Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson and Dr. Will Roper Keynote

so will you're there hi neil i can see and hear you loud and clear how about you excellent excellent um forgive my background just this follows me wherever i go so you just happen to catch me you know still it's it's both artistically and scientifically appropriate i'll say by the way it's one of my favorite works of art not only because it it's cosmically themed but um it's clearly not what he saw because no the sky doesn't really look like that but it's definitely what he felt when he saw the sky and i think the combination of what what you feel and what motivates you and what is is what makes us human and so when i see artists uh bringing a perspective that wasn't there before i embrace it by the way i think that's what engineers do but in a different way engineers they say to themselves gee you know there's a little bit of physics over here or chemistry or biology and we have this need over here because you can't you actually can't expect the scientists to do that because we're just sort of in the lab somebody's got to go out there and say i'm going to take that and apply it and then transform the world and that takes a certain audacity of creativity that the best engineers have and society benefits from it entirely i think it's a great way to just tee up that there is a real art in science they're both creative endeavors and that you're you're building with fundamental laws of physics and science you're building with applying them in engineering and of course artists built with their own medium including van gogh behind you but neil i just want to thank you on behalf of the air force and i can say space force so i should update my bio uh we are so excited that you are willing to join us for this quantum accelerator and what we're trying to do is make quantum real it's been talked about it's a buzzword in the pentagon most people don't know a lot about it and it's always the future with uh a capital f and we'd like to make it the future with a lower case f and so we're really delighted that you're going to share your expertise and just your enthusiasm for science in general and i want to see if you'd be willing just to start by just explaining quantum to the layman i know that we've got a lot of experts but uh you know i think sometimes hearing something a different way can spark new ideas even for seasoned veterans of quantum science so if you would tell us what you think of how do you explain quantum when someone on the street grabs you and says hey neil you don't know me but i need to understand this spooky law of physics how do i think about yeah so first of all probably most of who is on this uh webinar uh are would be way more fluent in quantum physics than i am i know i know quantum physics i studied it in school but i don't do it professionally but what i can tell you and what i do a lot of thinking about is what role quantum has played in our lives in ways that people i think don't suspect and let me go all the way back to the big bang for the moment so let's just start there okay that's a good place to start any conversation i think but um just consider that the triumphs of newtonian gravity giving us an understanding of of planetary systems and galaxies and the large-scale universe but then einstein comes along and says um by the way uh newtonian gravity has limits of applicability uh it actually fails at these the edges of where isaac newton had experienced in his lifetime what's the fastest thing he would have known it's a running horse perhaps all right and so einstein doesn't replace newton it extends the understanding of gravity to regimes that didn't otherwise manifest in newton's formulations of gravity so of course when you put low speeds and low gravity and einstein's equations you get newtons they've come out for free right so that's why it's not a replacement it's an extension all right so here we go so now we've got cosmology derived from einstein's general theory of relativity principally and it's working we got the expanding universe we get an understanding of the history throw some thermodynamics in there the universe was hotter okay in the past we got this but then we realized wait a minute if you keep going all the way back the universe was smaller and smaller and smaller smaller there's a point where the universe was on the scale in size of atoms okay particles well we have a formalism to understand the behavior of matter on such small scales that was developed primarily in the 1920s and it's called quantum physics back then was called quantum mechanics okay quantum physics is the whole thing so fine i don't have a problem with that all right by the way the 1920s was a watershed decade in for at least from where i see the universe in cosmic discovery because that's when hubble the man not the telescope discovered that our galaxy was not the only one in the universe there are island universes out there other galaxies and it was discovered that the universe was expanding and we got to apply einstein's general theory of relativity and quantum physics was developed all that happened in the 1920s okay an under-heralded fact about that decade and i'll get back to that in a minute so here's what happens um the universe is small and that quantum physics is the most successful theory ever put forth about the behavior of nature just want to make that clear yes a general relativity is successful but it has its limits right just the way newton had its limits general relativity has its limits what are those limits well what's happening at the center of a black hole there's a singularity there okay you're dividing by zero in some equations so so with the issues well things are really small there maybe we've hit the limits of einstein's theory and we have to then invoke this other theory that has never been shown to be wrong and that's quantum physics so quantum physics married to general relativity gives us an attempt to understand the very earliest moments in the universe it's kind of a shotgun marriage between these two the quantum theory and the theory of general relativity all right and it turns out as stated they don't they don't make nice in the sandbox general relativity requires space to be smooth and continuous quantum physics tells us that on a smaller scale a planck scale space is discontinuous they don't they don't work together all right so you need somebody to come in like you dr roper a string theorist to come in and say let me perform this marriage in some way that is amicable all right is there a third understanding that encompasses those two point is quantum we have no understanding of the birth of the universe without dipping our toes our whole feet our body into quantum physics well let's keep going 100 years ago we're trying to understand where energy comes from excuse me where the elements come from in the universe they're big heavy elements out there where do they come from maybe fusion you could do that well where would the fusion take place well the space is pretty empty and cold you're not going to have fusion there how about the centers of stars all right we did the freaking calculation okay you get the pressure it's gas your gas laws you know thermodynamics you go down there you get the pressure and you find out it's about 10 million degrees plus or minus now you go back into what you learned about about uh protons that are resisting each other because they have the same charge and you find out that's not hot enough to slam protons together it's not you're not fusing particles in the centers of stars because we know it has to be about 10 million degrees and we know how particles interact because of their electromagnetic repulsion so this was a dilemma until quantum physics and then we realized oh my gosh the proton is not just this particle it's a wave function all right and the wave function occupies more