How to become a quantum physicist in five minutes | Jacob Sherson | TEDxAarhus

my personal story began when I was 10 years old sitting in a clover field with my two sisters I don't really know why but I suddenly said I will now close my eyes and pick up a four-leaf clover so I closed my eyes I picked up something and to all of our surprise it really was a four-leaf clover so was it chance or just a magical moment none of the above you'll know what at the end of this talk so then I grew up and I after 10 years of training joined the field of quantum physics now if you and quantum are not the best of friends then don't worry I'll explain what it means in a few moment in my everyday work I try to find solutions to equations like these and I really love my work I really love my work but sometimes just sometimes it feels a little bit like running 5 marathons in a row so what if I told you that with 5 minutes of training you will be able to solve these puzzles and not just you but also your ten-year-old son or daughter my team and I have created a computer game it's been played by more than 150 thousand people around the world and they have clearly demonstrated that normal people can solve quantum research challenges better than physicists and even better than supercomputers that the power of human intuition we're now ready to dive into the wonderful microscopic world of quantum objects but first what does this word quantum mean it's related to quantity and it's simply the smallest unit of something that you would like to count so being in Denmark let's use Lego blocks as an example if you zoom into all matter around us you will eventually find that it consists of individual building blocks the atoms and just like Lego blocks come in different colors and sizes so too are there many different atoms there's nitrogen and hydrogen and oxygen and those are the building blocks that put together in different ways makes all of metal around us so an atom how big is it take a single grain of sand it contains more atoms than there are grains of sand on earth more atoms than there are grains of sand on earth it means that we can dive into the quantum world and have small tiny objects and control them but it's even more slippery than that because they are strangely behaving are you ready here begins your five minute journey into becoming a quantum physicist but there's no learning without doing so please now take out your cell phones open the game of quantum moves and press play try out the game a couple of times the idea is that you have a liquid and you're supposed to transport it as quickly as possible into the target area what you're really controlling when playing the games is a laser beam that picks up an individual atom and moves it into the target area hopefully this is a fun game we worked a lot to try to make it fun I'm sorry to say that from now on we get back to the equations for the rest of the talk no no but we now continue the talk in order to become quantum physicists you also have to learn to quantum superpowers the first one is called quantum superposition and it's the ability of atoms to be in two different places at the same time you can think of it as being able to sit here listening to my talk and at the same time snuggling up in bed reading a good book if you take a rock and throw it into a lake it will create ripples or waves an atom being in many different locations at the same time is also described as this wave or liquid like substance so if you ever try to pick up water or hot coffee and be late and try to run then you know that it's a difficult challenge to avoid spilling I would have loved to illustrate this on stage but unfortunately the TEDx organizers didn't think it was a good idea so fortunately there's also another classical analogy to our games and that's a child on a swing or pendulum and I actually brought a high-tech pendulum for you my shoe the task in the game is how should I move my hand in order to move the shoe from here to there without any oscillation in the end I will run with it and I will try to shake it in order to take out all of the emotional energy that's the challenge in the game so we asked you to solve so that was quantum superpower number one quantum superpower number two is a strange quantum effect that is called quantum tunneling it's the ability of atoms to tunnel through barriers translated to human scale you can think of me running towards a wall and instead of crashing into it I appear on the other side unharmed in the games you will see quantum tunneling appearing as the liquid flowing uphill so that's a very strange effect are you still not very comfortable with objects that can be in two places at the same time with atoms that can walk through closed doors then you are in good company because two of the founding fathers of quantum physics Einstein and Schrodinger have both said that they regretted ever playing part in the development of this crazy theory I'll now try to convince you that sometimes for solving a complex task you don't necessarily have to fully understand it but simply intuitively accepted when we play games we are very often forced to accept strange rules or strange laws of physics one example is a pure game called Porter you walk around solve challenges one of them is to pick up a bag which is just beyond your reach which is physically impossible except that in this game you have two portals at your disposal you can place one on a side wall and you can walk through it and if you place the other one in the ceiling then you fall out there you grab the bag and you do the seemingly impossible in our games the same thing happens you have intuition from running with water and then you mix it with the intuitive acceptance that in this particular game water can flow uphill so you form what we could call a quantum intuition and you become a quantum physicist without even noticing it people around the world have played the games just like you and become quantum physicists when we looked at the data we found something amazing not only did many of the players find better solutions then our powerful computers could do looking at the millions of data points also revealed deep insights into the nature of the physics problem that me and my team of highly skilled physicists couldn't discover on