How Will Quantum Technology Change Our Lives?

[Music] very nice to be here I'm also directing the quantum technology hub in sensors and metrology which sits similar to like miles who's doing the imaging have on like getting information from the environment and then there's communication to transmit that information and computation to that make sense of it to like get some something which actually use it's useful for all of us and while everyone agrees like why computers and communications is useful often we're not quite aware what sensors are doing and like why we need them so I just want to take a step back and think about about like do we need sensors and okay maybe where does the word come from that from our senses so if we like we are usually not aware of them but if we lost one of our senses like eyesight or hearing or touch we would quite dearly miss that because it stops us interacting with the environment in ways we are used to so it's a actually quite essential and just want to highlight that over the time whenever we had like some fundamental science the disruptive you capability to sense the previously unsensible that made quite a big impact on that what we can do what our lives are like so in 1901 there was a Nobel Prize on x-rays nowadays medical diagnosis without those was nearly impossible um similarly surfeit immense fear in Nottingham won a Nobel Prize and the MRI magnetic resonance imaging which again is now in 25,000 hospitals they are my Nobel Prize on giant Moneta resistance a bit later ah why do we use that that was high-density hard drives without those we wouldn't have been able to store the information as densely as we did um and maybe most prominently ah like there was a recent Nobel Prize on the CCD sensor which was effectively done by an Esther physicist wanting to see the stars a bit better and of course that created the whole cell you wouldn't be able to do service without that so they can have a really profound change in what we do if we change what we can see or how easily we can see it and so what quantum brings to it is seven new pathways to make other things sends extensible like gravity to look into the ground seeing what's actually under our feet some people say one meter under London is less known than at Arctica because yes there's all this infrastructure people foot down at some point but then forgotten about or the building's everything has changed is anything leaking there are there any dangerous mineshaft sinkholes developing that is a major task to look into that and like essentially what we can do to see it might have a profound impact on how we work with the future if we can see the underground we can start using it and have a sustainable management of not just for how we live on the earth but also how we use the underworld so quite important then we're sensors and you'll see a gravity grade geometry outside in exhibition I invite you to join like that and have a look we also have an exhibit from the University of Nottingham on the brain box because sensors can also look inside and see what parts of the brain are currently active so when you're like juggling a ball or when you're like learning to play an instrument and all that can have profound impacts on medical diagnosis and we all know about actually in this room um we might be 300 people so like 70 80 of us when we are getting more than 80 which most of us have now an expectancy to have about 70 to 80 in this room will be didn't have dementia so we really wanted to do something about this and learn about what the brain does how to react similarly are further sensors extending the sensors is like very very precise timing which can be used to actually look at the skies and see airspace much much more precisely then could could before and all these together this is what we're driving forward in the HAARP and I'm happy to take questions later but I see my time is up and I should hand over to no effect thank you okay then we have miles pageant professor of optics in the school of physics and astronomy at the University of Glasgow and also principal investigator and Technical Coordinator at Quantic so this hub is developing quantum imaging for new types of ultra sensitive cameras for medical imaging security and environmental monitoring correct sounds good to me so thanks very much and what of what a privilege it is to be sitting here in this incredibly famous lecture theatre and I've had a great time looking all the pictures of famous scientists from the past hanging up around the around the walls I think the best bit is there's one where Dewar as a thermos flask is presenting about how thermos class works and Lord Kelvin is in the audience and it says in the caption the resting his eyes so feel free clearly resting your eyes is good enough for Lord Kelvin it's good enough for everybody else so my phone which Chi has already referred to as the timer the egg timer also has a fantastic camera in it I mean it can you believe the quality of imaging that you get from your cell phone these days but let's think about what a cell phone can't do so Chi was already speaking about services what goes on underneath the road and most the time the road gets dug up it's probably because someone could smell gas and and they ring up and go I can smell gas and out comes entire team of people with spades and shovels and they start digging up everything so one of the things we've got outside there is a camera but unlike this camera it's a camera that when you look around you can see gas with that camera and work out where the leak is coming from so Kyle is there over there somewhere demonstrating that kind of camera now another kind of imaging says he is the good old endoscope and I and I don't know how many people have been on the receiving end of an endoscope I won't ask for a show of hands but most endoscopes are about the size of my finger and you go oh my goodness that's not very nice why do they have to be that big and it's because every single pixel in the image needs