than just the spot of the particle part of the wave function occupies and overlaps the position of the other proton and there's a finite likelihood that that proton can find itself close enough to the other proton that happens and you calculate what rate that is lo and behold you have thermonuclear fusion in the sun because of quantum mechanical tunneling tunneling oh my gosh what who ordered that okay this is stuff that has no classical analog and so here we are bit by bit and piece by piece assembling and understanding of the universe which for the longest while we had no idea was being touched by an entire other branch of physics even something as simple as magnetism something's been known for centuries okay um has has no understanding without an understanding of quantum physics and then other phenomena arise of course as you move forward we have uh superconductivity all right who ordered that you need an understanding of quantum physics for that super fluidity it goes on and on and on and on and on and so it leaves you wondering given how fertile quantum physics is in its weirdness and it's oddities it's only weird and odd by the way because we evolved in a classical world okay you don't see quantum phenomenon because we can't all right so so we don't have any intuitive sense of how quantum physics unfolds so we have to learn it with an equation or is that what matter does under those conditions i guess i got to just keep lear just got to keep thinking about that because i don't have a life experience to hand it to me the way i drop an apple in it i'd let go of an apple and it falls um that's intuitive quantum is not but you all know this okay i just want to emphasize how many unexplained unexplored uninvented things are out there because quantum physics underpins what's going on well i spoke i'm sorry i'm hogging all the time here will sorry you have the real question and i just got all the way my friend look i'm i am ready to go back into research so if you like um take over this job for me we need you somebody's got to allocate somebody's got to see the big picture you know so you stay right where you are okay it is it is rare for scientists uh to be in these jobs and so i i cannot tell you how much i use a technical background to try to help the military harness some of this new science and engineering that it does seem obscure to the person on the street we don't have an intuition because there's no evolutionary advantage for having an instinct for quantum physics and most of the things that we experience as waves in the physical world we can just treat classically as waves we don't have to deal with the fact that quantum waves like to be waves but sometimes not and when i'm when i'm asked when i'm asked by people like when are we going to see quantum effects in the military i tell them you already got them they're quantum effects everywhere you had a you had a great one that really did change my view of the world when i was a young student that you just can't get magnetism without quantum effects you can start zooming into those load stones that have been discovered by primitive peoples throughout history they have weird properties metals behave differently but if you need to understand them if you start zooming in you're eventually going to have to get down to those little microscopic uh magnetic moments and for certain metals they don't sum up to zero you can get circuits that leave the moment and you just can't get there classically it's one thing to understand something and then you feel good about having learned it it's another thing to say wait a minute now that i have that understanding i can exploit it in this way not previously imagined for example so happened to be my physics professor in college um discovered nuclear magnetic resonance all right and this is a it's a it's a peculiar phenomenon as is everything in quantum physics but if you have a a an atomic nucleus and you put a very strong magnetic field across it if there's a magnetic moment in it it will align and you'll keep it that way and then you put a varying magnetic field on it and if you if you tune it you can find a resonance with that nucleus and that resonance actually is it is detectable and so that's kind of interesting it's kind of initially would be just kind of like a a a curiosity well all right no you don't expect physicists to do this but now comes the engineer okay the physicist lays it out by the way he won the nobel prize for that discovery all right so nuclear magnetic resonance so what happens a clever engineer says wait a minute if you can distinguish this nucleus from that nucleus because they have different resonances hmm maybe i can make a cavity and put you in that cavity and distinguish the nuclei of different tissues that comprise your body tissues that would not show up in an x-ray which is famously good for finding your bones but not much else okay or other calcified things in your body so thus gets invented the magnetic resonance imager the mri it's really a nuclear magnetic resonance imager but it's that's one of the illegal n words in society nuclear so they take they they remove the word nuclear from the machine and it's just now mri so you can walk right into it and get this measured point is again it's an exploitation of a quantum effect that is yeah now i understand magnetism by the way nuclei can get magnetized in a quantum way and now it is arguably the most potent machine in a medical portfolio for diagnosing the condition of your body without cutting you open so so here you have this whole community of people tuned into this webinar who are applying who are invoking their their creative brain juices to try to do something that hasn't been done before um exploiting the quantum and i'm just saying that the day has only just dawned on this topic and yeah you want to turn quantum capital future into lowercase future just turn it into the present okay forget the future it's in the present all right and uh one other thing before i yield the floor back to you is um who you have people today who are saying i don't need to know this why do i need to know why do i need to explore space why do i need these people who are sort of technology science and technology skeptics let's call them presumably no one on this call is that but you certainly know people who are we all do these are the same people by the way who are rejecting the the the discoveries of scientists and and but they're still using their smartphone okay wait i gotta call grandma wait i need instructions to the nearest starbucks okay i don't like space don't spend money on space you are finding starbucks because a satellite is giving you coordinates just wake up to this okay i know i'm screaming at all y'all because y'all you're the wrong person for me to be screaming at but i'm just trying to say that if you were around in the 1920s and you're allocating budgets and you're one of these skeptics you might say why are you studying the atom it's it's so small you can't even see it it's got properties we don't even care about i'm a carpenter all i care is that my wood atoms cut with my saw all right why why are you this is a waste of money this is some of the most brilliant people in the world dedicated to something that has nothing to do with anything in this world you know people today if they were live back then would be saying that to those scientists yeah it would take decades okay 40 50 years especially before quantum physics would become manifest in the storage the creation storage and retrieval of information and so then you know back then computers are used by businesses scientists that's it the public is still not thinking about it now you cannot wake up in the morning without being touched by a computer in some way or another and there is no creation storage and retrieval of information without an understanding of the quantum and the i.t role in today's