that is proportional to the number of the quanta multiplied by the energy carried by each quantum.

The emitted electrons also emit photons, whichare able to penetrate the matter and form its image on the X-ray screen. Therefore, the elementary particles mentioned in quantum mechanics interact with X-ray energy to deliver the inside look of an object.

Fluorescence-based Applications

Fluorescence is referred to the emission of light under UV exposure that takes place when an electron achieves a higher quantum state and emits photons, fluorescent lamps and spectrometers work on basis of quantum theory. Various minerals such as Aragonit, Calcite, and Fluorite are also known to exhibit fluorescence.

Fluorescence is also used to lit synthetic gems and diamonds, jewelry manufacturers use this phenomenon to create artificial imitation stones that look brighter and more beautiful than the naturally occurring original stones.

Apart from these applications, quantum mechanics has contributed to our understanding of many areas of technology, biological systems, and cosmic forces and bodies. While there are several important questions remaining inquantum physics, the core concepts, which define the behavior of energy, particles, and matter have continued to hold constant.

Here is the original post:

Quantum Theory: A Scientific Revolution that Changed Physics Forever - Interesting Engineering

The U.S. standards and technology authority is searching for a new encryption method to prevent the Internet of Things succumbing to quantum-enabled hackers

As quantum computing moves from academic circles to practical uses, it is expected to become the conduit for cybersecurity breaches.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology aims to nip these malicious attacks preemptively. Its new cybersecurity protocols would help shield networks from quantum computing hacks.

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has consulted with cryptography thought leaders on hardware and software options to migrate existing technologies to post-quantum encryption.

The consultation forms part of a wider national contest, which is due to report back with its preliminary shortlist later this year.

IT pros can download and evaluate the options through the open source repository at NISTs Computer Security Resource Center.

[The message] is to educate the market but also to try to get people to start playing around with [quantum computers] and understanding it because, if you wait until its a Y2K problem, then its too late, said Chris Sciacca, IBMs communications manager for research in Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia and South America. So the message here is to start adopting some of these schemes.

Businesses need to know how to contend with quantum decryption, which could potentially jeopardize many Internet of Things (IoT) endpoints.

Quantum threatens society because IoT, in effect, binds our digital and physical worlds together. Worryingly, some experts believe hackers could already be recording scrambled IoT transmissions, to be ready when quantum decryption arrives.

Current protocols such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) will be difficult to upgrade, as they are often baked into the devices circuitry or firmware,

Estimates for when a quantum computer capable of running Shors algorithm vary. An optimist in the field would say it may take 10 to 15 years. But then it could be another Y2K scenario, whose predicted problems never came to pass.

But its still worth getting the enterprises IoT network ready, to be on the safe side.

Broadly speaking, all asymmetric encryption thats in common use today will be susceptible to a future quantum computer with adequate quantum volume, said Christopher Sherman, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, Anything that uses prime factorization or discrete log to create separate encryption and decryption keys, those will all be vulnerable to a quantum computer potentially within the next 15 years.

Why Do We Need Quantum Security?

Quantum computers would answer queries existing technologies cannot resolve, by applying quantum mechanics to compute various combinations of data simultaneously.

As the quantum computing field remains largely in the prototyping phase, current models largely perform only narrow scientific or computational objectives.

All asymmetric cryptography systems, however, could one day be overridden by a quantum mechanical algorithm known as Shors algorithm.

Thats because the decryption ciphers rely on mathematical complexities such as factorization, which Shors could hypothetically unravel in no time.

In quantum physics, what you can do is construct a parameter that cancels some of the probabilities out, explained Luca De Fao, a researcher at IBM who is involved with the NIST quantum-security effort, Shors algorithm is such an apparatus. It makes many quantum particles interact in such a way that the probabilities of the things you are not interested in will cancel out.

Will Quantum Decryption Spell Disaster For IoT?

Businesses must have safeguards against quantum decryption, which threatens IoT endpoints secured by asymmetric encryption.

