Saturday 28 July 2012
Robyn Williams: Okay, get a piece of paper and write down this question and have the answer ready in 30 minutes. So, can you assign a value of between seven and ten to the theta function in a Wexler distribution given that lambda is negative and moo is greater than phi and will yield a solution remarkably close to Theobold's constant? And the question is how close? You got it? Well, now you have 30 minutes, and away you go.
And this is of course The Science Show, and I see that the bloke in the beige anorak in Fitzroy has already got the answer. We'll come to that at the end, and I know you can't wait, it will be that sort of program, with plenty of Higgses and quantum fluctuations.
And a farewell. Vale to Sally Ride who rode in space twice, the youngest person in her time and the first American woman to fly. Here she is on The Science Show in 1990.
Sally Ride: The robotic missions are very obviously the best way to accomplish lots of things. For example, you're not going to get many volunteers to go to Neptune. I mean, those people that would volunteer you'd probably want to send anyway. There are a lot of things that can be done much more cheaply and much more efficiently with robots. Planetary exploration is one of those things, and I think that Earth remote sensing is another one in a lot of areas, particularly if you know what you're looking for and you already know how to build the instrument, then it's almost always cheaper to do it robotically than it is to send people.
The area where people are important is when you don't really know what you're looking for. The eye and the brain are actually very, very good at recognising patterns, flipping through the file index and saying 'I haven't seen that before'. And there have been several features in the ocean, for example, that have been discovered that are very important structures in the ocean that haven't been picked up by the sensors, that were noticed first by people because they said 'that looks odd'.
Having said that, I also think that it's very important to the country and just to the children in the country if no one else, to have a vibrant part of the human space program. Kids have to have something to look forward to and, believe me, I see a lot of kids who look forward to being astronauts. It might be astronauts today and firefighters tomorrow, but astronaut is something that kids like to aspire towards, and I think that every country needs to have some element of that to invigorate their population and their technology.
Robyn Williams: And Dr Sally Ride on convincing reluctant kids to study science and to stick with it.
Sally Ride: I do think that it's very important to attract young people to science and maths and engineering very early on. If you don't have them by junior high or high school you're not going to get them in most cases. So it's critically important to concentrate on their early years, even as early as mid-elementary school. And one of the things that I think the space program really has to offer is as a hook to get kids interested in science and maths. I mean, all kids are interested in the space program and dinosaurs, and you need to use that because you can really generate a lot of interest among seven, eight, nine, 10-year-olds if you attract them to the science courses with the space program and then use that without them noticing it to start teaching them some things about science and maths.
Robyn Williams: And now Dr Sally Ride on how much astronauts see of pollution and the increasing harm done to parts of the planet.
Sally Ride: First of all, I have only been up twice, although I guess I'm the only person in the room that can say that, and my two flights were very closely spaced, they were within about a year and a half of each other, and I didn't personally see any changes within that year and a half. People who have flown in both the Skylab flights of the mid-'70s and the space shuttle flights have seen significant changes in the levels of pollution, for example, and say that they were surprised at the differences and that they were so striking to them.
The things that I think all astronauts have seen that really catch their attention are pollution of the cities, the fires that you see all up and down the coast of Africa and across the Amazon Basin. You can really see the effects of what we are doing to the planet. You'd like to think that those are reversible and, as people become more and more aware that their little fire is contributing to something on a global scale, that we will be able to make prudent decisions, stop those things, and that everything will be reversible. But things aren't always that simple.
For example, a lot of the trace gases have very long residence times in the atmosphere, so even if you decide today that you're not going to put any more trace gases into the atmosphere, you have already done something that will persist for several years, tens of years, hundreds of years in some cases. So it's very difficult to say which changes will be reversible and which changes won't.
Robyn Williams: One of my heroes, Dr Sally Ride, the youngest astronaut in her time and the first American woman in space. She died on Tuesday. Sally Ride was a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego.
Ray Volkus is a professor of physics at the University of Melbourne where a massive meeting on particle research was able to announce the finding of the Higgs boson just three weeks ago, and already there are ramifications. Could the Higgs...and this would be sensational...could the Higgs be the basis for the mystery of dark matter? That substance, whatever it is, five times more common than ordinary matter like you and me and bricks and mountains and planets. Let's recap: what was found, as announced three weeks ago, and how?