economy i've done some calculations on this and there are ways to to to play with the numbers but but a conservative estimate is that i.t drives the creation of one third at least one-third of all the world's wealth i.t and 40 years ago would you even imagine that it's people employed in branches of our economy that would not have existed back then so all i'm saying is sky is the limit and i get to say that because i'm an astrophysicist that's right i love that there's no lid on the sky as long as you let the air get really thin so neil i think you make a great point it's one we've got to get across the military is that we already have quantum effects we have them in our personal lives i think if you didn't understand a lot about physics if you owned smart phones way back in the day and saw the progression to smartphones where you can now store all the information that would have taken an entire pc you can now carry around your pocket that to be able to store something that's that big and something that small you've got to get down into the physics of small things and you know for the air force and space force you know we we run past the fact we're building hypersonic weapons we'll test one this year and the black body radiation that will be significant from something moving that fast and some really cool physics to explore that you can't understand that without uh without a knowledge of quantum physics and quantum science and even the laser you know is it's just so common now we've got laser pointers we built high energy in the military and certainly you can't even begin to talk about coherence or quantum coherence without having a sense of how atoms behave individually under quantum mechanics yeah a quick thing about the laser we uh i think we have it to your point we have it the quick thing the you know if you look at laser you know if you google it you'll find out that it was invented you know in the 1960s or late 50s i forgot exactly when and there's also a mazer microwave amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation if you didn't otherwise know laser was an acronym late light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation um what's interesting to me is you typically don't in those articles don't go back to what enabled the invention in the first place and it was a research paper by albert einstein had this particular research paper that i'm referencing but the only thing he contributed in this world he would be among the ranks of he'd be listed among the most brilliant scientists of the 20th century okay he wrote a paper i forgot the exact title it's something on the stimulated emission of radiation okay okay and he runs through the calculations and he shows that okay that you can you know an excited atom will will de-excite emitting a photon in so doing the electron changes energy states okay emitting a photon okay get that i understand but you realize that if you bathe this atom in the energy of the same photon that was emitted it emits more photons who ordered that somehow the atom likes it is stimulated by it and emits more and so this was a curious phenomenon it's a quantum phenomenon a curious phenomenon that would not be exploited into a laser for decades and you know einstein is not thinking you know this is the future of barcodes or skin peels or you know you know it's just so so i think what i like to do with with your audience here is i don't need to tell you to get excited about quantum but what because you already are you wouldn't be on this call but there are people out there who don't understand it and don't know why they should and to the extent that i that i can feed you ways that you can reach them to get them to say to themselves yeah technology matters yeah technology is a future uh can i give a quick anecdote here um this will sound like a cheap plug but it actually isn't uh my most recent book is called letters from an astrophysicist it's a compilation of correspondence i've had over the decades with random general public asking me stuff about life about aliens about god about about education about uh you know so it's a compilation the letters from an astrophysicist i just got noticed that it's going to be translated into portuguese for sale in brazil the brazilian publisher wrote me a letter and said could for this edition could you please write a letter your own letter two brazilians and i said why because they knew that i know that brazil has the third largest if they still last i checked the third largest aerospace industry in the world if you ask most people in the world what's brazil known for they'll talk about coffee soccer beaches tanning creams whatever and somehow technology doesn't come up meanwhile there's a shift in their politics and in their government and in their ways where science is being less valued compared with other things that have immediate gratification so they see this as an opportunity to get me to say something to the country to say look you already have this embryo you know you already got something going here all right and if you want to be a part of the future if you want to be a player in the future you've got to continue to invest in that way otherwise the world will leave you behind i'm ready to write that letter i'm gonna write it this weekend in fact so other countries are thinking about this oh and by the way you talk about quantum in the military you know you like to know that the military is ahead of whatever you're doing otherwise you know what are we paying for you guys got all the deep pockets here wait a second no tough questions here neil [Laughter] um i just remember you know when the fastest computer in the world was a thing that would make headlines it doesn't much make headlines anymore but the fastest computer in the world was always in the military craig computer gray xmp military bought the first one off the assembly line and so now you don't hear much of that we know the frontier of that is going to be quantum computing personally i think some of it is oversold in terms of what it would be able to do add that to for example um you know when they know each other um entanglement tanglement thank you quantum entanglement um hey we're ready for charades uh sure yeah i i worked right it succeeded um sounds like so look at quantum entanglement um i think some of the promise there is overstated you know about it being a way of faster than light communicating oh by the way tunneling and quantum entanglement when you collapse the wave function it happens instantaneously faster than light quantum tunneling is faster than light so this is all basically faster than light phenomenon all right so the people very excited about possibly exploiting this i think i don't mind people sort of overthinking it because then you want to go where you've never been before even if you have to pull back but all i can say is if you look at quantum entanglement and say uh where are all the records being set and who's doing all the research united states does not show up so maybe we are doing all that research and it's all classified and it's not getting published or we are stuck at the table and everybody else is in the lab okay china has the record for the longest distance between two entangled particles 1200 kilometers the width of china beamed by two coherent particles that came down from a satellite okay so they got a whole branch working on this do we if we do it's top secret and nobody knows about it but i don't sorry sorry will roper i don't have that much confidence other than what you're trying to do for the military i don't i don't have the confidence that i can sit quietly at night knowing we got top people working on stuff that needs to be worked on just look around the world and you see where everyone else is putting their resources and that's a sign and and by the way again i'm still i'm talking too much here but i just want you to i i don't know