A symmetric encryption technique, Advanced Encrypton Standard, is believed to be immune to Shors algorithm attacks, but is considered computationally expensive for resource-constrained IoT devices.

For businesses looking to quantum-secure IoT in specific verticals, theres a risk assessment model published by University of Waterloos quantum technology specialist Dr. Michele Mosca. The model is designed to predict the risk and outline times for preparing a response,depending on the kind of organization involved.

As well as integrating a new quantum security standard, theres also a need for mechanisms to make legacy systems quantum-secure. Not only can encryption be broken, but theres also potential for quantum forgeries of digital identities, in sectors such as banking.

I see a lot of banks now asking about quantum security, and definitely governments, Sherman said, They are not just focused on replacing RSA which includes https and TLS but also elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), for example blockchain-based systems. ECC-powered digital signatures will need to be replaced as well.

One option, which NIST is considering, is to blend post-quantum security at network level with standard ciphers on legacy nodes. The latter could then be phased out over time.

A hybrid approach published by NIST guidance around using the old protocols that satisfy regulatory requirements at a security level thats been certified for a given purpose, Sherman said, But then having an encapsulation technique that puts a crypto technique on top of that. It wraps up into that overall encryption scheme, so that in the future you can drop one thats vulnerable and just keep the post-quantum encryption.

Governments Must Defend Against Quantum Hacks

For national governments, its becoming an all-out quantum arms race. And the U.S. may well be losing. Russia and China have both already unveiled initial post-quantum security options, Sherman said.

They finished their competitions over the past couple of years. I wouldnt be surprised if the NIST standard also becomes something that Europe uses, he added.

The threats against IoT devices have only grown more pronounced with current trends.

More virtual health and connected devices deployed in COVID-19, for example, will mean more medical practices are now quantum-vulnerable.

According to analyst firm Omdia, there are three major fault lines in defending the IoT ecosystem: endpoint security, network security and public cloud security. With 46 billion things currently in operation globally, IoT already provides an enlarged attack surface for cybercriminals.

The challenge is protecting any IoT device thats using secure communications or symmetric protocols, said Sherman, Considering that by, 2025 theres over a trillion IoT devices expected to be deployed. Thats obviously quite large in terms of potential exposure. Wherever RSA or TLS is being used with IoT, theres a threat.

Weighing Up Post-Quantum And Quantum Cryptography Methods

Post-quantum cryptography differs from methods such as quantum key distribution (QKD), which use quantum mechanics to secure technology against the coming threat.

QKD is already installed on some government and research communications lines, and hypothetically its impenetrable.

But the average business needs technology that can be implemented quickly and affordably. And, as we dont even know how a quantum decryption device would work in practice, its unrealistic to transfer QKD onto every IoT network.

One of the main post-quantum cryptography standards in the frame is lattice-based cryptography, an approach that is thought to be more resilient against Shors algorithm.

While these are still based on mathematics and could be endangered by future quantum decryption algorithms, they might buy scientists enough time to come up with other economically viable techniques.

Another advantage would be in IoT applications that need the point-to-point security channel, such as connected vehicles, De Fao said.

Probably the lattice-based schemes are the best right now to run on IoT devices. Some efforts will be needed in the chip design process to make these even easier to run, he added, But we should probably start thinking about this right now. Because it will probably take around five-to-seven years after the algorithms have been found for the chips to reach peoples homes or industrial systems.

And then potentially [if the optimistic estimates are right,] quantum computers will have arrived.

Read this article:

NIST's Quantum Security Protocols Near the Finish Line The U.S. standards and technology authority is searching - IoT World Today

An edgy biography of Stephen Hawking has me reminiscing about sciences good old days. Or were they bad? I cant decide. Im talking about the 1990s, when scientific hubris ran rampant. As journalist Charles Seife recalls in Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity, Hawking and other physicists convinced us that they were on the verge of a theory of everything that would solve the riddle of existence. It would reveal why there is something rather than nothing, and why that something is the way it is.

