Session II: Our Quantum Future

welcome back everyone please take your seats when I said we were going to start at exactly 10 a.m I wasn't lying it was quantum time is it 10 or 1005 Quantum time thank you one person applauding okay all right well you'll know more by the end of the session then welcome back to session two Caltech seminar day 2023 and our first of two panel discussions for

the day um it's called our Quantum future quick reminder about slido we're now in Caltech 2 second session it's a different QR code please um keep your questions going in there okay advances in Quantum science have already led to remarkable Technologies such as lasers MRIs the ability to pack billions of transistors onto a single microchip but these Technologies barely scratch the surface of how quantum theory

has altered our view of what's possible in the universe our Caltech experts will be discussing the challenge and promise of quantum technology and the potential for powerful quantum computers on hackable encryption and astonishingly precise measurement devices we have three folks on this panel today Rana adikari PhD Professor physics come Tech a quick quick intro born in Ohio to immigrants of West Bengal India adakari earned his

BS in physics in 1998 at the University of Florida followed by a PhD at MIT he then joined Caltech first as a postdoctoral researcher for caltech's ligo project ligo laser interferometer gravitational wave Observatory leading to a subsequent professorship here he's also been an Adjunct professor at the International Center for theoretical Sciences at the Tata Institute of fundamental research in Bengaluru India since 2012. um experimental physicist

with interest in fundamental physics including tests of gravity and quantum mechanics Rhonda's group focuses on techniques for precision measurement as related to gravitational wave detection measurements of short scale gravity and Bounds on quantum mechanics at the macroscopic sale scale using Precision opto mechanics next will be Fernando Brandel PhD who's caltech's Brand professor of theoretical physics and head of quantum algorithms for Amazon web services his academic

work has included a BSN at the university.university federal Domina practicing my Portuguese because that's in Brazil and followed by postdoc work in graduate work at Imperial College London Fernando Brando's Quantum information science research explores the interplay of physics Computer Science and Mathematics to study the role of quantum mechanics in computation and information transmission he's also interested in the application of tools and concepts of quantum information

to other branches of science such as Quantum many body Theory complexity Theory and thermodynamics and statistical mechanics in recent years he's been exploring several directions in entanglement Theory something I think we'll be hearing a bit more of and last but not least we have John preskill PhD Richard P Feynman professor of theoretical physics and Ellen BC Davis and Lena Bell Davis leadership chair Institute for Quantum

Science and Technology academic work spans from Princeton Harvard and finally here at Caltech where he's been a feminine Professor Davis leadership chair Etc as a theoretical physics topics of interest to John preskull have included the connections between particle physics and cosmology properties of topological defects non-perturbative phenomena in Quantum field Theory and Quantum aspects of the early universe and black holes since the mid-1990s his Central interest

has been in the theory of quantum information Quantum Computing and Quantum error connection if you're starting to feel a little fear over some of the terms that are coming out which will learn the pure lab later don't don't be a alarm he's also part of a fantastic six minute animation which is a cartoon which is an introduction to Quantum Computing and word has it he's also

known for making Bets with Stephen Hawking late Stephen Hawking and winning please put your hands together for our panel today on our Quantum future [Applause] well hi everybody I'm John preskell as you've heard I'm here with my colleagues Ron adakari and Fernando Brando we're all professors of physics at Caltech we're just three Quantum friends we're going to have a conversation and then we'll answer some of

your questions we represent a flourishing community in Quantum Science and Technology at Caltech that's a field in which Caltech has a long and proud history I've been at Caltech for almost 40 years now boy it goes by fast why would I ever leave I'm already at the best place in the world and I started out as we just heard working in theoretical particle physics and cosmology

but since the 1990s I've been excited about the possibility that if we can build quantum computers we'd be able to solve problems that we couldn't otherwise solve with our conventional computers and we hope that will eventually have a big practical impact on the world but as a physicist I'm also excited about how the development of quantum information science opens New Frontiers of theoretical physics that our

ideas and our technology offer us with new opportunities to study the way nature behaves we can study very complex systems and many particles strongly interacting with one another and that means we can study phenomena that have never been accessible before which should open up opportunities for discovery which actually are starting to unfold now Rana I had you pegged as a classical guy because you've been chasing