what the people dialing in from all around the world let me just say something about the united states of america okay our self-image is one well we're leaders and we're this and we're that and and and it's because we've actually sort of readjusted the arc of history so that we feel comfortable saying that but let's take a look at space for a moment okay here's what happened all right russia puts up sputnik it's ussr puts up sputnik first artificial satellite in space we freak out okay we create nasa a year and a day later okay all right what else happens russia puts up the first non-human animal leica okay the dog russia puts up the first human russia puts up the first woman russia puts up the first dark-skinned person it was a cuban okay russia puts up the first space station russia puts makes the first docking russia does all of this okay we put someone on the moon and we say we win okay so what i want to impress upon you is yeah we as a country we can get anything done we want but my read of history tells me that we do so reactively rather than proactively okay we're really good saying uh oh i have to catch up really good at that because we're embarrassed all right so somewhere in there somebody's got to turn that into things we do that are proactive that's how you truly lead the world neil my hope is i think you made a great point i hope by doing events like this quantum accelerator just pushing a million dollars into basic research that we we are being proactive but i would say we're being proactive in our reactive response and that that arc of history actively reactive that's what you're saying meaning we we are just so accustomed uh to being reactive this is actually closer to the proactive side scale we're not waiting for something to be on fire before we send in the team to put it out okay i agree with you there you're being proactively reactive yes it's it's it's like it's like a lead zeppelin it's just wonderful to have those oxymorons in our language but but the loss of the soviet union you can't let that go hold on so the group led zeppelin um when they first performed you know there's a lot of screaming in their songs back when screaming was uncommon now it's everybody does it and the music was not like listening to the kingston trio uh it was hard to listen to for early people and it then brought everyone else to it and it became norm and now it's in the canon of classic rock when they were first heard was it by an agent or by a record producer they said this music is terrible if we published it it would sink like a lead zeppelin so they said we'll call ourselves that so there you have it so i didn't want that to go by unless people didn't know that little bit of history there no it's i think all uh transformative music is universally hated by the status quo yeah that's that's the force that transforms everyone and brings them to it and then when their kids love it right then it becomes the next thing but you know for for kids growing up today just thinking back to what it would have been like to have the soviet union as a strategic competitor that is ancient history for people joining the air force and space force now the sense of we're in a competition and it's not clear who's going to win is a foreign idea because of what you just discussed we we presume that we're going to be ahead and leading dominant and today's world uh that is not a fade yeah just i think the military really lost something when the soviet union collapsed we lost the need to compete in all domains including fundamental science and so fortunately we are now feeling uh we're reacting we're now feeling that we really need to compete and there are many nations like china that you mentioned it's not clear what our relationship will be long term but we can't assume the best we have to plan for the worst and we can hope for the best but we can't assume it and science is an area of competition and military can can actually play a really valuable role which is what we're trying to do here i think what hurt us was that quantum effects like the laser and black body radiation and medical um they they actually got bypassed when the impact of the quantum computer and breaking encryption was first raised this idea that a quantum computer could take all of the trusted communications that the military has and just open them to an adversary that could process with a quantum computer something that all the computers in the world would take longer than you know the whole history of humanity to churn through that was a scary thought and so it started our engagement in quantum computing and if you look back it was kind of a it was a naive pursuit that we had camps that jumped into particular trapped ions or or optical quantum computers and and that we we focused on that for so long uh that we we ran past other quantum effects that now appear to be closer to coming into the military than quantum computing which was the initial thing that let us on fire uh quantum encryption is here so you mentioned the chinese the mises being able to beam down and tangled particles being able to communicate well maybe we don't have to worry about quantum computers breaking encryption if we can use quantum encryption to be secure against a mega computer focused at us and quantum sensing gets very little height in the military and i think it's just a fantastic area to encourage fundamental research now i don't know what part of quantum mechanics is going to be most easily mechanized i do like that we call it quantum mechanics because it does provide a new apparatus a new set of machinery to start thinking about building things from an engineering perspective and for those who think quantum energy levels are the place to begin or superposition states or entanglements uh which you mentioned earlier so many different mechanisms to think about new kinds of machines that have never existed before and will likely do different things and i'm hoping that in this event we do today we don't just become synonymous with quantum computing though i did bring one of our research labs quantum processors here i can now hold one in my hand when they used to take up an entire research lab but quantum sensing like like quantum gravimeters which could have a variety of commercial uses you could imagine how the future could be radically different if you could detect an enemy submarine this big heavy thing uh that that is below or or how having say a quantum metrology on a chip being able to do things we currently do with gps to navigate you mentioned going to starbucks using gps satellites just a small number of space force operators operating that constellation i don't think many people know the military provides that as a free service and yes we do have to take into account quantum sorry a general relativity to keep the gps constellation uh operating with all the leap seconds and small changes that uh that sidereal time just doesn't really jive with uh the way the world really really wants to turn versus how atoms actually emit uh radiation so we're already leveraging physics that in the 1920s was was so far and it's now common in mechanized and quantum isn't to the same degree and so what i'm hoping that that we will do is is kind of come back and baseline the military and say do we have to worry about quantum computing yes we do there's there's no telling what they could do but i'm in your camp it's not clear to me that a quantum computer is going to be uh be doing better cat videos on a phone anytime soon but as leading researchers can determine how to write code computer code using quantum mechanical language superposition states other things so that a process in the end generates information that is actionable by military or anyone until that's commonplace there are other things to explore and i'm curious out of all of those things so quantum computing quantum sensing quantum encryption you know where