In this column, Ill look at an equally ambitious and closely related claim, that science will absorb other ways of seeing the world, including the arts, humanities and religion. Nonscientific modes of knowledge wont necessarily vanish, but they will become consistent with science, our supreme source of truth. The most eloquent advocate of this perspective is biologist Edward Wilson, one of our greatest scientist-writers.

In his 1998 bestseller Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Wilson prophesies that science will soon yield such a compelling, complete theory of nature, including human nature, that the humanities, ranging from philosophy and history to moral reasoning, comparative religion, and interpretation of the arts, will draw closer to the sciences and partly fuse with them. Wilson calls this unification of knowledge consilience, an old-fashioned term for coming together or converging. Consilience will resolve our age-old identity crisis, helping us understand once and for all who we are and why we are here, as Wilson puts it.

Dismissing philosophers warnings against deriving ought from is, Wilson insists that we can deduce moral principles from science. Science can illuminate our moral impulses and emotions, such as our love for those who share our genes, as well as giving us moral guidance. This linkage of science to ethics is crucial, because Wilson wants us to share his desire to preserve nature in all its wild variety, a goal that he views as an ethical imperative.

At first glance you might wonder: Who could possibly object to this vision? Wouldnt we all love to agree on a comprehensive worldview, consistent with science, that tells us how to behave individually and collectively? And in fact. many scholars share Wilsons hope for a merger of science with alternative ways of engaging with reality. Some enthusiasts have formed the Consilience Project, dedicated to developing a body of social theory and analysis that explains and seeks solutions to the unique challenges we face today. Last year, poet-novelist Clint Margrave wrote an eloquent defense of consilience for Quillette, noting that he has often drawn inspiration from science.

Another consilience booster is psychologist and megapundit Steven Pinker, who praised Wilsons excellent book in 1998 and calls for consilience between science and the humanities in his 2018 bestseller Enlightenment Now. The major difference between Wilson and Pinker is stylistic. Whereas Wilson holds out an olive branch to postmodern humanities scholars who challenge sciences objectivity and authority, Pinker scolds them. Pinker accuses postmodernists of defiant obscurantism, self-refuting relativism and suffocating political correctness.

The enduring appeal of consilience makes it worth revisiting. Consilience raises two big questions: (1) Is it feasible? (2) Is it desirable? Feasibility first. As Wilson points out, physics has been an especially potent unifier, establishing over the past few centuries that the heavens and earth are made of the same stuff ruled by the same forces. Now physicists seek a single theory that fuses general relativity, which describes gravity, with quantum field theory, which accounts for electromagnetism and the nuclear forces. This is Hawkings theory of everything and Steven Weinbergs final theory."

Writing in 1998, Wilson clearly expected physicists to find a theory of everything soon, but today they seem farther than ever from that goal. Worse, they still cannot agree on what quantum mechanics means. As science writer Philip Ball points out in his 2018 book Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew about Quantum Physics Is Different, there are more interpretations of quantum mechanics now than ever.

The same is true of scientific attempts to bridge the explanatory chasm between matter and mind. In the 1990s, it still seemed possible that researchers would discover how physical processes in the brain and other systems generate consciousness. Since then, mind-body studies have undergone a paradigm explosion, with theorists espousing a bewildering variety of models, involving quantum mechanics, information theory and Bayesian mathematics. Some researchers suggest that consciousness pervades all matter, a view called panpsychism; others insist that the so-called hard problem of consciousness is a pseudoproblem because consciousness is an illusion.

There are schisms even within Wilsons own field of evolutionary biology. In Consilience and elsewhere, Wilson suggests that natural selection promotes traits at the level of tribes and other groups; in this way, evolution might have bequeathed us a propensity for religion, war and other social behaviors. Other prominent Darwinians, notably Richard Dawkins and Robert Trivers, reject group selection, arguing that natural selection operates only at the level of individual organisms and even individual genes.