gravitational waves all these years why are you sitting at a table with the quantum boys I was wondering the same thing I think I I was not a Quantum believer when I first got here I thought it was a lot of hype I thought it was a lot of hype when I first got here and I was completely a classical guy and I'm a recent convert

to the to the quantum faith I think and I the way I think about it is that people who are still thinking about just doing classical measurements it's a little bit like doing trying to do experiments without electricity and we're it's sort of living in the past and nowadays when you think about measuring something very carefully you had better start thinking Quantum from the beginning and

all the way up all right that sounds promising so uh Fernando uh I've known you for quite a while as a theoretical physicist par excellence you prove theorems and such but rumor has it that now you're trying to build a big machine so can you explain how that happened yeah so I I I've been working on Quantum Computing for 18 years I think since my masters

in Brazil then I've been to many places and then joined Caltech seven years ago less than John but through fused away already and yeah I'm a furious so I'm being you know my career so far was like thinking about what future quantum computers could do what kind of applications you could run how you can understand quantum entanglement better Direction you talk about more soon uh but

then a few years ago I stopped getting interest that uh you know these experiments on on trying to build building blocks of a quantum computer they they're getting more sophisticated and maybe you're getting to a Tipping Point where it makes sense to start trying to scale up these Quant devices and really see what it takes to build our like dream quantum computer that you know we

don't always going to to be ready but that would potentially change science in a major way and even change society and then some companies also start to get interest in you know building this technology uh seeing the potential impact they might have uh many many startups and also some big companies uh and Amazon got interest in that uh like three years ago three four years ago

uh and then I I joined this project and and uh you know after consideration by the company they decided to stop building a quantum computer here on Caltech campus so there is a Amazon web services which is the cloud part of Amazon uh the part of Amazon that provides Cloud Computing Services so to many other big companies they decided to to build the AWS Amazon Web

Services Center for Quantum Computing here at Caltech and we started a project like two and a half three years ago and we're trying to build this scalable quantum computers that you know hopefully one day can change society it's early days as we talk more soon but uh but it's exciting to be here on campus and in Caltech seem like the ideal place for for having this

right uh having this effort from Amazon for for building up this technology so you say building up um we've got a long ways to go right we have quantum computers now they're small they're kind of clunky they're not very accurate uh when you do an operation and a quantum computer there's like a one percent or maybe under really good conditions a tenth of a percent probability

of an error and we're going to run real applications it has to be many orders of magnitude better you know a one in a billion one in a trillion chance is that even is that credible that we can cross that uh Chasm that's a that's a good question uh and uh it's yeah right as John put it we have to bridge basically 10 orders of magnitude

right between the error rates that we have today on our qubits where our Quantum bits and our Quantum Gates and where we want to be to run interesting applications that we know today uh and we it's very hard to see how we could do that just like in improving you know the lasers in the lab right or the microwaves in the uh the microwave signals but

there is one idea which was introduced I think like 20 25 years ago theoretically but only now is actually starting being tested experimentally which is error correction so error correction we understand well uh right on on modern technology whenever we start something on the on a hard drive we actually use a little bit of error correction right such that if there's some imperfection there we can

recover the information it turns out there is a more subtle way but uh it's still possible to do that in quantum mechanics and for Quantum computation uh so it in the end instead of having to bridge these 10 orders of magnitudes we still have to improve maybe like an order of magnitudes you know in the Precision of our qubits and our gates but then if you

can do that we can just use redundancy we use like more qubits that we build in the lab to encode one better computational qubits and then we have a plan to get to this really very very accurate go to systems which is something remarkable in itself right as bioscience but then that's the plan to scale up this technology and build useful quantum computers is use air

correction which means you have to build pretty large Quantum systems on the other like hundreds of thousands kill bits maybe millions of qubits which is very daunting but maybe possible that's why we want to figure out and improve a little bit not a little bit but like maybe just one other magnitude building blocks and then we'll get there so it's very ambitious but it's something that

we see as credible at least yeah some of us started thinking about Quantum error correction a long time ago just because it's so intellectually enticing that we can make very complex Quantum systems behave the way we want them to but it's exciting to see that it's starting to become a reality though we still have ways to go so Ronnie you know something about uh ambitious goals

that take a long time to come to fruition people at Caltech were thinking about detecting gravitational waves like Kip Thorne and Ron Trevor in the 70s and 80s it took until 2015. to for it to really happen and actually if you think about the theory side you know it was a hundred years after Einstein's general theory of gravitation which predicts gravitational waves until they were until