its own optical fiber that's about 1600 at the bare minimum and that gives them their size so gray amount the back there has got an endoscope which is no wider than the width of a human hair so something the size of a human hair you can look down it and you can have a look around in 3d no less as to what is out the other side no patience involved don't worry just a demonstration out there for you to see another thing which I think is really super cool I was looking at it yesterday we were we're outside the Westminster yesterday demonstrating our wares to some politicians but apparently they were all busy with something I don't quite know what but lots of civil servants came so that was okay and so that's our colleagues from heriot-watt I've got a fish tank out there full of water that you can't see through maybe you're a diver at the bottom of the North Sea trying to fix something like pipes or whatever and so they've got a super fancy camera that can look through cloudy water maybe it can also look through London fog or whatever else too as a driver assistants and so those are just three of the new kinds of imaging that quantum technology allows and I invite you all to go out and look down when you're looking at it also have a chat to the people that are there because actually the hub's are as much about the people and the careers that are hubs earnable the people that we train for the industries of tomorrow as they are about the research itself and I always think that people's career paths is very interesting to just sort of explore yeah anyway so thank you very much great Thank You miles we've got Tim Spiller the founding director of the York Center for quantum technologies and director of the UK quantum communications helped Tim over to you so the hub that I run which is again a big collaborative thing so we have University partners and industry partners all across the UK our focus is on new secure forms of communication now we'll talk a bit more about it I think under questions but but one thing to appreciate is that the current ways of doing secure electronic communications that we use at the minute are under threat so we are going to need new methods of secure communication and that's what our work is all about and we're going to talk a bit I think also about quantum physics but I'm going to let one sing out a bag just now and tell you that one of the fundamental features of quantum physics and the once really important for our communications is that when you try and measure something quantum you disturb it and that's built into nature that's not just that the experimentalist is still a bit rubbish and they will get better in the future that disturbance is built into nature so we can use it and the way we do secure communications is we take tiny quantum signals of light and send them from one place to another and the fact that that there is this fundamental disturbance means if anyone has a cheeky look on the way and intercepts your signal they cannot avoid introducing some noise and disturbance so you can see whether anyone is doing that and if you see that they haven't done that then you can you can share secure we call and keys between people and then you can use those keys for encryption or for other forms of transactions so by sending quantum light signals around we can effect a new method of secure communications so in our hub in the last five years we've been pushing forward various directions of this so so one example is that we've been we in quantum communications the transmitters always call Alice and the receivers always called Bob so so what we're trying to do is we're trying to put Alice in your phone for the future so so you as an individual might be able to communicate securely with your bank or the government or whatever so we've got a demonstration on that outside where where we've got a phone sized Alice transmitter of the future we're also trying to put both Alice and Bob on ships so they can go in computers and we've in the last five years demonstrated the world's first chip to chip quantum key distribution system so that's another demonstration one big thing that we've done over the last five years is we built the UK's first secure communications network based on optical fibres so we've got we've got a network that's mainly danced out the minute it runs from British Telecom in Ipswich to Cambridge we've got a network around Cambridge we've got a link to London and they were going out from London to Bristol we've got a network around Bristol so we built and established that and we are now running secure communications links over that so that's highlights of what we've done in the last five years in the next five years we're going to improve on that and develop those technologies further but we're also going to try and do satellite to grant secure quantum communications by sending light signals from a satellite to a telescope ground station on the surface of the earth so so that's for the future as I say the UK quantum networks already they're up and running thank you thank you Tim and finally we have Dominic O'Brien co-director of nqi T in Oxford his expertise is in photonics photonic systems integration and his hub is building prototype quantum computers Dominic thanks my memory of this place is of course as a kid watching the Christmas lectures on telly so it's very strange to be the other side of of watching of that barrier so in this phone if I bought an expensive iPhone that'd be about three billion transistors now I looked up this morning and the first microprocessor had about 2,000 transistors in it that's taken 50 years 1970 to 2022 so we've seen this immense growth in the power of computers that we all have in our hands around the place and things but there are still problems that that we find it hard to solve things like even how the order you might deliver parcels that sort of thing you have a delivery route how do you find the most efficient route that's quite a hard problem it grows much harder as the number of