our own that's why I dare to call you quantum physicists because where as I solve problems rationally and using equations you use your intuition and perhaps we should do this more often so who are these players and and why do they play one of them is an accountant and and she says that for her it's a send moment coming home from work and contributing to science by playing our games another one a sales assistant sent me this video because he had struggled so hard to find solutions to one of the very complex problems that we had building up his intuition game-by-game he learned to play tricks with this funny acting liquid you may actually now if you look closely recognize the trick that he employs as quantum tunneling a phenomenon so complex that my fourth year physics students struggle to understand it and yet here you see it being employed by a player with no formal training in physics and that's how the power of games can turn you into a quantum physicist in five minutes so now that I've hopefully convinced you that using the games I can create a global army of quantum physicists you may ask why should I bother normal computers are based on operations on strings of bits and these bits can either be 0 or 1 in my lab we are constructing something called a quantum computer operating on individual atoms quantum bits there can be both 0 and 1 at the same time this means that the quantum computer can perform nearly infinitely many operations at once and that's not just having an eight-core upgraded 8-core normal computer something much much more powerful let me illustrate with an example nearly 2 percent of the world's energy consumption is spent producing fertilizer it's a process that requires high temperatures and high pressures and yet bacteria can do this at room temperature how do they do this we have no idea but with the computational power of quantum computers we think we can learn those tricks and we can produce enough fertilizer to feed the growing world population that's why in many labs around the world including Google Microsoft and IBM they try to build a quantum computer we all share one column common problem and that is quantum bits lose their information very quickly due to random influences from the environment what you could do is speed up all of these processes and that's exactly what the players have achieved for us they found ways of picking up an atom and moving it around in our potential quantum computer much faster than we thought theoretically possible and thereby they helped us take a very important step in the development so far this was just a game of a simulation of an atom in the past months we have also taken the democratization of science one step further by building tools allowing normal people on the internet to get access to the real atoms in my lab in Denmark sidestepping the years of training normally required we try to make it as easy as playing a game to create entirely new quantum experiments in a matter of seconds these results are just the latest in a citizen science revolution which is spreading across many fields of science in the Galaxy Zoo project you can help researchers map out galaxies in the projects of folded and it's Anna you can help researchers search for cures for diseases like hiv/aids and tuberculosis the fact that you with no formal training and very casual effort can contribute to solving these very complex problems is the first of my two main points the second one is about you and me as players and as human beings and how we are different from computer algorithms if you follow the tech news in recent years then you may have heard that artificial intelligence algorithms have beaten expert players at games of Jeopardy and chess and recently also go how come then we can use games to solve problems that not even the most powerful supercomputers can do one reason that my researchers and I are fascinated with the human mind is our generic ability to solve problems despite often seemingly not having enough information at our disposal we humans know that we don't have infinite storage capacity right so we filter hard and then we make leaps of faith or intuition on an individual level if you play out our games and you are very steady handed then you will actually probably be led to try out very similar solutions and iteratively improving them on the other hand if you play our game on a shaky subway it's doing like this then you have to abandon that strategy and try out much more different solutions and it's actually been established that for tasks of creativity and innovation you actually have to have a period of crazy exploration so to me this is a striking example that sometimes being less skilled at something makes you more able to solve it I talked about memory and steadiness of hand but of course there are many if human skills wouldn't be fantastic to be able to map out all of them and create what you'll call an equation of innovation that takes any given innovation challenge and tells you exactly which skillset is needed to solve it of course this is an extremely daunting task but we believe that with hundreds of thousands of people solving these complex challenges we will have enough data to unlock some of the subtle patterns underlying human innovation does human innovation depend on gender and age or culture again we don't know but finding out may actually be the key to developing entirely new forms of artificial intelligence that are much more like true human intelligence I started out this journey by closing my eyes and picking up a four-leaf clover I know now that it was not chance my mind knew that the four-leaf clover was there without me rationally being aware of it in many ways in my current research I seem to be reliving this fantastic discovery because I started out this project gamifying quantum research challenges a crazy project with no rational hope of being able to find anything useful but I closed my eyes and trusted my instincts and I hope in the future you will do the same thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 251,534

Rating: 4.8539262 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Denmark, Science (hard), Computers, Education, Games, Physics

Id: vkVnnN0MjIE

Length: 17min 10sec (1030 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 11 2017