they were actually detected so are there some lessons there about how to pursue a long-term goal and eventually succeed I yeah I was thinking about it well you're asking this tough question to Fernando I thought I was going to get one of these zingers how's this ever going to work I think I think so one of one of the main things is the existence proof you

know if someone's done it once then you you don't have to worry so much that can I can I do it so once it's been demonstrated nowadays when we think about detecting gravitational waves it feels a little bit like how can you how can you not or they're just they're happening all the time I mean how how could you not see these things you'd have to

really mess things up but the I still because I've lived through the transition I remember how it was and what it took to do it and before there was an existence proof we were just uh kind of I don't really want to say like searching in the dark but we didn't really know what was the approach that was going to work out and it needed this

uh Army of people all over the world trying out different ideas and talking to each other once in a while not too often but often enough so that you could share mistakes and not repeat them too much and eventually we all kind of converged on one thing that works out but I think I get I think the lesson if we think about how are we going

to do this to make the really Grand Quantum telescope in the future that has to be the kind of effort where you let curiosity drive you wherever you want and then as the years go forward you just have a lot of these results to pick from and people have plowed all the fields so you kind of know where you can where you can find treasure but

if you don't do that then you know who's to say what's the right path or what's the wrong path 20 years ahead of time so maybe ligo was a little different in that respect although it was very ambitious what you needed to do was fairly clear early on um it just seemed really technically hard but some of these other goals we really need to do more

exploration to figure out even what to do I think yeah I think so and when you know when it came to the side of bringing something Quantum into the sensing in ligo it was a as you say a completely classical thing yeah and there was a pretty uphill battle to get do anything Quantum on the sensing side because it seemed sure there are these uh people

at Caltech who are having big dreams about entangled photons and how that's going to make everything magically better but that was all started around 1980 actually yeah that dream and I think it and even when I look back at those things it feels like that was a really Brave direction to go in and it took more than 20 years before we started to see some practical

results from that kind of thing and now you would say oh it's just just put these things together and you get it but at the time it was a it was a it was a dream with no proof that it could be done yeah so fernan Fernando was talking about building a computer that can do amazing things you're talking about new measurement strategies that can be

much more sensitive to the way we've done things in the past and Quantum information science and technology is is fairly broad because it encompasses that and also other goals like networking together Quantum devices there are intellectual themes that span those different application areas and one important one is what we call quantum entanglement that's the word we use for the characteristic correlations in a Quantum system among

the parts of a system which are different than in a sense stronger than the ones that occur in ordinary systems actually just last fall the Nobel Prize in physics recognized the experimental validation of that phenomenon of quantum entanglement which is different and stronger than classical correlation are Alum John clauser was one of the recipients of that prize but when it comes to you know thinking about

the future of measurement what can we envision that by mastering quantum entanglement we can do in your opinion oh it's it's vast I think maybe like you I'm I'm just interested in fundamental physics and all of this other stuff is just to get the answer to uh what's really going on here what's the universe made of and what's out there and how could it possibly be

this way and when we ask those kinds of questions you just tap it's not enough to say well I'm going to make my little widget two times better 10 over 10 years or something you have to be dreaming about how am I going to measure the Horizon of a black hole a thousand times better than we're doing now it's not enough now we detect these black

hole mergers and it sounds like a whoop kind of thing which is fine everybody can make a whoop sound but let's hear you do it that's uh 20 years of practice but the the thing you really want to get at when you hear these sounds is not just the whoop but who made it and what was the you really want a high five recording of that

sound and like when you listen to music you really want to feel you know you want to hear the the strength of a person's fingers on the strings and what kind of instrument were they using and you want all of those details that tells you what's really going on and we in the same way we want to zoom in to the Horizon of the black hole

and here is there any crust when these things slime into each other is there any Quantum fuzz around the Horizon any of that stuff and I think all of these things this is a bad pun all of the work we do in Quantum information is actually entangled in that way intellectually and I think when Fernando builds the first working quantum computer even the small one I'm

immediately going to take that and use it and put it into my instrument to make the measurements better and I think it feels a little bit unrelated you know what's Computing and what's measurement but I think the the the main goal which is how to have a lot of entanglement and get something like a million times better than what we do now that's a that's a