Ray Volkas: I was surprised I think, as many people were, at the strength of the signal that they had. We knew that something was cooking since last December when a couple of other seminars were given at CERN. And because we were running the world's biggest high energy physics conference in Melbourne in early July, we were certainly hoping and praying, if you like, that enough data would be gathered and the analyses could be done in time to make an important announcement at our conference, and essentially that happened. So yes, everything worked out perfectly.
Robyn Williams: There were two teams working on the Higgs boson. Did their findings coincide exactly?
Ray Volkas: Pretty much exactly, yes. The two experiments independently analysed their data. Their equipment is a bit different. They both have these enormous detectors, but they have different characteristics. So the experiments are doing the same thing but a little bit differently. By and large the experiments agree very well. It's early days yet. There are some small indications of strange behaviour in some of the data, but it could just be that there is too little data at the moment and what we are seeing are just statistical fluctuations. So taking all of that into account, one should say that the data between the two experiments agree very well.
Robyn Williams: What are the characteristics of the Higgs boson that you're looking for that made it pretty sure that they've found it?
Ray Volkas: Well, first of all its mass. So its mass is about 125 times that of the proton, and for a number of years there has existed indirect evidence that that is the mass it ought to have. Because of the nature of the quantum theory that describes elementary particles, even before the Higgs particle is discovered as a real particle, it can have effects on the behaviour of other particles through quantum mechanical fluctuations, the creation of virtual particles, these kinds of words.
Robyn Williams: What is a virtual particle?
Ray Volkas: Well, it's a particle that exists only for a fleeting moment of time and it plays a role in the interactions of what we call real particles. So real particles are the ones that you actually see in detectors, and virtual particles are ones that exist for a brief amount of time while real particles are interacting with each other. So, long before the Higgs was found as a real particle, which was only confirmed three weeks ago, already evidence for its existence was there in many sorts of ways, and one of those ways was in computing its effects as a virtual particle, its effects on the interactions of other particles. And the precise magnitude and nature of those interactions depended on its mass.
So by comparing the interactions of other particles with the predictions you could get a good feeling...more than a feeling, a quantitative measurement, if you like, albeit indirect, of what its mass ought to be. And where it was found was pretty much where it was expected to be. So already last December when the first hints for this new particle were released, the fact that its mass came out where people were expecting it to be on the basis of the virtual effects of the Higgs particle, led a lot of people to be quite hopeful that what data was seeing was real and not just a statistical fluke, and that's been borne out.
Robyn Williams: And the characteristic of it, which everyone talks about, is that it itself gives mass to the other particles, that it's the kind of glue that when I kick a piece of concrete it hurts my foot and that's the work of the Higgs. What else might be the implication, in your mind, to physics? What other links might be made from the Higgs to something else?
Ray Volkas: Yes, that's a very important and interesting question and I could talk for hours about that. Well, one approach is to just talk about what is the future of the experiments. So a particle has been discovered, that's very clear. The particle’s properties are consistent with those of a Higgs. However, at this early stage, the amount of data that has been collected and analysed is not sufficient for us to say with very great precision that the properties of this new particle very, very closely match those of the standard model Higgs.
Many of us are hoping that this new particle resembles the Higgs, that it is doing a very similar job to what the Higgs is supposed to do, but that it's a variation on the theme, that it's not exactly the standard Higgs particle, that it's a non-standard Higgs particle. And if that's true then that would be breathtakingly important because it would point the way to new physics. What we're trying to do in particle physics, as well as measure the properties of known particles and their interactions, we are actually searching for new phenomena, we're trying to push the boundaries of the laws of physics. And the discovery of the Higgs particle is a very important milestone in this long quest to uncover the deeper laws of nature.