parcels you need to deliver goes up so those sorts of complex problems which are parts of our lives how do we run complex cities those sorts of things we're actually having more powerful computers or computers that do computation in a different way will be useful quantum computers can do that now I'm sure we're going the quantum physics a bit later but quantum physics are built with rather than the digital bits the ones and zeros that we see every day they're built with quantum bits and the odd quantum thing about quantum bit is it can be both a one or a zero at the same time and it can be a bit of one and another bit of a zero at the same time so it's a and that allows you if you build a quantum computer to have rather than if you have a normal computer there's a pattern of ones and zeros and and that will be a particular piece of information in the same space you can quote store many possibilities if you like many patterns of ones and zeros in that same space and it's that storage if you like of simultaneous possibility that gives you this way to store way to do some very hard problems that you wouldn't be able to do with normal computers and in the hub that I'm a part of I'm privileged to work with so much smarter people for me trying to build the elements of quantum computers now in a quantum pewter what are those elements how do we create those patterns if you like you can use ions so they're atoms with some electrons knocked off that's it in a vacuum and you can apply electric fields and magnetic fields and optical fields to turn around the patterns the states of those cells and manipulate if you like the quantum bit you can use superconductors and we do work in that particular technology you've seen results from Google and IBM they're artificial atoms if you will made from superconductors the hard thing is that the world is quantum but you never see this stuff unless you cool it down or just remove all the sources of noise so the key challenge for quantum computation that that we're looking for now is do are those sorts of things and so a lot of hard engineering there's a lot of smart people working on this globally and in the UK so once we have these machines we might be using them for things like designing new materials more efficient wing design more complex planning of the way we live our lives and the way that cities work the way the Health Service works those sorts of things there are all these sorts of applications that may be possible in the future I'd like to finish by saying echoing what Miles said that there's a there's there's there's a demonstration a virtual demonstration of one sort of computer outside go and have a look at that but also this is an exciting area if you're at all interested in a career in science or an engineering we're way short of engineers in the UK way shorter scientists this is a really great area to get into thank you Dominic so before we actually kick off the actual discussion I'd like to ask you guys a fun question so when we talk about quantum I guess you will know that we are talking about very very very small things right teeny tiny so it's the scale of atoms subatomic particles you know electrons protons neutrons quarks gluons but my question is what what what's inside actually what what is that do you think they are particles or maybe they could be waves now about a show of hands who thinks that they are particles anyone okay few people that yes who thinks they could be waves okay well what about both particles and waves yay fantastic great exactly so and I find I personally find it mind-boggling how it could be both particles and waves but yes it's called wave particle duality and it's not the only cool property of the quantum world as Dominique was just saying when a qubit can be in multiple states at the same time that's called superposition and it's also really cool for example if you flip a coin right and the coin is turning in the air and while it's in the air you don't know whether it's heads or tails so basically it's in the superposition of States the position of heads and tails at the same time or maybe you've heard of Schrodinger's cat right the cat's in the box and there's a mechanism and until you actually look into the box you don't know whether the cat is dead or alive right and so basically the cat is dead and alive at the same time actually for my toddler who you heard earlier I brought him a book baby book quantum physics for babies and and the author actually changed that experiment slightly and the cat is now either awake or asleep which for me I found you know I was founded a bit of a problem that the cat is either dead or or not so and the other really cool property of quantum mechanics is entanglement and so I meant in a particle here and the other particle really far away in a light-years away at the other end of the universe what's really cool is that when this particle here changes state the other particle will automatically be in the same state as well which I find amazing so there's like this mysterious connection kind of similar you know when maybe I don't know if you fall in love and your partner goes really really far away and then if he said and you were said and he's happy and you're happy but I guess he would have to communicate it to you somehow first like I don't know Sandia what's that message or something but for particles they can't send a whatsapp message they just know automatically and they they can be in the same state at the same time which is really really crazy so that's quantum mechanics but now let's go back to our panel and the first question I have actually for you Kai can you tell us what devices are we already using in our daily lives that are actually already based on the principles of quantum mechanics yes essentially quantum technology itself is not new or at least we're all using effects of quantum mechanics it came actually what what is quantum oh it had her about all these spooky effects but what what is it in the basics and it came about in 1899 