dream that we all have to push at the same time and who knows whose work it's going to come from are you an audio file when it comes to music as well as gravitational wave signal yeah I think a lot of um I don't know there's a sociology paper in there maybe but a lot of the people who are the best in the low noise electronics

and instrumentation for gravitational waves are also secretly uh not so successful musicians so so you well you can whoop at each other we do and there are uh there are bands in the world which have uh gravitational wave physicists only for better it works so Fernando we were talking a minute ago about how hard it's going to be to scale up Quantum Computing but not so

much about why to do it uh what are the applications of your envisioning which will have an impact on the lives of Ordinary People so that's a good question that the honest answer is that we don't really know very much Rhino but we know a few of them which makes it exciting a lot to you know to to build it and see really what will be

the ultimate right applications in the end so one actually is the the probably the one of the first times the idea of Quant computation was made she was here at Caltech by Richard Feynman was giving some some lectures on like the the you know some visual they had about uh Computing in physics like 40 years ago he had this idea right that uh you know in

physics and quantum physics we we want to use computers of course right to understand you know uh phenomenon of many of many systems there sometimes we cannot just write solve our equations in the Blackboard we need to go to computers but by experience is very hard to simulate content systems on the computer when the complexity of the system grows because of quantum entanglements among other things

and then he said well wouldn't be cool actually if the computers were made of quantum mechanics itself right and then maybe this kind of simulation problem would be easier uh so and that's probably that's still like one of the main applications that we foresee right for the future quantum computers we'll just be able to understand quantum physics much better right that like complex content systems much

better than we can do today with our modern computers and this goes like you know this be relevant in chemistry in Material Science writing high energy physics we are talk you know we are talking three of us like two days ago uh writes about this this event here and then Ronald said oh it would be so cool to have a quantum computer that maybe I can

run like a quad neural network there and and improve ligo in some way so you know I think it's just a new scientific tool that we have and many people interested in the quantum regime we will find things to do with it I think that idea is not published yet so just keep it to yourselves sorry yeah don't tell anybody I guess the truth is um

we really need quantum computers that we can run uh applications on in order to understand what they're capable of and we we're not quite ready to do that yet but we're getting there that's right yeah yes so it's um I I like to say yes so I like to think about Quantum applications right and as part of my my research and I have to do in

you know whiteboards right with colleagues we write equations we try to solve them we prove theorems as John said because you know that's what we can do today right then and and I I you know I'd like to say that my dream is that when they'll become a computational physicist right where I have a quantum computer and can I just have some idea of a Quantum

application or Quantum algorithm when I just run on it see how it goes right and then you know do and that's how computer science is done today right a lot of heuristics you just try you see works and you move forward it'll be great to get to the same right like regime with quantum computers one day now how we are in terms of building them it's

you know it's you will take I think no one would say it would take like five years a decade if you're really like aggressive maybe you can so the challenge is to make error correction work right as I explained before so this means scaling up to at least like hundreds of thousands of qubits maybe a million qubits uh this will take like at least a decades

no maybe longer it's hard to predict right now uh but there are many platforms that people try to build a quantum computers and there is reasons to be excited about many of them so I think like with you know this a lot of innovation happening in in Academia I feel very vibrant right about like the ideas for qubits new ideas for a skinny app and this

kind of interest from industry that puts this engineering side of things right and gives the resources for a scale up I think we're in a good position to make a lot of progress in the next decade but industry can't do it alone right we need we need those innovations that are going to come from the universities for sure yeah and that's why for example why Amazon

decided right to build the computers here in partnership with Caltech right it's this understanding that it's not an engineering test right it's very much a scientific test and you know the the most Innovative things and the science will be done in Academia right that's how it usually happens so I think this is really an interesting example where uh this tight Partnership of industry and Academia is

very beneficial and be crucial to to get us where we want to get so we are all professors in addition to being researchers we are Educators and we're all proud of the young people who came through our groups and then went on to become scientific and technological leaders we like to think they take a little bit of the Caltech spirit with them when they leave which

helps them succeed in their later lives and careers but what's so special about Caltech in your opinion Rana there are a lot of great universities um what is there something that we have here that just isn't duplicated elsewhere in your opinion yeah I think it's a okay you know so occasionally I think about moving elsewhere uh but when I see some other campus that has a