First of all, the Higgs is a very special kind of particle. It's quite different from the more familiar particles like electrons and protons or photons, the particles of light, or other particles that are related to the ones I've just mentioned. The Higgs particle is quite a different animal and it plays a different role, and it's the first particle of its kind that has ever been discovered that performs those sorts of roles, giving mass to other particles. Even the nature of the Higgs itself, the fact that it is a particle that doesn't spin…most particles in a certain sense spin about their axis. This is using a bit of poetic licence, and all physicists will know that it is not quite true to say that, but nevertheless it's the only way you can visualise it. Most particles spin on their axes, whereas the Higgs doesn't. Well, we think it doesn't. That's one of the properties that has yet to be measured.
Robyn Williams: It might.
Ray Volkas: Yes. For it to be the Higgs particle it must not have any spin, and that's one of the main things to now be checked experimentally. So that's why it is fair to say that this new particle resembles a Higgs but we don't yet know that it is the Higgs. So first thing experimentally is to just measure, with as much precision as the data allow, the properties of the particle, its spin, and also the way it decays. So the Higgs particle is a very unstable particle obviously, otherwise we would have found it long ago, and it decays in a number of different ways. It can decay to many different kinds of final-state particles, and the precise proportions of its decays to various different kinds of daughter particles is an important piece of information about the Higgs. And one way the particle that is discovered could not be a standard model Higgs is if its decays to other particles didn't follow the right pattern. So that's on the experimental side. On the theoretical side...
Robyn Williams: Which is your field.
Ray Volkas: Indeed, I'm a theorist. I can only admire these experiments that were done, it is just amazing what has been achieved. From my point of view as a theorist, the importance of the Higgs is if it is the Higgs particle then it tells us that our theoretical speculations are moving in the right direction, that we know what we're doing. The role that the Higgs field plays, to give mass and to do something called spontaneous symmetry breaking, this is a technical term, it has to do with certain nice properties of the fundamental equations of physics, and then how those nice properties are hidden from view. This is called symmetry breaking and it is absolutely crucial, this is the phenomenon that lies behind the generation of mass and it lies potentially behind the unification of forces.
So a lot of people want to believe that the forces we know today are separate forces like the electromagnetic force and the weak interaction and the strong interaction that holds nuclei together, that those three forces and perhaps gravity one day are actually different manifestations of a single unified force. For that to be true, we have to explain how the world today doesn't appear to have one force but appears to have four. And the way you would do that reconciliation is through this thing I've called symmetry breaking, that's what the Higgs does. And if there is a grand unified theory, then the way it will be related to the real world, which does not display that symmetry, that unification, is because a different kind of Higgs particle, not the one that was discovered three weeks ago but a completely separate particle, but another particle performing a similar role, its role would be to hide the fact that the forces of nature are actually unified.
Robyn Williams: So there might be another one yet?
Ray Volkas: There could be many. The one I've just been talking about associated with grand unification would be well out of reach of the Large Hadron Collider because it would be very, very heavy.
Robyn Williams: I can imagine. But what about dark matter? Where does that possibly come in?
Ray Volkas: This is a favourite topic of mine. Most of the matter in the universe, in terms of mass at least, is dark matter, and that just means that it isn't emitting light waves. But we know it's there through its gravity. And there is five times as much of this by mass as ordinary matter. So whatever it is, from that point of view, is pretty important, even though we are not made of it. And we particle physicists would really like to know what it is; is it one kind of new particle, is it several different kinds of new particles, exactly what is it? One thing we do know is that it is not a particle that is described by the existing theory, the standard model. The existence of dark matter is proof that the laws of physics at the moment are incomplete. They must be extended.
Robyn Williams: And you think there is a connection between the Higgs, as discovered just now, and dark matter.
Ray Volkas: Yes. It's a speculation but it's certainly possible. It is quite possible that the particle discovered at CERN decays some of the time into dark matter particles. So it decays part of the time in various ways into relatively ordinary elementary particles, various kinds of quarks, leptons, spin-1 vector particles, let me not go through all of the names and all the possibilities...
Robyn Williams: All of the nuclear zoo.
Ray Volkas: All right. But suffice it to say, it decays into particles that we know and love. It's also possible that part of the time it decays into dark matter. We don't know that yet...
Robyn Williams: How do you find out, how do you test it?