when Max Planck but was posed the problem of actually how do we understand the space trim off light emitted from like something heated up like then industry was at that time quite interested to know how do we make the light bulbs a bit more efficient but people in physics there was a big puzzle because that spectrum from like something black which we heat up and then it starts to send out light it was not explained by like the theories or it was inconsistent with the existing theories and how what Max Planck did he ad hoc introduced just an idea to say actually what if the light didn't come as a continuous form of energy but in little packets of energy so if it was something which is not just a wave but it comes as little like photons which each has a certain amount of energy and was that idea he was able to explain the spectrum he was very unhappy about this because they said yeah it's an ah this is just an artic idea and have no reason why it should be like this from the physics but it seems to work and that essentially started quantum mechanics are because this idea that we have essentially little packets of energy like quanta it doesn't come continuous but in quanta that essentially is behind it back then moved on and in the early 20s that was Golden Age of like autonomy experiments thinking about all what what does they're actually all what are the implications people came to realize they actually it's not just photons but which act as a wave and a particle at the same time but also electrons and atoms and effectively all particles and what does that imply if we have to treat them as waves that then explains that the energy levels of electrons around atoms that we have actually energy levels when you look at the orange streetlamps or the old ones the sodium street bands that is actually a transition between two energy levels in sodium atoms you'll see the same orange light if your parents around you might do this experiment at home put some table salt inside the gas burner or a blue light flame and you would see this orange light coming from the table salt because that's the sodium line and that's the same which is used sodium's also used in these street lamps so that's the quantum effect that we have these and of course it led us to understand this wave nature it led to understand okay electrons in solids move like waves are their energy levels so are all the bends in semiconductors so how does electron transport and materials work and so effectively anything any transistor are is effectively based on our understanding of quantum theory which means every computer every piece of IT equipment similarly lasers that we learned how to actually create these bits of photons these quanta of light in a very coherent way like running all our communication networks or our DVD players or blu-ray players are all that is quantum technologies so we all carry our like a what we call nowadays quantum one point all around in our pockets so what's the special thing about why our is everyone excited and putting lots of money into quantum technology right now and that is because we are now at the end technologically we have reached the technological ability to manipulate a single particle nature to get to actually the quantum effects at a single particle level not just that the averaged effects of these waves we can see the single wave or the single party would be in a superposition of two states at once or actually entanglement between part like two particles in two different places that they know somewhat what the state of the other is and so that is really that was a technology advance which we are can now start to harness and that opens up lots of new technological capabilities but you actually also carry something off that around not quite in here but you're using it was your smartphone's when you when you ever look on a map and try to find your way when you navigate because that interacts was the global satellite navigation network satellite navigation network and each of these satellites has an atomic clock on board which effectively is the quantum technology of this quantum 20.0 time probably the oldest one invented first atomic clock was working in NPN in 1957 the UK was maybe not best in harnessing all the power of this that gone largely to other nations but that's why we have this program to make sure we stir haps to translate internally keep it in the UK but these atomic clocks they put electrons in a superposition of two different energy levels around the atoms and was that can measure time very very precisely and we need this precise time measurement on the satellites to measure the transit time of a signal from the satellite to our phone and if you know how long it took for the microwave signal coming from there to reach our phone we know the distance if we know the distance of three satellites we can start pinpoint our position so we're all using quantum 2.0 technology already and it's just that there's much much more to to be gained and that's where we're heading thank you um so with all the research and all the money being spent on quantum - on taking quantum out of the lab how do you think maybe miles question for you how do you think the UK will actually benefit from all this commercialization of quantum mechanics so I mean let's have a think about what universities do universities train people and probably the biggest impact that universities have of the careers that we enable with those people that then leave and work for UK based companies and so we're reflecting on certainly within our own hub and I'm sure it's true of the other hubs as well you know we started off five years ago many of the people that we employed either as students or as what's called postdoctoral researchers so as people has just got their PhDs have effectively now moved on in their careers from our own hubs and now work for uk-based based companies and and ultimately the the transfer of Technology I believe very strongly it's often a people transfer it's it's about the outflow