nice beachfront or something like that is that also a secret that you're thinking about moving here uh I'm not thinking the thoughts occur to me sometimes and sometimes they're not good thoughts uh and but then I I say you know it's kind it's another entanglement kind of thing but one of the best things about Caltech for me is that uh we can walk around outside and

sit outside a lot and while we're doing it uh you know the greatest expert in the world in some kind of area will just wander by with a cup of coffee and you can say Hey you know I had a question about something something and sit down and just have a talk like that and people are so generous with their time and their lab facilities and

efforts and skills that I can't imagine doing any you know if I moved to some other place I just wouldn't be successful because I'm now kind of hooked on this thing that I can go to the electrical engineering department and get non-linear Optics that I needed or I can talk to the radio astronomers and figure out how to do electronics correctly or talk to someone in

the Control Systems Department who knows how to control non-linear things with machine learning and things like that I would never get that in a larger place where I wouldn't run into people all the time so part of it is small size part of it is the weather part of it is the coffee yeah and uh put it all together put it all together yeah I I

think it's and and the students are I just find amazing some of the especially the first year students they come in they got the excitement and I get excited you know I'm excited because they're excited and occasionally uh I think of a great student we shared Kevin Coons who was an undergrad he worked in my lab on lasers the youth stole him from me he worked

on Quantum information for a while then he worked with Sean Carroll on cosmology and then I grabbed him back after grad school and so what a great orbit he made in his career and he makes use of all that background in his uh creative thoughts that's my impression yeah yeah and that that's the kind of students I love to have who've orbited around so what do

you think Fernando why if you're gonna develop Quantum information science why why is Caltech the right place to do it yeah I think it's something from the beginning why I wanted to work on Quantum Computing Quantum information science was it so much disciplinary right so it's really it's it's a we need mathematicians we need physicists we need hierarchical physicists experimental physicists really Computer Sciences right Engineers

everyone coming together right to try to both build the technology and really explore like you know uh what is the impact upon Computing in physics and chemistry right in other sciences and I think you know Caltech is really since I moved here I have collaborative people from from the chemistry Department right from electro engineering from uh from physics of force of experimental physics like many different

platforms and this is kind of a small village right feeling that Ronaldo was saying that Caltech health is ideal for when you want to do this kind of multidisciplinary work right and um and Caltech has this great tradition in Quantum Computing right so so John you know as one of the pioneer of the fields have been doing this for 30 years almost yeah almost right yeah

so and you know Caltech has been like if you if you just look faculty in Quantum Computing theoretical right on the fury side everywhere in the world pretty much like they were here at some point postdoc right in the top places so so Caltech has this like greater addition in Quantum Computing uh it has expanded in recent years like you know the number of Faculty working

on Quantum Computing quality information is growing so I think it makes a very exciting place for uh for you know developing research in this area yeah I agree you know sometimes we think that science advances it splinters more and more into specialized fields that don't interact with one another but my experience here has really been the opposite that as our understanding advances I have more in

common that people in computer science and chemistry and wasn't part of my training but I can learn a lot from interacting with those people um Caltech has very ambitious plans in Quantum Science and Technology uh to succeed we need a lot we need people we need facilities and resources we have been extremely successful I think in recent years in hiring brilliant young people to our faculty

who have an interest in Quantum Science and Technology across many different departments and physics and applied physics computer science materials science engineering chemistry and as we've been discussing it's fascinating to have the opportunity to interact across those disciplinary boundaries but we also need facilities so what uh what do you where do you see that going Rana in in the next couple of years what are we

going to have here that'll help us Propel the field I think I think there's there's several things but the I guess I'm hooked on this entanglement thing so I think one of the really important things which sounds a little bit silly but people have got to interact more and the right combinations of people have to run into each other more often and a little bit of

uh I was a in the introduction you heard I was at MIT before and that is a really a one-dimensional campus and so not that's not a psychological statement it's just geographically it's kind of in a line and one long card it's one long Corridor and it's you just like Traverse back and forth but it's not the geometry that we have on the Caltech campus where

you're kind of running into each other and it it Spurs so many new ideas that I always wanted to make that more and more and one of the things that we are working toward is having a center for precision Quantum measurement on the Caltech campus that will bring together people who are doing experimental work and design work and algorithms and thinking about Theory more broadly and

we don't uh I mean we're talking now but it would be great to uh accidentally go by your office door more often and pop in and ask you questions and have my students talk to your students and that kind of thing and when it happens it's magical one of your postdocs come over to my group it's yeah it's a great infusion of brain power and we