Ray Volkas: Well, you have to do very detailed measurements...
Robyn Williams: With a bigger instrument than CERN, LHC?
Ray Volkas: Well, CERN can do it to some extent, and in fact since the discovery of this new particle was announced three weeks ago, plenty of papers have already been written on precisely this topic, of what's allowed now by way of a Higgs decaying into dark matter. This is called the invisible width of the Higgs particle in jargon, and from existing measurements you can put a constraint on what fraction of the time the Higgs is decaying to dark matter. Let me say right from the outset, there is no evidence at the moment that it is decaying into dark matter. But it is one possible thing that could be uncovered with more precise measurements. And if that were to be discovered, I think that would just be fantastically exciting because the dark matter problem really is an extraordinarily important problem for fundamental science, it really goes to the core of what is actually in the universe today. And so discovering that kind of a connection...so the Higgs you see could be a bridge between our world made of ordinary atoms and ordinary elementary particles, and the world of dark matter. Possibility. And that would be really exciting.
Robyn Williams: Let me just ask you a final question, to emulate Brian Cox, you've seen Brian Cox on television many times, he's at Manchester and he works at CERN, and he said that the discovery of the Higgs was the greatest in his lifetime in science. Would you agree?
Ray Volkas: I think you can make a case for that for sure. So yes, I would say that the discovery of the Higgs particle is certainly the most exciting thing that I've witnessed in my career.
Robyn Williams: And if he's right about the link with dark matter, as he said, staggering. Professor of physics Ray Volkas at the University of Melbourne.
And we shall swerve away from those quantum perplexities for a moment to consider more immediate concerns about energy. Our PhD student this week is at Deakin University in Victoria and his name is Tristan Simons.
Tristan Simons: Who out there in radio land is concerned about the effect our energy production is having on the planet? If you are, then you might think that solar and wind power are great ways to move away from dirty carbon-emitting fossil fuels. It's a wonderful image; the world's energy needs being met by a bright sunny day, or a cool pleasant breeze.
But what stop the lights going out when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow? The answer to this question lies in energy storage. Renewable energy sources give an interrupted supply of power, so it's important to save some power for a rainy day. The simplest solution is to use our wind turbine or solar farm to charge up a battery which we can then use later when it's needed.
But there's a problem. There are lots of different types of batteries to do lots of different types of jobs, but we simply don't have a rechargeable battery that is cheap enough or green enough to do this job. This is the subject of my PhD research; the zinc-air rechargeable battery. It's the bigger, better battery that can store huge amounts of energy where it's generated, then dispense it when it's needed.
This battery uses cheap zinc metal at the negative terminal and oxygen taken straight from the air at the positive terminal to generate electricity. However, this wonderful piece of clean technology has a drawback; it cannot be recharged. One of the main reasons that it can't be recharged is that when the battery is used, zinc metal gets dissolved away from the smooth metal surface into the liquid inside the battery, known as an electrolyte. When it gets recharged, we need to get the zinc out of the electrolyte and back onto the conducting metallic surface. When this happens, it needs to be reapplied, just the way it was when we started, as a smooth surface, otherwise the battery short-circuits and dies.
Imagine you were painting your whole house. Some movers come along and take all your furniture away so you can paint. When you're done, they bring it all back again. But you noticed something; the bed is in the kitchen, the toaster is in the toilet, your possessions are not in the same place they were when they took them away. Just as a good mover would remember that the toilet is not the home of the toaster, a good electrolyte will put zinc back onto the electrode in a smooth shape when the battery gets recharged.
In my project I've made some new electrolytes and I found that I can deposit zinc from them. But small changes in the recipe can give drastically different shapes of zinc. If you add some water it creates a nice smooth surface made of tiny needles. Take the water away and the zinc becomes a jagged, spongy mess, which is toaster-in-the-toilet territory.
Over the next few months I'm heading to the UK to learn more about this important process. Using magnetic resonance imaging I'm hoping to be able to understand how this process works by imaging the zinc in the electrolyte in real time as the battery discharges and recharges. These initial findings are my first steps towards making a rechargeable zinc-air battery, which could let us rely on the wind and the Sun as primary power sources, even when the wind doesn't blow or the Sun doesn't shine. Thank you.