of people yeah and so we should I just want to say that right but at at the start now the other thing of course that we try to do is inspire new products for companies to make and I one of the really exciting things I think about this program as a whole is as well as funding research and when people talk about funding research in universities what they really mean is funding people and most of the money that is spent is actually funding people and we also set aside 20% of our current budgets to trigger new projects and many of those projects have been joint projects between UK based industry and and the universities with a view of initiating new products for those companies and I think all of the hubs can give specific examples of things that you can now by not not necessarily in Sainsbury's okay it's not that kind of job but but in a scientific product sense of things that one can buy as a result of the work that has taken place in our hubs and that ultimately will be the success by which they are hubs are measured it is can we make sure that the UK does not get left behind in the next quantum revolution can we support high technology companies with you know one of the companies we work very closely with those impacts you work closely with them we all I think work closely with them is that M Squared lasers it's a company in Glasgow they employ about a hundred people many many of whom used to work in one or more of our research groups and they something like 85% of all their products go to export and those are the kind of companies that the UK economy is going to have to grow if if we are going to carry on generating the tax revenue to fund our NHS and all of the other things that we want a government to support and I think all of the hubs take that responsibility extremely seriously I think we should great thank you I just accidently yeah so I I absolutely echo that and I think if we look over the last five years from when the UK program started to know there there there is a number of big UK companies already established who have now got significant interest ahran and who are investing themselves in in a quantum aspect of their R&D now in addition to that over the last five years a considerable number of startups have emerged in the UK which is very refreshing to see so there are these two ways forward with industry there are there are startups that are very often come out of a little university group with some new idea but there's also big companies that are picking up on this and I think those two going forward together in the UK means we've got a very good and now well-established industry that's growing yeah well I was going to say I think you reach a point where there are enough startups there's a vibrant community that our younger researchers are willing to take the risk with the startup and that wouldn't have been traditional career choice for them yeah so it's actually been a rather virtuous circle they see some success they see that even if this particular venture doesn't lead or something goes wrong with it that's fine they'll find something else to do and there's enough confidence in it so so it's actually been a good story because of this was a critical mass that actually no the the investment that was made of a decade ago right great actually I'm Dominic I have a question for you now as well I'm sure people here all interested in quantum computing because it's you know it's been all over the news recently with Google how different are quantum computers are we gonna have them at home but they're gonna replace our laptops or or is it gonna be something completely can you describe one maybe I'm not sure whether people have seen one um so what well I think there's several things to say that that the what we understand about a silicon chip is that we all have some vision of something that sits in a little package that's glued to a circuit board on our phone and and within limits most silicon chips are the same they use roughly the same technology they're roughly made in the same way in quantum computing there's not one clear way to do it so so there are different approaches so you'll see something about ions outside superconductors now other things to each of them has their own real challenges to get the quantum effects it needs to be very quiet very low noise so they're either in big refrigerators because they need to be cooled down just above absolute zero that superconductors and one of these fridges would maybe five or six meters high you know a meter wide nothing like the computer you'll have seen that they're very very different with with wires and things coming out I got its steampunk computing on some days because actually it seems very much like you would draw a computer if you didn't quite know there was a silicon chip and um no an I in fact computers it the ions have to be held in a vacuum there's lots of laser beams running in all of those sorts things and because it's early days that sort of integration that's taken something really big and made it really small you know so think of it like an a an old CRT TV a 65-inch CR TV CRT TV if you can remember one used to be about 65 inches deep for people would have to lift it and now technology changes and it's a flat panel so because a quantum computer we haven't seen that integration and development they're big structures they have to be cooled they have to be in temperature controlled environments so not like a laptop what I would say though of course is we don't see what a Google server farm looks like so we our communications means we access vast machines the size of warehouses with cooling all of the same sorts of things that our quantum computer has so so the fact it isn't a laptop doesn't necessarily make it any less useful it's just much harder to do but and there won't be so many to begin with I'm not gonna make the IBM statement so as you probably know that a number of companies working on quantum computers right now iBM is one of them there's Google and there are some