need to do that more so I I anticipate we're all going to be in that building that's the plan and uh every once in a while I expect to see you stumbling by carrying a cup of coffee that'll give me an opportunity to ask you a question well beyond that Fernando what do you think we're we're going to need at Caltech to be successful in this

field yeah so um so as Quantum information science rights transition from from like you know science to engineering a little bit where you continue to to you know and both have to advance together now uh how Tech is like is also planning a Quantum engineering center and a building together with it uh and and the idea there is to you know put together people uh from

from Applied Physics from Material Science from other parts of other parts in Caltech they think about Quant Computing you know the more engineering structured way uh together to make Innovation uh and to yeah and and this is I think it's very exciting especially also going back to you know this Amazon presence on campus right this industry friends on campus I think this will really uh you

know allow us to move to the next step of competing where where we want to like actually build right build on this like ideas that we developed before on Theory here and on small scales to really big on a bigger scale and a more like Industrial Level and Engineering level I think things keep getting smaller so Quantum phenomena are becoming more and more important and a

lot of settings in engineering increasingly a bigger swath of engineering will be Quantum engineering you know I I've just a thought as you were talking is it's a tough engineering challenge and as you say you're like working on the Whiteboard and that kind of thing but these days when we design classical experiments we use classical computers to do it and even people who design the next

generation of classical computer use classical computers use today's Intel chips to design the next Intel chips or something like that and at my world anyway the reason why we're not more Quantum is just it's really tough to keep things entangled you have something like 10 to the 25 photons and you want all of them to be in lockstep and kind of waving at the same time

and moving along but the world conspires to not let you do that and it disentangles the stuff and I think for quantum computers the a lot of the challenges on the the guts of it the materials and how do you keep the things entangled what do you think about this idea of using the first quantum computers to design the materials for the next generation of quantum

computers and then you could imagine some kind of exponential increase in quantities yeah I think it's um it it might happen right it's definitely one of the first applications that we foresee of a Quantum compute is exactly right like on Material Science they think about new materials and simulating some molecules which are very hard to write on Modern computers and they needed this week maybe that's

how we get the idea for the better qubits right for the better way to build the quantum computer and we iterate from that right so so when I talk about this kind of like 10 years time scale maybe it's 20 maybe start who knows right to to be this first generation of air corrected quantum computers that we we know they can run some interesting applications this

is really just the first step right if you think about modern computers today they have hundreds of billions of transistors right and and of course what they want to have hundreds of billions of qubits as well right but the ideas that we have today will not get us there right so as Ronald is saying I hope this like early quantum computers which are very exciting can

help us to read device design this huge very futuristic Quant computers right that right now we have no clue how to build them but that we want that we want to be there it took Decades of materials research to get where we are now where we can carry computers around in our pockets and even more exotic materials will be needed in the future and so we're

we're going to take some questions but before we do very briefly let's just talk about the future um Fernando you haven't quite told us how long it's going to take to have a quantum computer that uh we're all going to be excited about using uh you want to stick your neck out one far away is that one digital procedure I was going to say I hope

it's closer to 10 years than 100 years but then run okay so look I I it's I I think it's it's like a it would be 10 years is really pushing it's probably not going to happen right I think 20 years you know it's um I feel good about it I think something that is going to happen definitely like in the next couple of decades for

this first generation of computers right and then we have to go from there unfortunately I'm still a young man but I better stay healthy still yeah so uh Rana what what's the dream if we can really entangle all those particles you were talking about what do you think is going to happen um I I think we'll use it to answer all of the questions we have

about fundamental physics and then find new questions so we'll you know not only find out what's really what's up what's up with the black hole Horizon and is it smooth and as Einstein would say or is there some sort of funniness going on do we have a vast sea of bubbling wormholes appearing around the edge of the black hole or is there some other kind of

crust we've never imagined is space-time empty like we think it is or is it more like a fluid which has a prismatic effects or I mean is there some sort of exotic nature of space-time and who knows I might even figure out why all the particles have the masses that they do well yeah I'm aligned with that ambition I've you know been interested in fundamental physics

since uh my start and uh the the big question for me is what are the atoms of space how does the geometry of space-time work at a fundamental level and we haven't we don't understand that but we have increasing evidence that it has a lot to do with quantum entanglement that entanglement in some sense is holding space together and if that's true we should be able

to simulate new types of space-time with our computers and in experiments we can we can do in the lab and probe the properties and and get insights into how space-time works at a at a fundamental level whether that really happens or not I think we'd be very confident there are a lot of exciting discoveries ahead at the quantum Frontier and a lot of that's going to

happen here at Caltech so uh let's take a few questions absolutely thank you so much um Rhonda you may have brought it up with your bad pun about entanglement because For the First Time The Question the top question is drumroll what's your favorite Quantum superposition joke thank you yeah I got nothing what was the question John what what is your favorite Quantum superposition joke my favorite