Robyn Williams: And thank you Tristan Simons at Deakin University. And that's too where they are exploring the potential of nano. No, not the sunscreen type ructions we've heard about this week, but the materials science possibilities. Prue Bentley prepared this report:
Prue Bentley: Dr Paul Collins is a researcher in nanotechnology. He and his colleagues recently showed me around the labs at the Institute for Frontier Materials at Deakin University in Geelong. Nanotechnology isn't a brand-new science. The idea has been around, at least theoretically, since the 1950s, and scientists began playing with it in the lab in the '80s. But until now we've never had the technology and expertise to fully exploit it.
Okay, and what would you use this information for?
Paul Collins: This can be used for a variety of different materials, everything from steel, carbon fibre, biological materials. And what it allows us to do is to actually look at how things are built in nature and also how we can manipulate things to build better structures.
Prue Bentley: I've been told to follow Richard. Richard, what's your full title and name?
Richard Williams: My name is Dr Richard Williams, I'm a researcher in bio-nanotechnology.
Prue Bentley: It is pretty dark in here, but this is a really impressive looking machine.
Richard Williams: This is proper science now, yes. So this is the electron microscope itself, and essentially what happens is we've got a giant electron gun sat at the top of the machine, which is a big long tube, and then we have a sample holder. So what happens is we put our sample in the way of the electron beams, and then the electrons go through the sample and then they hit a camera detector. And what this actually gives us is quite a grainy black-and-white image, but that grainy black-and-white image is actually representing molecules themselves. So these are the things that are thousands of times thinner than a human hair, you can actually pick up and see it and see different types of morphologies on there, so different types of shapes and different structures. So if you've actually built something, you can have a direct look at it and see what you've made.
Prue Bentley: It's real 21st-century stuff, isn't it?
Richard Williams: The last century was macro-scale engineering, so things that you can see. But then this century will be nano-scale engineering, which is things that you can't see and you need specialised equipment to have a look at. And now that we have access to that specialised equipment, we can start putting structures and information and functionality into things in a way that we never could do before, or at least could not understand before. So it has just opened the floodgates to this whole new technology.
Prue Bentley: The adage all of the researchers worked to is that it's difficult to improve on nature, but they are definitely going to try. Professor Xungai Wang has devoted much of his research to a traditional material; wool. Which he reminds me is still a $2 billion industry in Australia.
Xungai Wang: We have been able to convert a normal wool fibre into very, very fine particles, and the purpose of doing that is to identify new venerated applications for a traditional material. We're also improving the properties, the functionalities of normal wool, textiles, like the UV protection effects, and also finding new applications for the fibre itself.
Prue Bentley: So we could, say, in five, 10 years time be walking down the street in a wool product that is UV resistant, that maybe cleans itself, those sorts of things?
Xungai Wang: Absolutely. Wool is actually a very wonderful fibre. Not many people associate all these nice attributes to a very traditional material, but if you look at the functionality of wool as a fibre material, it's actually more advanced than any other fibre that I can think of.
Prue Bentley: I got the chance to see some of those fibres very close up on the massive electron microscopes in the lab with Dr Alessandra Sutti.
So what we are really looking at here is a black and white photo. It looks like a bunch of pom-poms really stuck to a piece of material.
Alessandra Sutti: This is a powder, a pom-pom powder made of silk. These are particles that are made in this facility as a way to give value to silk waste. They have particular properties such as metal absorption from solution. So we are trying to recover waste and use it in different ways, such as recovering metals or heavy metals from polluted water.
Prue Bentley: The range of research going on at the Institute is staggering. Just chatting with Richard, Paul and Alessandra I heard about engineering to make better carbon fibre sports equipment, and other departments making materials that will make implants safer by actually mimicking what the human body produces, such as skin. And that's on top of research into fibres that are going to make better building materials for our future structures. None of this is happening in a vacuum either, it's not just boffins in a lab. Industry is heavily involved in sponsoring and trialling new materials.