do you see the the application to military problems and if you were going to place of that what would you what would you bet on first for giving us that next quantum effect that we leveraged so a couple of things first i never pretended to be you know see the future and i have very good evidence why you should never trust me for seeing the future i'm old enough to remember star trek in first run in the 1960s and there they were with these warp drives and photon torpedoes and and you know i said yeah that's the future yeah yeah and they had this box in the wall where you put food in it and seconds later it comes out hot yeah i can maybe that could happen i'm saying all of this and then there they are walking up to doors that automatically open and close and i say how does the door know that'll never happen so here i am embracing photon torpedoes and not and not even imagining that a door could know that you're walking people don't know there was a day where you actually had to open all your own doors right and then they got a little clever and they had a pressure pad you step on that and that would open it but now okay i'm just saying i don't don't trust any of my predictions what i will do i do a lot of reading of history however and i want to give a historical example by just by analogy uh are you familiar with the great manure catastrophe have you ever heard of that i haven't but i i do work uh in a in a government apparatus that often generates them okay we'll see if you still have your job tomorrow after this so um manhattan where i live um it's an island connected by many tunnels and bridges to the rest of the world it's not very large it's about 13 miles long and three miles wide so it's a long skinny island you go back 120 years there were horses that took you everywhere you either walked or you hired a cab which was a horse-drawn cab okay there's not only that but all supplies you know it's a it's a it's a it's a mercantile mecca okay so horses are pulling everything all right uh horses pull the the fire engines horses so so horses are everywhere and they're pooping everywhere so there's manure everywhere in the streets and it's attracting flies and it's a sanitation problem and so the local government's saying how are we going to fix this well maybe we can get the chemist to work on the biologists to work on a feed where they don't have to poop as much where they process it more into their metabolism okay that might have helped how about this other thing that makes it less interesting to flies because flies became the secondary health problem so all this research is going on and by the way they ran the calculation and they said if this population of manhattan goes up and the manure continues to grow because there's a system of removal you take it from here and you put it over there where then big trucks horse-drawn trucks would then load it up and then take it out of the out of the borough okay but what happened was people did the calculation and they said there's a limit beyond which the effort to remove the manure requires as many horses as the manure that's getting laid down in the street so you ca so this was it's called the great manure catastrophe and there's all these people working on that problem and you know what solved the problem the car the internal combustion engine car my point is you can become so focused on a problem that you are blind to other solutions that are vast of course car had its own issues okay including safety before we had stop lights and then pollution and all the rest of that but that solved the manure problem without ever having to think about manure and the manure was not what motivated carl benz for for perfecting the internal combustion engine okay so so as you approach these problems stay broad because maybe some other solution to another problem renders your entire exercise obsolete there's everybody trying to solve the encryption problem what's the acronym that i mean the three letter abbreviation the um aes encryption or rsa encryption or say encryption okay so that that's the the gold standard okay we use it because we don't know how to decrypt it in any in a timeline of civilization does that mean that's the only encryption out there it's the best one we know of now maybe to work on a different encryption okay that does not then lend itself to the quantum solution that will perhaps come down the pike one day all right is that the only way you're gonna move information back and forth find another way to do it rendering the interception of information obsolete maybe so i'm just saying stay wide open by the way contests such as this that you're sponsoring here are just that sort of thing you're crowdsourcing innovation i think the advice is good one history certainly supports your position that if you decide to buy a crystal ball it's just going to be an ornament in your house and i also take the caution uh from you that if if fundamental science and broad research is our number two priority then we will inherit a manure problem of one kind or another i didn't think to take the analogy that far but if we want to if you want to generalize you don't want a manure catastrophe in the military right i i would have been it would have been fun to calculate that break-even point of where you cannot add another horse without needing more horses to care for it and i think you report your your point about uh exploring broad things we could get over i got to interrupt so on the subject of horses can you do something about this please if you're gonna if with the air with the with the space force and you got a thing now i am tired of reading about rocket propulsion in units of horsepower okay no number of horses will ever ascend earth's surface okay so don't okay can we evolve past horses in measuring this okay i get it that you measure engines in horsepower car engines because cars replace horses so that was something people kind of understood but cars don't fly they're still going horizontally they're still going forward so if you have any influence on the space force get people to come up with some other measure of the thrust of a rocket okay i'll take that one on although i do remember as a student a lot of weird physics problems where you assumed a perfectly spherical uh so maybe a a very a very uh uh well jumping horse perhaps could get us into the safe cool but i like you yeah pegasus units how about that pegasus units i like of course they need to fly so i don't know how we're going to get outside the atmosphere oh yeah it gets you through the atmosphere so uh rocket pegasus rocket power yeah we need it uh purely and so you're always one step behind right so units of flying then inform the units of of space see as units of horses inform the units of cars by the way we had the same problem uh challenged with nuclear power how do you tell someone what is the energy of this bomb well they give it in terms of tnt right and now you got million tons of tnt and the units just they lose their their their relevance to the magnitude of what is going on at hand we could i mean you know since a horse can't get into space if we could use manure units because you could burn it turn it into energy right we keep it all in the family though [Laughter] so horses can still look with pride on how they influence civilization yes they're they're they're they're actual they're the actual uh propulsion on land and they're generating the fuel for aaron's face there you go there you go i have one more historical point i just want to leave you guys with it has to do with the industrial revolution so we think of it as this great time or you know you read the history books and we're still a little in a little bit of it but it's mostly an information revolution of course the industrial revolution um most people i don't think think much about what enabled it was it just a bunch of creative people yes you need that but it's