If scientists cannot achieve consilience even within specific fields, what hope is there for consilience between, say, quantum chromodynamics and queer theory? (Actually, in her fascinating 2007 book Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, physicist-philosopher Karen Barad finds resonances between physics and gender politics; but Barads book represents the kind of postmodern analysis deplored by Wilson and Pinker.) If consilience entails convergence toward a consensus, science is moving away from consilience.

So, consilience doesnt look feasible, at least not at the moment. Next question: Is consilience desirable? Although Ive always doubted whether it could happen, I once thought consilience should happen. If humanity can agree on a single, rational worldview, maybe we can do a better job solving our shared problems, like climate change, inequality, pandemics and militarism. We could also get rid of bad ideas, such as the notion that God likes some of us more than others; or that racial and sexual inequality and war are inevitable consequences of our biology.

I also saw theoretical diversity, or pluralism, as philosophers call it, as a symptom of failure; the abundance of solutions to the mind-body problem, like the abundance of treatments for cancer, means that none works very well. But increasingly, I see pluralism as a valuable, even necessary counterweight to our yearning for certitude. Pluralism is especially important when it comes to our ideas about who we are, can be and should be. If we settle on a single self-conception, we risk limiting our freedom to reinvent ourselves, to discover new ways to flourish.

Wilson acknowledges that consilience is a reductionistic enterprise, which will eliminate many ways of seeing the world. Consider how he treats mystical visions, in which we seem to glimpse truths normally hidden behind the surface of things. To my mind, these experiences rub our faces in the unutterable weirdness of existence, which transcends all our knowledge and forms of expression. As William James says in The Varieties of Religious Experience, mystical experiences should forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.

Wilson disagrees. He thinks mystical experiences are reducible to physiological processes. In Consilience, he focuses on Peruvian shaman-artist Pablo Amaringo, whose paintings depict fantastical, jungly visions induced by ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic tea (which I happen to have taken) brewed from two Amazonian plants. Wilson attributes the snakes that slither through Amaringos paintings to natural selection, which instilled an adaptive fear of snakes in our ancestors; it should not be surprising that snakes populate many religious myths, such as the biblical story of Eden.

Moreover, ayahuasca contains psychotropic compounds, including the potent psychedelic dimethyltryptamine, like those that induce dreams, which stem from, in Wilsons words, the editing of information in the memory banks of the brain that occurs while we sleep. These nightly neural discharges are arbitrary in content, that is, meaningless; but the brain desperately tries to assemble them into coherent narratives, which we experience as dreams.

In this way, Wilson explains Amaringos visions in terms of evolutionary biology, psychology and neurochemistry. This is a spectacular example of what Paul Feyerabend, my favorite philosopher and a fierce advocate for pluralism, calls the tyranny of truth. Wilson imposes his materialistic, secular worldview on the shaman, and he strips ayahuasca visions of any genuine spiritual significance. While he exalts biological diversity, Wilson shows little respect for the diversity of human beliefs.

Wilson is a gracious, courtly man in person as well on the page. But his consilience project stems from excessive faith in science, or scientism. (Both Wilson and Pinker embrace the term scientism, and they no doubt think that the phrase excessive faith in science is oxymoronic.) Given the failure to achieve consilience within physics and biologynot to mention the replication crisis and other problemsscientists should stop indulging in fantasies about conquering all human culture and attaining something akin to omniscience. Scientists, in short, should be more humble.

Ironically, Wilson himself questioned the desirability of final knowledge early in his career. At the end of his 1975 masterpiece Sociobiology, Wilson anticipates the themes of Consilience, predicting that evolutionary theory plus genetics will soon absorb the social sciences and humanities. But Wilson doesnt exult at this prospect. When we can explain ourselves in mechanistic terms, he warns, the result might be hard to accept; we might find ourselves, as Camus put it, divested of illusions.

