The magical world of quantum physics | Yameng Cao | TEDxGhent

how's everyone doing who's ready for some signs let me ask you a few questions who use social networks here I use who use online shopping or what about watching TV's and movies and playing games online or everyday we connect ourselves to the Internet and every day we trust companies like Facebook eBay and Apple to keep our most sensitive information safe but have you considered that these companies are at risk of losing this information to hackers two years ago eBay was subject to one of the largest cyber attacks in history more than 140 million accounts were lost to hackers and with a list of emails passwords and phone numbers hackers can use the information to get into other web services using similar credentials the worst of all it doesn't stop with eBay there's so many more Sony Apple linkedin myspace the list goes on and on each time something like this happens a digital pandemic falls it is truly catastrophic so what is the problem behind all this it turns out the problem is the way we communicate is vulnerable to hackers let me tell you how we come currently communicate on the Internet so we put our credit card details our email address our phone numbers into a digital safe and then we lock it with some kind of password which is a digital string of ones and zeros now we then upload this box somewhere on the internet where it can be accessed by dozens of web services online and we send them the key where they can use a key to open the safe and look at the information but there's nothing on the internet today to stop a hacker from coming along and downloading a copy of that information as well and not only that he can intercept a key a password during transmission to one of the web services and make a copy of it for himself that you can open the your your safe and then you can access all your most sensitive secrets private data and personal information from underneath your nose you will never have found out until you tell somebody about it now this is the state of the web today I'm here to tell you is that it all we can solve all this problems using quantum physics it all began about a hundred years ago a group of scientists got together at Brussels just 50 miles away from here at the survey Institute of physical chemistry they got there to discuss a big issue that later became one of the greatest discoveries of the 20th century some of his people you might recognize Albert Einstein who invented general relativity as you heard before from Christoph Max Planck my personal hero he invented quantum physics he's the one that came up with a word quantum which I will explain later and then there's mr. Schroedinger who despite winning the Nobel Prize in Physics he's really only famous for telling the story of a cat's as both dead and alive at the same time so is quantum physics quantum physics is how things work at a really really small scale this scale is invisible to our very eyes but it describes everything we feel we touch we hear we experience in this world aware that we're living in this invisible world it is really weird how things work in this invisible world even though it describes everything we're familiar with in this world of quantum objects can travel through walls be in many places at once and be as if they were next to each other when they're really really far apart so how do we visualize this invisible and weird in a spooky world it turns out we can use some everyday objects like a coin a coin that we familiar with it has two sides head and tail these are ordinary states of the coin that we are familiar with but in the quantum world things are a little bit different this is what happens in the quantum world in the quantum world we are no longer certain of what the coin is is now that we've become stupid but the coin has learned to conceal its information the coin does not choose to be head or tail it is actually head and tail at the same time this is called a quantum state and that would be the most technological jargon you were hear from my talk today a quantum state the coin doesn't choose to be head or tail until someone tries to disturb it if you push it or move it or change in any way the coin will lose these quantum properties instantly and we decide to choose either head or tail this is called a quantum state the same can be said for two coins both coins can be put into their own quantum states but there is a caveat when you bring two quantum objects really close together like two people sitting in the audience next to each other today they will interact and this interaction will bring up a really mysterious link which is invisible to the naked eye but exists between the two coins such that if you move the coins eighty-four parts one over here one over here what happened to the coin over here will instantly affect the one over here and over here could be a few thousand miles away this means that if this coin becomes head this one will know and instantly become head as well with no apparent communication between the coins whatsoever this phenomena is called quantum entanglement and it has puzzled even Einstein himself and for a hundred years it has puzzled us but today I'm going to tell you that we know how to use it to beat hackers and this is how it works we take your password the digital key of ones and zeros and we convert it into a quantum object just like the coin and then we take another quantum object and we bring the key and the quantum objects close together so they interact this interaction brings up a spin invisible ink so the way of the coin where the wherever the key is any disturbance of the coin to any disturbance of the key like a hacker try to copy it or steal it will instantly make the key change and that will instantly cause the coin to change as well so the coin is almost like an alarm for foreign choosers so that you can have any in your home that whenever hacker tried to hack the key you will be notified immediately let's see how this works in real life this is you and all the web services online eBay and target in this case you have a quantum transmitter and they will have a receiver and in between you have few dozens of kilometers of optical fiber this is what we use for internet everyday optic fibers so you take a key and you send it into this quantum transmitter where it creates is invisible in between another quantum object and you put this key into a light box the light pulse and travels down the optic fiber and goes into receiver gets converted back into key and then eBay and Targa and so on and so forth they can use this key to open your safe but if a hacker comes along at any point during the transmission and tries to copy the key you will be notified immediately and what's more the key will be changed so he will not reveal any information from hacking so this is a powerful property of quantum physics you any hacker no matter how powerful or resourceful or clever they get now or in the future they can out beat the laws of physics and for that reason this security is 100% secure guaranteed security by the laws of nature can we really build such a magical device it turns out we can and we should be really proud of our scientific community because we have built a prototype and tested it it works so here on the on one side you have a quantum receiver and one side you have a quantum transmitter and in between you have a few thousand cyclic fibers this is exactly like what I've just showed you before there is a problem though look at how big it is compared to our mobile phones and tablets and laptops and look at how expensive is it costs 75,000 euros to have one of these devices it is practically impossible to integrate them into our smartwatches smartphones tablets laptop and so on and so this is this is a challenge but fortunately at Lancaster University and a quantum bass our subpoena company we are envisioning a revolutionary way to convert light pulses at the microscopic scale which we call photons and we convert these photons into quantum objects that can be ultimately encoded into quantum keys quantum keys like I've just shown you are 100% proved - resistant to hackers these devices not only are they incredibly cheap to produce easy to use and they're so small you can fit a dozen of them onto the end of your finger the day we bring this revolutionary device out is a day no one in the world will ever have to worry about hackers again thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 49,917

Rating: 4.8368578 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Belgium, Technology, Communication, Computers, Hack, Internet, Physics, Privacy, Security

Id: e67nFfiYQzk

Length: 11min 35sec (695 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 27 2016