startups as well but are they actually already better than traditional computers or still where are we where are we um it's great weather when the Google announcement came out it would be so did people see do put hands up we saw the Google announcement um there was a sort of internal debates about what it meant now I'm an engineer I just thought fantastic engineering absolutely fantastic engineering efforts I think was about 70 people working for five years really super a necessary milestone on the way you know you need to it's hard stuff it truly is um now what they did was they showed they could do a problem and it was a test problem which wasn't didn't have practical use which would have taken a conventional machine a big summit which is the world's biggest supercomputer 20 megawatts of power huge thing a long time to do now whether that supremacy or not it seems to me that's not quite the point the point is we're at this cusp we're starting to see real practical technology where you're saying it does things it's hard for something conventional to do we're sort of in this crossover region what I should say is the view is that to do practically useful problems because this was a test problem is still some way off but necessary step fantastic engineering you know you can see we're in a region that we weren't in five years ago but yeah yeah great um Tim question for you what are the dangers of quantum computing and yet you okay so I I'm the communications guy and and the one of the problems so it's very interesting in quantum technology arena because quite often things have worked out theoretically about what you could do with quantum technology when you have it in the future and one of the things that was worked out actually I quite a long time ago there ninety ninety-five Peter sure worked at that if you had a big quantum computer so this was thinking very theoretically at that point one thing you could do is break the mathematical algorithms that we currently use for our secure communications so in a minute the way we do a lot of our secure communications or at least the way we start off secure communications sessions is that we use what's called public key cryptography and this is based on the fact that there is a mathematical problem that is easy to do one-way and hard to do the other and it's taking two very big prime numbers and multiplying them together if you do that on a big computer that is very easy to do on the other hand if you just give someone the product of those two primes and say find what that what the two Prime's are given their product that is incredibly hard and nobody knows how to do that efficiently with an ordinary computer so the minute current cryptography is based on this asymmetry in this mathematical problem the the factoring of a composite number Institut primes and Peter sure worked out in 1995 that if we could build a big quantum computer you can solve that problem easily so if there was a big content computer around right now all of the secure communications that we're currently using would effectively be very vulnerable to this and so we we have to think ahead and actually does an aside on this if you're communicating stuff currently now that has a very long security shelf life so it's data that you want to be secure for 20 or 30 or 40 years maybe you should be worried now because people can record that encrypted data right now and they can potentially decrypt it in the future so if if you're worried about very long security shelf lives you should be worried about secure communications right now if the stuff that you wish to communicate has a very short security shelf life so you don't mind if somebody finds it a few days then you probably don't need to worry yet but when a big quantum computer comes along in the future we're going to need a new secure communicate methods which is why people are already working on these because we will over time need to implement them thank you um okay let's step away from quantum computers for a second and talk about senses okay question for you can you describe some of the new disruptive sensory capabilities that quantum sensors will have how are they going to be different from what we already have today yeah I already mentioned that a bit earlier but and Myles mentioned about looking under the ground and trying to see the infrastructure which is there so why would this be important and okay I as a physicist was quite I needed a bit convincing that to get enthusiastic under the ground and seeing the infrastructure but actually it's a big big problem and we all are annoyed by when people dig up the roads and just stuck in a traffic jam so if you could actually replace or put the new next high-speed broadband in with horizontal drilling which in principle the technology is there but people are afraid to hit a gas pipe or electrical lines if we could see that more directly or knew exactly where it was we could avoid a lot of these disruptions similarly when we want to go like hs2 if you're thinking through an old mining area Birmingham Manchester that area lots of mine shafts my at the moment you have to just drill and look can you find them if you could find them with some sensor that would be much less disruptive and which use much less money to actually do that and it's like study in another lens some numbers from there suggest that it's about half percent of GDP going into delays and cost overruns YouTube asked not knowing what's under the ground in infrastructure projects of course there's also oil minerals carbon sequestration if we want to take the carbon out of the atmosphere put it down we have to make sure it stays there for six thousand years or so which is the carbon cycle time but one issue is you put it down and you can see it at the start because it has a nice boundary between the like gas or like the carbon dioxide phase and like water which might be surrounding it but eventually gets dissolved you get something like fizzy groundwater and so you can't see it was like