Wilson neednt have worried. Scientific omniscience looks less likely than ever, and humans are far too diverse, creative and contrary to settle for a single worldview of any kind. Inspired by mysticism and the arts, as well as by science, we will keep arguing about who we are and reinventing ourselves forever. Is consilience a bad idea, which wed be better off without? I wouldnt go that far. Like utopia, another byproduct of our yearning for perfection, consilience, the dream of total knowledge, can serve as a useful goad to the imagination, as long as we see it as an unreachable ideal. Lets just hope we never think weve reached it.

This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by theauthor or authorsare not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Further Reading:

The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience

The End of Science (updated 2015 edition)

Mind-Body Problems: Science, Subjectivity and Who We Really Are

I just talked about consilience with science journalist Philip Ball on my podcast Mind-Body Problems.

I brood over the limits of knowledge in my new book Pay Attention: Sex, Death, and Science.

Read the original here:

Science Should Not Try to Absorb Religion and Other Ways of Knowing - Scientific American

The discussion about quantum computers has reached the mainstream including investors. This is one of the numerous examples that such technological development is happening much faster today than 50 years ago, Lars Jaeger writes on finews.first.

This article is published on finews.first, a forum for authors specialized in economic and financial topics.

A word that is becoming more and more popular, but still sounds like science fiction, is the term quantum computer. Only 10 to 15 years ago, the construction of such a computer as a future technology seemed impossible within any reasonable time frame.

Thus, the discussion about it was limited to a small team of experts or just material for science fiction. Just as transistor effect or von Neumann processors were not even remotely familiar terms to non-physicists in the 1940s, the same was true for the term quantum computer until recently.

The discussion about quantum computers has even reached the mainstream including investors. And this could become one of the numerous examples that such technological development is happening much faster today than 50 years ago.

The quantum world offers even more

However, most people are still completely unaware of what a quantum computer actually is, as in principle all computers today are still entirely based on classical physics, on the so-called von Neumann architecture from the 1940s.

In it, the individual computing steps are processed sequentially bit by bit. The smallest possible unit of information (a so-called binary digits, or bit for short) thereby always takes a well-defined state of either 1 or 0. In contrast, quantum computers use the properties of quantum systems that are not reducible to classical bits but are based on quantum bits, or qubits for short.

These can assume the different states of bits, i.e. 0 and 1 and all values in between simultaneously. So, they can be half 1 and half 0 as well as in any other possible combination of them. This possibility is beyond our classical (everyday) imagination, according to which a state is either one or the other, tertium non datur, but is very typical for quantum systems. Physicists call such mixed quantum states superpositions.

Quantum computers are supposed to be the crowning achievement

But the quantum world offers even more: Different quantum particles can be in so-called entangled states. This is another property that does not exist in our classical world. It is as if the qubits are coupled to each other with an invisible spring. They are then all in direct contact with each other, without any explicit acting force. Each quantum bit knows so to say over any distance what the others are doing. Such entanglement was the subject of a heated debate in early quantum physics. Albert Einstein, for example, considered entanglement to be physically impossible and derisively called it a spooky action-at-a-distance.

In the meantime, however, this controversial quantum property is already being exploited in many technical applications. Quantum computers are supposed to be the crowning achievement here. They could open completely new, fantastic possibilities in at least five fields:

Some physicists even believe that a quantum computer could be used to calculate and thus solve any problem in nature, from the behavior of black holes, the development of the very early universe, the collisions of high-energy elementary particles, to the phenomenon of superconductivity as well as the modeling of the 100 billion neurons and the thousand times larger number of their connections in our brain. Quantum computers could therefore represent a revolution in science as well as in the technology world.

Some even spoke of a Sputnik moment in information technology

Less than two years ago, Google announced that its engineers had succeeded in building a quantum computer that for the first time was able to solve a problem that any conventional computer could not. The corresponding computer chip Sycamore needed just 200 seconds for a special computing task that would have taken the worlds best supercomputer 10,000 years.