necessary but not sufficient to make this happen what was going on was physicists were were figuring out what energy is how to represent it how it manifests how to convert it from one form to another this was unknown in the time of newton as brilliant as newton was you read all his stuff energy is not a thing that he's working with okay because it wasn't formulated yet that's early 1700s late 1600s you fast forward up into the 1800s people are figuring out wait there's energy going on i'm boring my cannon with this drill and the drill is getting hot in fact it's boiling the water how did that happen mechanical energy is becoming thermal energy what's going on can i measure this how much is there can i convert it as the laws of physics and thermodynamics arose in tandem clever engineers exploited it and therein was the transformation of civilization and the years since quantum physics have you know it's been 100 years um and okay we we we've only begun to exploit the quantum but think of the quantum in modern times as energy in the olden days of the 1800s and look at what it did for civilization over a relatively short period of time 150 years transformed us so um think of us at the birth of a revolution of our understanding of by the way uh and a caution here it's a fun caution the caution nonetheless the industrial revolution was still based on classical physics still based on physics that you had some intuition of how it would work quantum physics you can't just sit in an armchair and take your life experience and come up with a discovery because your life experience is irrelevant leave it check it at the code check okay and walk in afresh um you know what you can do imagine that the value of planck's constant was a billion times larger than it currently is then put yourself in that world and if you walk through a doorway you would diffract okay to be fun things matter okay in fact somebody invented quantum chess okay look it up online you all probably know this quantum chess and you can't actually physically build that board because it involves superpositions of states of the pieces that you're moving and so each piece has a binary manifestation but of two different pieces but you don't know it until you touch it then it's wave function collapses then it's one of those two pieces but once you've touched it you have to move it it's to fun interesting rules so there's a whole gaming industry you can imagine that would be exploiting the rules of the quantum which are all fun and they're spooky only because they're not in our life experience but they're completely natural to the quantum laws of physics i might be able to win at quantum chestnut if as long as i don't look i really can't be in checkmate can i i am with some probability less than one and you have to acknowledge that you're in checkmate in order to lose the game is that what you said that's first rule to working in the government is always look for the bright side so neil i think the thing we're hoping to do is really within the the air force and space force and i will take on that you know why are we doing rocket power to space so you know uh for all tuning in if you've got a an idea about how to measure it uh these are the kinds of things though i think that do make people think differently you know why why are we still measuring something with an antiquated system that actually can't achieve the domain in which we're flying that is space but i serve on a i serve on a a recently conceived board of the pentagon the defense innovation board and we first met oh that's right that's right and we are um we're tackling you know we issue reports back to the secretary of defense or anyone who asks in you know in the pentagon but uh we to the extent that quantum matters we're there for you to to help get that through whatever i don't know if it's still called red tape but whatever bureaucratic inertia resistive inertia rather than propellant inertia uh exists out there so i i'm i'm i'm on your side here i appreciate neil and i i'll definitely take you up on that i what i hope that we'll get out of this event are a lot of ideas that are spooky though we shouldn't call the science spooky anymore i hope that we get some things that that our investment uh creates new areas of research and new phenomenology but i also want to provide the connection to where the science can transition into engineering we we start by being educated in simple machines the lever the wheel the pulley but but quantum mechanics provides some very new machines that that have no analog into the machines that built the industrial revolution or the physics that undergirded it and so i know that if we don't get the the engineers the appliers involved that that the demand and resource that we need to keep putting into fundamental science is easy to let up on because the pragmatist of the world you could you're only one one potential you know leadership change away from having a pragmatist in this job whereas right now you have a scientist and coming in and saying what you opened with what's the value of this you know why should we invest in funding and i hope that i was helpful in that regard like i said people who are applying for this grant money it are surely more fluent in the quantum that they care about than i could ever be uh but to the extent that i could add and help with context i was delighted to participate but i i are people with questions is there a way for questions to to flow into this yes there are so thank you very much dr roper and dr tyson for just an awesome and inspiring talk and so many great things to think about there especially uh from our perspective manure was the top one you went there i did it sir so we we've lined up some special guests uh really talking about the next generation here so i think you're really going to enjoy these questions uh that we've gotten in the last a week or so and let me just start with the first one so we have stephanie yoshida she's a senior at punahou high school in honolulu hawaii over the past three years she has been conducting astronomical research on exoplanets using data from systems such as kepler k2 and tess under the guidance of dr sam grunblatt but get this her work on white dwarf exoplanets has garnered her numerous accolades such as second place at the intel international science and engineering fair in physics and astronomy category in second place at the national junior science humanities symposium both in 2019 she intends on pursuing a degree in astronomy or astrophysics in college where she hopes to keep doing what she's most passionate about that's research stephanie hi um so my research revolves around finding exoplanets and as a result i'm curious about possible extraterrestrial life and so with humans sending out interstellar messages over the past five decades do you think that mysterious radio signals received by us could indicate possible communication from another life form in the near future in addition to this how could accelerating technology help humans find an exoplanet with life excellent so uh first congratulations on your on your your arc of life there um you don't need any help from me clearly because you're you're already in the rocket with the and the engines are ignited um so uh with regard let me start your last question first um with regard to best ways of detecting life if we're not going to uh life at all is not necessarily sending us radio waves trying to talk to us life could be microbial and so i think the future of the search for life in our field is the search for biomarkers so if you have a planet that transits across the face of its host star and then light from that star will actually pass through the atmosphere of the planet before it comes reaches us of course that signature that that signal will be completely dominated by the star itself but there will be some absorption features that go on here that you can