Xungai Wang: In the fibre space, for instance, we are now investing heavily in the new carbon fibre production facility, and this can do support in local industries, not just in the fibre area but in the composite sports equipment, in the textile manufacturing areas, because those traditional textile machinery can be utilised to make carbon fibre fabrics which can be used in composite materials. We can't really compete on the basis of costing, there is just no basis for doing that, so there has to be something new and unique in the things that we make, and if we can do that through research and innovation then I think we are in a much better position for the future.
Prue Bentley: The man who pretty much started things at the Institute is Peter Hodgson, who is seen it grow from 1 to nearly 200 people working there in the last decade.
Peter Hodgson: If we're going to have a manufacturing industry, and there's lots of people talking about it, it has to be a smart and knowledge intensive industry. I travel the world, I spend a lot of time in India and China, and I have no doubt that Australian industry is quite innovative. I think there's a lot of scope to develop advanced materials and advanced manufacturing processes which can give us an advantage over other parts of the world.
If I go to China, they are really about large amounts of concrete, large amounts of steel, whereas there is a one-piece carbon fibre wheel company spin-off here which is really innovative, so they are making carbon fibre really lightweight wheels for the automotive industry. And that's the sort of thing that we are good at because it requires knowledge of new materials, it requires engineering knowledge, it requires manufacturing knowledge, all at very high levels. And with some of these large organisations you see overseas they don't have that sort of innovation.
So what I want to be known for in the future is basically that all the science we do, whether it's nanotechnologies science or whether its advanced computer modelling or whatever it may be, that it does make an impact in the real world.
Robyn Williams: That is Professor Peter Hodgson at Deakin University with Prue Bentley of ABC Ballarat.
And we're getting quite close to that problem I posed for you at the top of the program. To get in the mood, something else that's entirely incomprehensible but which may well change your life; quantum computing. Daniel Lidar is a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and his revolutionary line may not crack the coding problems but may do lots else in other remarkable applications.
Daniel Lidar: My quest has taken an interesting twist lately. For a long time I was a theoretician working on problems in quantum error correction, trying to make quantum computers more reliable. Very recently, thanks to the involvement of Lockheed Martin at USC we acquired a quantum processor manufactured by a company in Vancouver called D-Wave, and this processor has now been installed in an off-campus facility called our Information Sciences Institute, ISI. And so I've started to play with this device which has 128 cubits and is at this point the largest functional quantum information processor. And I'm learning to program it and I'm trying to understand its behaviour, characterise its degree of quantumness, and I'm trying to program it as well.
Robyn Williams: So this is not actually even close to being a quantum computer but it's on the way.
Daniel Lidar: It's not yet a complete quantum computer in several ways. First of all, it is too small to compete with large-scale classical computing, but perhaps more importantly it is also not a universal quantum computer, meaning that it is a special-purpose optimisation machine. It is not designed to solve arbitrary problems like you can solve on what's called a universal device. And in addition, there is a lot of...well, to be blunt, there is scepticism in the community as to the degree of quantumness of this device, and that's exactly why this is such an interesting experiment to play around with.
We are actually now in a position to settle, to some extent, the question of whether the D-Wave chip is performing quantum computing or whether it is actually more along the lines of a classical computer. But it seems to me that the more relevant question is about a different quantum phenomenon known as tunnelling. So tunnelling is this idea that in some sense a particle can just go through a wall, and it's an old idea and it's a well tested notion.
And it is actually the case that at the level of quantum particles there is a finite probability for particles to go through barriers which we as humans obviously cannot go through, not in our lifetimes. In fact, there is a finite probability even for us humans to go through walls in some sense, but we would have to wait several times the age of the universe for that to happen. But at the level of tiny quantum mechanical objects this happens routinely, and it seems to be the case that this phenomenon is what is being exploited in adiabatic quantum computing.