It had been Google itself that some years earlier had christened such an ability of a quantum computer to be superior to any existing classical computer in accomplishing certain tasks with quantum supremacy. The moment of such quantum supremacy seemed to have finally come. Some even spoke of a Sputnik moment in information technology.

However, this was more a symbolic milestone, since the problem solved by Sycamore was still a very special and purely academic one. But there is no doubt that it represented a significant step forward (which, however, was also called into question in some cases: IBM even doubted the quantum nature of this computing machine).

Jiuzhang was also controversial as a quantum computer

Then, in December 2020, a team-based mainly at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei communicated in the journal Science that a new quantum computer they had developed and which they had named Jiuzhang, was up to 10 billion times faster than Googles Sycamore.

That this news came from China was not quite as surprising as it might have been to those with little familiarity with today's Chinese science. Partly still seen as a developing country and thus technologically behind, China has meanwhile invested heavily in potential quantum computing and other quantum processes as well as artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and a bunch of other cutting-edge technologies. Communist General Secretary Xi Jinpings government is spending $10 billion over several years on the countrys National Laboratory for Quantum Information Sciences.

Jiuzhang was also controversial as a quantum computer. But if both Sycamore and Jiuzhang could indeed solve their (still very specific) problems incomparably fast with quantum technologies and this can no longer be easily dismissed there would already be two quantum computers that have achieved the desired quantum superiority.

Just these days, there was another (money-big) announcement

From here, we could then expect numerous further versions quite soon, which can solve more and more problems faster and faster. A few weeks ago, Google announced that they want to have built a powerful quantum computer that can be used on a very broad scale (no longer limited to exotic peripheral problems) by 2029. To this end, they want to bring together one million physical qubits that work together in an error-correcting quantum computer (in todays quantum computers this number still stands at less than 100 qubits).

In addition to Google and the Chinese research center in Hefei, there are countless other quantum computer development sites. And they are increasingly supported by governments. Germany, for example, announced in 2020 that the country will invest billions into quantum computing technology.

The new entity could become another global leader

And just these days, there was another (money-big) announcement: Cambridge Quantum Computing, a British company founded in 2014, announced that it will partner with the quantum solutions division of U.S. industrial giant Honeywell to build a new quantum computer. This deal brings together Honeywells expertise in (quantum) hardware with the one of Cambridge Quantum in software and algorithms.

The new entity could become another global leader (along with Google, IBM, and the Chinese) in developing quantum computers. Without the belief that initial breakthroughs in quantum computing have already been achieved, it is unlikely that so much money would be flowing into the industry already.

These sums are likely to multiply again as further progress is made. One might feel transported back to the early 1970s before commercial computers existed. Only this time, everything will probably happen even much faster.

Lars Jaeger is a Swiss-German author and investment manager. He writes on the history and philosophy of science and technology and has in the past been an author on hedge funds, quantitative investing, and risk management.