traditional technologies very well and gravity again like the mass of the carbon still visible so that one can refine the models and know exactly what's happening and monitor hardly like plumes might evolve under the ground so that yeah sure it does it in the right way and you can even look deeper into like magma flows and like eventually one might hope to be able to tell when their natural disaster like an earthquake or volcanic eruption might happen so all these things are opening our opened up by these new sensing capability the other thing I've spoke about the brain and you should really go to the stand outside like seeing or part of the brain functions but I also want to mention the airspace control actually we are just approaching a new revolution at the moment UK airspace looks at about 7,000 flight movements every day once we have flying taxis and drones it's likely to be a million or more so we'll have lots of movements in the air now in Australia Amazon is already delivering past that's why our drone I don't know if they already have any anti-collision mechanisms so that like when two drones try to deliver they don't hit each other I guess that's like sufficiently less low-density populated country that it doesn't happen but that what happens if you have lots of them in flying taxis in front of an environment like in city environment lots of trees and houses which is getter and lots of obstacles you have to have a completely new approach yes based control and that might mean like much better radar systems with like higher resolution and like picking out things out of the scattering or some of my sensors like to pick up like look around the corner if like something is approaching around there it's not just on the ground but in the air so all these things will be needed to move forward in our like way how we transport things and how we like get our deliveries fascinating and let's talk about medical technology as well I'm asked a question for you how will and transform medical imaging and other medical technology hmm well as I've already mentioned the the endoscope yes it is let's not let's not relive that experience so we've got a number of other things I think I think can't remember who spoke about what if you spoke about x-rays before and you know x-rays I think err the ubiquitous through body imaging technique both for medical and indeed airport whatever but of course x-rays aren't particularly good for you and I think we all have some nervousness about that and indeed that's why the person that runs the x-ray machine doesn't stay in the same room as you have your x-ray in because they're trying to shield them from the x-rays and so we'd like to use x-rays for lots of things that we don't we don't like x-ray in the brain at all for example we'd consider that not a great thing to do so you go well how bout I use light instead I'll use light to look through the body and you sort of can do that a little bit if you on it on it on the nighttime you go outside and get a bright torch and you hold it to your hand you sort of see some light comes through so light light does come through the hand but on the other hand I don't really get to see the bones and then one of the things that we're able to do now with quantum technologies and the kind of camera that Gerald and his colleagues have from Harriet what today looking through the water is that you can shine the light and actually some of the light go straight through and that would be okay but the other light bounces around a lot inside the hand and that's all fussy so what I really need is a camera that only looks at the first light and ignores everything else and then sometimes it's called prompt imaging I'm just going to look at the first light and then I can see through and then you couple that with what our just now amazing computer algorithms have got some of those on display as well which can somehow make sense of this fuzz because in that that's actually the key to how we see through the fiber you look through the fiber it's a mess but it's always the same mess and so the computer can sort of learn about that and then do the inverse and recover the image and so this combination of being able to detect the single particles of Lights in fact the first experimental evidence for that were talking about Nobel Prizes 1905 you may have thought Albert Einstein win the Nobel Prize for a relativity nope you may have thought he he he won it for something else well he did he won it for what's called the photoelectric effect which was essentially pretty much the first experimental proof that that light was particulate it came in particles and we talk about wave particle duality I was very excited to see there's a portrait of Thomas Young hidden behind the quantum city stands he he was the first person to to show that actually light was a wave and said there's been experimental evidence for both but once you recognize that actually light is particles and you can make cameras that are so sensitive that you can see these individual particles and you can time to a few picoseconds and then a picosecond lights traveled fraction of a millimeter you think it lights very quickly it something on fracture than name is it though that timing that sensitivity that computing power means that you can recover images in situations where if you and I looked at it by eye it's just a fuzzy mess and and that I think is a really exciting imagine the prospects have been able to do an MRI with a torch so that's the kind of thing that quantum technology office or indeed with Kies work measuring the precise magnetic fields associated with so when is that gonna happen well actually do have some images of of bones in your hands so let's see you

Channel: The Royal Institution

Views: 54,096

Keywords: Ri, Royal Institution, quantum computer, artificial intelligence, quantum physics, quantum computer google, quantum computer explained

Id: St76QFAjwXY

Length: 46min 26sec (2786 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 09 2020