Let me try to explain to you the kind of problems that can be solved on the D-Wave chip and why tunnelling is relevant. The D-Wave chip is designed to solve optimisation problems. You can think of an optimisation problem as the problem of walking on a rugged landscape, some kind of a mountainous range somewhere, and you're looking for a deep valley. And the solution of the optimisation problem lies in the deepest of all valleys. It could be, let's say, a note that somebody hid under a rock, if you like. So you're looking for that valley. And the problem is that while you are going through this mountain range, being classical you can only go up and down these hills, look around you and try to find your valley, and that's not a very efficient procedure. If you don't know where you're going, you'll be performing a random walk and it will take you a very long time.
On the other hand, if you were a tiny quantum particle performing adiabatic quantum computing you'd have a better strategy at your disposal. What you'd be able to do is effectively go through those hills, you wouldn't have to go up and down, you could take a shortcut. And if your walk was designed properly, which is the art of designing adiabatic quantum algorithms, then we could steer you somehow to that deepest valley and you'd be taking a shortcut through space and in some sense through time as well. You'd end up very quickly in that deep valley by virtue of having gone through those hills.
Robyn Williams: So you don't know necessarily yet whether the chip has got that effect?
Daniel Lidar: There is some experimental evidence that the chip does indeed have that effect. It's been demonstrated for a small number of cubits, and there was actually a recent paper on that topic published in Nature, and we are going to try to replicate and extend these results. In fact we are working on that as we speak.
Robyn Williams: So if not codes, what?
Daniel Lidar: Right, so adiabatic quantum computing is likely to be going to be used for different purposes than code breaking and number theory and factoring. For example, machine learning. Machine learning is a broad field which includes image recognition, protein folding, neural networks. The original motivation for Lockheed was detecting bugs in software, that's also a branch of machine learning. So we believe that we will be able to use the chip and develop algorithms in this context.
Other applications that we know adiabatic quantum computing are good for are, for example, doing PageRank, the algorithm that underlies the Google web search. So a couple of colleagues of mine and I have recently written a paper that shows that it's likely that we'll be able to search the web faster with adiabatic quantum computing by implementing a quantum version of PageRank.
Robyn Williams: By when?
Daniel Lidar: Well, algorithms that could be run on the current 128-cubit chip are of the type that I mention in the context of machine learning. In fact, that has already been done. There have been demonstrations of, for example, image recognition in a collaboration between D-Wave and Google. They demonstrated that they were able to pick out images of cars in some sense with higher reliability than is done with the typical Google type algorithms. So I'd say that day has already arrived to some extent, but what has not yet arrived is our ability to demonstrate beyond doubt that we can do tasks like this faster than is possible on classical computers.
Robyn Williams: Well, I hope all that is clear. Anyway, the upshot, if he's right, is a revolution in computing. Another one. Maybe that will mean some of us won't have to stare at hourglasses on the screen for hours on end. Daniel Lidar is a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California.
And if you want to explore some of those surreal quantum-type ideas in the theatre next week and you live in Perth, go to see The Cat in the Box by Vivien Glance at the Blue Room Theatre. It starts Tuesday. Here's a peek:
[Excerpt from The Cat in the Box]
I bet it does. An extract from The Cat in the Box, opening on Tuesday in Perth, written by Vivien Glance and starring Schrödinger's cat, which may or may not exist, living or dead.
One of her heroes and mine is the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn. I've interviewed him every 10 years for the past 40, and the last time being about his play Copenhagen and the bomb. Now he's written a hilarious novel called Skios, a very big hit. And that's where the question comes from.
Now, my first question to you is a technical one. It's about assigning a value of between seven and ten to the theta function in a Wexler distribution, given that lambda is negative and moo is greater than phi and will yield a solution remarkably close to Theobold's constant. My question is; how close?
Michael Frayn: Well, this is the question that somebody asked the man in my novel. The man in my novel is passing himself off as a scientist who knows what things like Wexler equations and whatnot, but in fact he knows no more than I do about them, and has to somehow construct an answer, which he does by joking about it.
Robyn Williams: Did you make that entire question up?
Michael Frayn: I think so, yes.
Robyn Williams: So theta and moo and Wexler and all the rest of it is just pure invention?