say oh my gosh i have found a spectral feature that we know can't exist in the surface of the star because it's too hot and this feature we know is a product of light as we know it such as oxygen or methane so the astrobiologists are today making a list of things for the spectroscopist to look for which if it's in the atmosphere would be strong indication that something biological is going on on the surface and it reminds me back when i was watching those star trek episodes you ever noticed in star trek they never wear wear spacesuits you ever ever think about that they just beam down to a planet now they so how does that work they find a planet that oxygen nitrogen atmosphere captain okay let's just beam down and leaving you to think that you just look around until you find one of these planets and then you go there no no if that planet has oxygen it means it has life okay because oxygen is highly reactive chemically and it doesn't stay loose in an atmosphere long unless something is generating it actively so unless there's some phenomenon that generates free oxygen and it's not biological that we don't yet know about if you find a planet that has oxygen you can go there and look for life and i if i'm you're betting person uh that's if you if you to rank planets in sequence of which one you want to visit first you go there first that doesn't mean they have radio telescopes beating to us but it could mean there's some kind of process where oxygen is a byproduct of the metabolism which is true of course for all plant life on earth uh as far as the um your first question was uh with uh exoplanets what was the first i just dealt with the second half um it was about mysterious radio signals being released so here's the thing so uh it's cheaper to listen than it is to transmit so quote listen so we have some dedicated telescopes that are looking up in radio frequencies at studying as many frequencies as possible in the bandwidth that it's sensitive to seeing if there's some kind of a signal that repeats right what good would it be for just one signal that you can't do anything with that let's hope that aliens who are intelligent who have technology think the same way we do that you'd want to send something that we can then decode right so they're skeptics of this you know it's a vast universe and we haven't looked very far sure but if you make a discovery there it is a very high return on an investment that could even start out small so if for i'm if it is a budget you should always for me you should always be allocating some percentage of it to make a discovery that could transform all of civilization such as the discovery of intelligent life in the universe so yeah we're still listening we haven't found anything that's the that's the certain repeated signal um but where we're looking looking by the way the more you look the more exotic is the radio signal you might find and it could be a natural phenomenon you've just never discovered yet all right that's what happened with the discovery of pulsars we're looking around and this thing is flashing oops i keep hitting my camera here the thing is flashing light at us whoa this is a this is a radio beacon this is like a lighthouse sending us signals oh my gosh little green men okay um and so there was a lot of excitement so we figured out no it was a natural phenomena it was a rapidly rotating neutron star with a tipped magnetic field that was spinning out uh radio signal radio pulses so just keep in mind that just because we don't know what it is that if we discover something new and don't know what it is the act of not knowing does not mean it is of alien origin so anyway good luck sometimes you need a little bit of that too but we'll see you on the other side thank you so we're cognizant of everyone's time but we're hoping we have time for at least one more question let's do one more and i'll just sort of speed up my answer to it okay sounds great thank you so we have a question from laurel violet white laurel violet white laurel is a senior undergraduate studying physics at syracuse university where she is both an astronaut scholar and goldwater scholar conducting gravitational wave research for the past three years she plans to continue with astrophysics research in graduate school over to long hello good morning dr tyson dr robert it's been such a pleasure hearing people speak um doctor jason i know you said you can't predict the future but you were talking about all these like unexplained phenomena that we don't have any understanding of and i was wondering if you know um or have any ideas about what mysteries in science we might be able to solve with a quantum computer uh yeah i mean if if you just follow the the um the expectations the arc of expectations for quantum computing where there may be certain problems that are completely intractable by classical computing methods that become trivial for a quantum computer i can be sort of non-imaginative here and say there are systems in the universe where we always have to make approximations because if we gave the full hammer of what it is we're trying to simulate it would it would just take too long we have clusters of stars of have hundreds of thousands and in some cases millions of stars all of them moving simultaneously everybody feeling each other's gravity and every tiny movement of one changes the gravitational field of all the others and they all respond into each other's gravitational field those stars were born they're living out their lives and they're dying so we have the gravitational orbits we have the of each star we have the collective gravity we have the stellar evolution calculations we have all of this that's going on we have orbit captures if they come too close some are spit out we we we allow ourselves to make significant approximations to on the belief that we're getting our insight into the larger system so we can do it for a thousand particles but maybe not a million okay if quantum computing allows us to do it for a million is there something out there that has 10 million or 100 million or a billion galaxies have 100 billion stars all in orbit forming out of gas can we put all that on the computer and then evolve nature in exactly the way nature evolves and not in some approximation limited by our hardware if that's the case then we will have complete knowledge of a system and it may be it's making this up now because again i thought doors would never open when you walk towards them so so here's something here's something we don't really understand and it's called emergence you know about emergence emergence is you know there's there's a pigeon walking around in the park and it's packing its head and it's looking for other pigeons all they're doing their own thing you could analyze every single molecule of that pigeon okay and you can get its metabolism and how it's worked and it's evolutionary bad you can get all of that but it's not going to predict the fact that when the pigeons decide to a light i mean to to ascend from the ground then they all flock together how do they know to do that could you have figured that out by studying one pigeon we don't know that so this is an emergent behavior from the ensemble that is not evident from the individual and this is might be the key to consciousness is consciousness emergent okay you can study the neurosynapses of brains and all of this you say oh there's a chemical and it just went this way and an electrical electrochemical signal and it does this and it says this i said can you judge from that that this person is contemplating their future contemplating their death is studying the history is that can you get that out of just studying the neurosynaptic transmissions in a brain i don't know that you can or i don't know that you can yet it could be that there is a calculation that is still yet to be done that is way more refined than anything a classical computer