Previous contributions: Rudi Bogni, Peter Kurer, Rolf Banz, Dieter Ruloff, Werner Vogt, Walter Wittmann, Alfred Mettler, Robert Holzach, Craig Murray, David Zollinger, Arthur Bolliger, Beat Kappeler, Chris Rowe, Stefan Gerlach, Marc Lussy, Nuno Fernandes, Richard Egger, Maurice Pedergnana, Marco Bargel, Steve Hanke, Urs Schoettli, Ursula Finsterwald, Stefan Kreuzkamp, Oliver Bussmann, Michael Benz, Albert Steck, Martin Dahinden, Thomas Fedier, Alfred Mettler,Brigitte Strebel, Mirjam Staub-Bisang, Nicolas Roth, Thorsten Polleit, Kim Iskyan, Stephen Dover, Denise Kenyon-Rouvinez, Christian Dreyer, Kinan Khadam-Al-Jame, Robert Hemmi,Anton Affentranger,Yves Mirabaud, Katharina Bart, Frdric Papp, Hans-Martin Kraus, Gerard Guerdat, MarioBassi, Stephen Thariyan, Dan Steinbock, Rino Borini,Bert Flossbach, Michael Hasenstab, Guido Schilling, Werner E. Rutsch,Dorte Bech Vizard, Adriano B. Lucatelli, Katharina Bart, Maya Bhandari, Jean Tirole, Hans Jakob Roth,Marco Martinelli, Thomas Sutter,Tom King,Werner Peyer, Thomas Kupfer, Peter Kurer,Arturo Bris,Frederic Papp,James Syme, DennisLarsen, Bernd Kramer, Ralph Ebert, Armin Jans,Nicolas Roth, Hans Ulrich Jost, Patrick Hunger, Fabrizio Quirighetti,Claire Shaw, Peter Fanconi,Alex Wolf, Dan Steinbock, Patrick Scheurle, Sandro Occhilupo, Will Ballard, Nicholas Yeo, Claude-Alain Margelisch, Jean-Franois Hirschel, Jens Pongratz, Samuel Gerber, Philipp Weckherlin, Anne Richards, Antoni Trenchev, Benoit Barbereau, Pascal R. Bersier, Shaul Lifshitz, Klaus Breiner, Ana Botn, Martin Gilbert, Jesper Koll, Ingo Rauser, Carlo Capaul, Claude Baumann, Markus Winkler, Konrad Hummler, Thomas Steinemann, Christina Boeck, Guillaume Compeyron, Miro Zivkovic, Alexander F. Wagner, Eric Heymann, Christoph Sax, Felix Brem, Jochen Moebert, Jacques-Aurlien Marcireau, Ursula Finsterwald, Claudia Kraaz, Michel Longhini, Stefan Blum, Zsolt Kohalmi, Karin M. Klossek, Nicolas Ramelet, Sren Bjnness, Lamara von Albertini, Andreas Britt, Gilles Prince, Darren Willams, Salman Ahmed, Stephane Monier, and Peter van der Welle, Ken Orchard, Christian Gast, Jeffrey Bohn, Juergen Braunstein, Jeff Voegeli, Fiona Frick, Stefan Schneider, Matthias Hunn, Andreas Vetsch, Fabiana Fedeli, Marionna Wegenstein, Kim Fournais, Carole Millet, Ralph Ebert, Swetha Ramachandran, Brigitte Kaps, Thomas Stucki, Neil Shearing, Claude Baumann, Tom Naratil, Oliver Berger, Robert Sharps, Tobias Mueller, Florian Wicki, Jean Keller, Niels Lan Doky, Karin M. Klossek, Ralph Ebert, Johnny El Hachem, Judith Basad, Katharina Bart, Thorsten Polleit, Bernardo Brunschwiler, Peter Schmid, Karam Hinduja, Zsolt Kohalmi, Raphal Surber, Santosh Brivio, Grard Piasko, Mark Urquhart, Olivier Kessler, Bruno Capone, Peter Hody, Lars Jaeger, Andrew Isbester, Florin Baeriswyl, and Michael Bornhaeusser, Agnieszka Walorska, Thomas Mueller, Ebrahim Attarzadeh, Marcel Hostettler,Hui Zhang, Michael Bornhaeusser, Reto Jauch, Angela Agostini, Guy de Blonay, Tatjana Greil Castro, Jean-Baptiste Berthon, Marc Saint John Webb, Dietrich Goenemeyer, Mobeen Tahir, Didier Saint-Georges, Serge Tabachnik, Rolando Grandi, Vega Ibanez, Beat Wittmann, Carina Schaurte, and David Folkerts-Landau, Andreas Ita, Teodoro Cocca, Michael Welti, Mihkel Vitsur, Fabrizio Pagani, Roman Balzan, Todd Saligman, Christian Kaelin, Stuart Dunbar, and Fernando Fernndez.

Read this article:

Lars Jaeger: Quantum Computers Have Reached the Mainstream - finews.asia