Quantum superposition joke um can we come back to that we'll come back to that okay the perfect okay so we'll go to Dave's question Dave 84. is that Dave zobel yes it is okay of course um Carver Mead suggested we revamped physics education and teach it in reverse chronological order Quantum first since it's our most accurate description of reality then rolling backwards through these are the

smart Caltech people Bohr Newton Galileo and Archimedes nicely done would that work or would it require young people to think too abstractly coffee or no good question I I think you could do it at the at a kind of a root level um I at the root level probably physics is statistical mechanics but still you could teach quantum mechanics sort of in the Feynman style where

it's all about coin flips and waves and that's kind of thing that people have good intuition for and if you start thinking a direction and you think Quantum first then that that's a good sense it's not chronological but you can build up all the classical things from that it's just a little tougher to make examples when you say you know imagine uh you know this is

my attempt at a joke imagine you and your sibling are in a superposition in your bunk beds or something like that that's a little tougher to imagine maybe on your first day but you and so we of course we torture all physics students with the incline plane because I guess it's a test to see if you really have your heart in physics or not but we

could uh I think as we both thought about it you could have a more exciting thing right in the beginning where you go right to black holes and auto mechanics on the first day as we get more experience at manipulating Quantum systems that should deepen our intuition about how they behave and we know my generation and the generation before mine we spoke of you know quantum

physics being uh very counter-intuitive and weird well that's because we're less accustomed to it but if we can make these macroscopic Quantum States behave the way we want to we should be able to have more of a gut feel about how Quantum Works after all even classical physics isn't so intuitive you know it took a few Millennia to discover Newton's laws and as experience will uh

will allow us to understand things much more deeply maybe the last question because it may be at length and we want to give you a break at 10 50. what has been the most crucial development in the quantum world so far and what do you think would be the biggest development that can be made so what's the biggest development so far the most crucial development in

the quantum world so far and what do you think would be the biggest development that can be made or you can go the biggest development to come well I thought we had some pretty big Ambitions there at the end uh hey actually one we haven't talked about explicitly um is uh you know you want to detect things in the sky oh but what again you have

these ligo interferometers and you can make use of the fact that uh you know by combining their signals you can get a lot more information what if we can entangle telescopes and what if we could have a network of telescopes that really shared Quantum information in a serious way what what would that allow I mean I think we could we could look out into the sky

which is great but you could also think about it for looking inside and I I I'm an experimental physicist so I'm maybe you could say partially an engineer and I think whenever we come up with a new physics theory I think well it's a great thing you could use it to measure things better or something if we have a real entanglement I we could we could

entangle telescopes and peer deep into the cosmos of course in all kinds of different wavelengths and find out what's happening but I also Imagine a world where we have sensors right around the earth and then sensors right around each person and you could use it to do extremely sensitive Health monitoring Brain Monitoring atmospheric monitoring all the things that matter to life on Earth I mean not

that astronomy doesn't matter but astronomy matters a lot to a lot of us but these other things matter maybe to more people and what's going on in the Earth with our health and with the environment and that's the kind of thing that you'd like to know and it would be great if we could turn our Technologies for looking out into space back onto the Earth right

if we can if we have more sensitive and less invasive sensors enabled by Quantum technology we can see maybe single neurons firing the single protein Motors in the cell and that will uh help us to understand biology more deeply but it will surely have big implications for medical science as well do we have time for any anymore um I think probably that is it because a

biological break is needed for the gut brain connection so thank you so much please give a hand to our fantastic fan of Ultron and future Rana adikari Fernando brandeo and of course John prascal thank you so much and during your break you can ask Ponder the questions do you ever consider that our universe is a simulation running on a computer on a quantum computer and the

question why did the quantum particle cross the road thank you so much that was really fantastic