has done that could give us insight into phenomenon that to this day remain a bit mysterious and intractable to our classical ways so uh that's my answer for you thank you very much thank you laurel and once again dr tyson dr oprah thank you so much for your time today it was true honored to have you here i'd like to turn the floor over to you for some wrap-up comments both of you oh i don't have it you know i've been uh i make sure every comment that i give is like a wrap-up comment because i never know when you're gonna end so neil we will change the agenda i mean we could listen to you nearly every field of science and i think that just uh that speaks to the enthusiasm that the air force and space force and the nation should have for science uh not just uh because of practical reasons for what it has done to our nation and all nations but just because of the the illusion you made about the car solved the problem it was not related to the problem it solved in manhattan but someone was working on it just merely because it was a new area of research and with so many areas of physics we've talked quantum here but materials are very interesting right now nano materials synthetic biology gene editing there's so many new things that if i were going back to school now i i might not do string theory a second time though i do love living in more dimensions than just the four that are don't compensate don't put me in 11 dimensions or whatever the theory does come with strings attached literally in this case you have to have those extra dimensions and so you just learn to love them yeah i get you i get you um one i think an important point here is um you i i i was making a really point then it just it just escaped my head see it's it tunneled neil did it to you you got the thought i i have not let's see what what what could possible what neil could neil have been thinking about i i don't think i picked it up no give me give me a quick second clinical brain dr tyson we have confirmed that here today um you know i think probably was it something on the lines that we shouldn't just invest because of practical reasons that that a problem that was the automobile solved a sanitation problem on manhattan was being worked on for completely different reasons but it came in and solved this problem out of left field and we should always be working on anything that could be new and transformative gene editing synthetic biology nanomaterials and of course quantum here today any of those could spark a new industrial revolution so we can't be behind i don't know what you wanted to be you you triggered it back in me what i was going to say it's like a laser i have stimulated i've admitted the photon back on it the wave function collapsed back in my head so it's a um you mentioned material science i just want to say that in my field astrophysics we get all the media attention you know there's an eclipse colliding black holes um you know we had our the second student who asked a question specializing in gravitational waves there was two huge humongous black holes that collided and was reported i think yesterday so so there's all this we get headlines pluto gets demoted whatever there's an eclipse we get this the public doesn't see advances in other very important branches of science some of which are slow but they work their way into our lives and you no longer even the the moment of announcement isn't there because it happens slowly for example i'm old enough to remember because i think i'm older than you when anything made of plastic was cheap and it broke if you bought somebody something made of plastic that was the end of your relationship okay over the years plastic just got stronger and stronger and and more durable and and then we came up with we people transparent plastic okay oh my gosh you can see through it these things nobody's thinking about today oh by the way because it is so durable it now never leaves the environment right so that that brought its own problem with it what i'm saying is that material science is a the silent transformer of our world because this stuff comes out it gets picked up by engineers and it becomes product and all of a sudden you've got a really cool thing you're playing with at home and you didn't even know it that some clever engineers enabled it and by the way um if you i want to repeat something you said earlier it's not good enough just to just to solicit all this you need to keep and you need to keep a a conduit open between the science and the engineering applications to it because the scientists are not going to come up with those solutions the engineers are some will but most won't the engineers will and that's got to stay open and it's got to be a funding stream to allow it otherwise no one's going to enter that conduit and and another thing to echo what you said again um don't ever go up to a scientist and say um how will that ever improve my life you could do that but the scientists if they're honest most of the time will say i have no idea we get to say that all the time is astronomy in astrophysics there is no there is there's nothing that's going to help put food on your plate however i will tell you bringing this full circle that my physics professors ed purcell who discovered nuclear magnetic resonance you know what his first love is molecules in space space all right he was a part-time astrophysicist and he loved it and for all you know his enthusiasm for molecules is what got him to a place where he could say here's a phenomenon i think it works it's nuclear magnetic resonance so [Music] so you never know what frontier of research will bring you either the next year 10 years later or 50 years later so all i can do is just endorse whatever frontier research anybody is doing and put it out there you might have to wait a half a century but a clever engineer is going to come behind and transform the world and as a minimum transform the economy i'm going to get in my rocket ship that is going to be not in horsepower but something different in future and let's get near the speed of light so we can come back and see what the world's like in 50 years but yeah neil i just want to on behalf of the air force and space force just thank you for so much of your time your enthusiasm for making science palpable real and important and most importantly infectious and for everyone joining if you are a researcher thank you for being here we are rooting for you i hope you win i hope that you bring in that next spooky effect that uh that will eventually hopefully become commonplace for us like the laser is today for the students that are here we really welcome you we are excited about your interest in science and the air force and space force are great places to be scientists we really really love technology and science and the service and gall has been late so we would like by this event that we will continue each year to bring a new quantum phenomena into the military i don't care what it is we just want to start making this new battleground of physics something that is as commonplace as the airplane and satellite is today so neil just want to end by just forget that here's an image just don't forget there was a day when lasers were the size of laboratory rooms okay if you went back then with your pocket laser and showed it to them and they say where'd you get that i said oh at the input it was an impulse item at the checkout line at kmart that's how this works okay that's all i'm saying neil thank you again and i'll turn back over to our research lab excellent everyone have a great event today thank you thank you so much once again dr tyson and dr roper for all your time today and this awesome talk and just inspiring conversation

Channel: AFResearchLab

Views: 4,750

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Id: EJOftIXgCaQ

Length: 73min 42sec (4422 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 03 2020