Michael Frayn: It is, but the subject that the scientist who is supposed to be giving the lecture...I should say it's about a scientist who is supposed to be giving a lecture to a foundation only somebody takes over his identity who knows nothing about science and indeed no idea of what he is supposed to be giving the lecture about. But the speciality of the real scientist is scientometrics, and I've had many compliments from readers on my inventiveness in imagining this branch of science, which is the scientific measurement of science, and I scarcely like to admit that I didn't invent it, it is actually a real branch of science. Indeed, I read a textbook on scientometrics while I was doing my research for it.
Robyn Williams: Gosh, what is it?
Michael Frayn: Well, it's just the scientific measurement of science. And if you think about it, it's very necessary. Scientific research is often extremely expensive, and before people sink vast sums of money into it they want to know what the likelihood is of it producing some kind of financially measurable results, what the reputation is of the people who are doing it, and people have now devised objective ways of measuring these things.
Robyn Williams: In fact there's a wonderful article by Stephen Weinberg who got a Nobel Prize for physics in the New York Review of Books about something called big science, and the reason he wrote it is that there is a famous hole in Texas that cost $2.1 billion. They were going to have a supercollider a bit like CERN, you know, the Large Hadron Collider which has just found the Higgs boson, perhaps, and yet Congress decided that even though the hole existed at great expense, they weren't going to continue funding it because Texas already had something. So they used it to grow mushrooms. That's part of scientometrics, isn't it.
Michael Frayn: It should be a part of scientometrics, it sounds like the scientometrics was a little defective before they started this particular scheme.
Robyn Williams: But the novel is wonderful, it's a farce, and it shows you how some conferences where they take people seriously, especially the 'sage on stage', can be usurped, as you said, by a total plausible impostor who knows nothing about anything but smiles nicely and has got this wonderful quiff of hair that falls down. Were you made to feel that about conferences because you've been to too many yourself and seen what a farce it is?
Michael Frayn: I've only ever been to one conference and that was a conference for writers about 30 years ago in Stockholm, and that was so farcical that I've never been back to another. The thing that writers of fiction sometimes do, not always, is they sometimes make things up. It's a terrible confession, but we do actually tell lies. And no one ever believes that about writers of fiction, people always think they are just putting in their own experiences and their own friends, changing the name and the colour of their eyes and whatnot. But I think this is pretty much an invented story, an invented conference centre.
Robyn Williams: Yes, but there are plenty of people in business class on planes sipping their champagne, bringing out their standard speech which they are going to recycle again. There was an element of truth in it surely?
Michael Frayn: I hope there is an element of truth, yes, that's what makes fiction relate to the world, that it's something you recognise in the world around you. I have to say that scientists aren't the only people who sit in planes sipping their champagne going off to conferences, so do some writers.
Robyn Williams: Another specific question from your novel; is there a role for God in physics?
Michael Frayn: I seem to remember that when someone proposes this question in the novel, an English couple who happen to be present slip away because they find it impolite to remain while something so American is being discussed.
Robyn Williams: That's right, so American; is there a role for God in physics? A previous book of yours called The Human Touch explored at great length and depth the ways in which we understand what the world around us is made of, and showed that science is, however magnificent, nonetheless approximate. We're sitting in an office, we have a table, there's the wood, and yet most of that table is space and most of our understanding of that table and its electrons and, who knows, its Higgs bosons, is not exactly sure, it's approximate. What were you trying to achieve in The Human Touch?
Michael Frayn: The thesis of The Human Touch is that there is a fundamental paradox. We can't help but believe that human beings are really irrelevant to the universe, they are a tiny, tiny infestation in one very small corner of the universe. The universe has plainly existed for a very long time, before human beings turned up, and will go on existing for a very long time after human beings have vanished. That's one side of the paradox. But on the other side is it's impossible to say anything about the universe except in terms of human understanding, the way human beings perceive the world, the instruments that they devised for trying to grasp the world, including the laws of physics and numbers.
After the book had come out I was sent for by CERN in Geneva and given a grilling by 100 or so physicists and mathematicians about the book, and they had appointed a jury of a dozen people who had actually read the book and asked me questions in great detail. And I was not surprised, but all the same slightly shocked, to discover that all these physicists and mathematicians, brilliant as they were, were un-reconstructed Platonists. They believed that numbers and scientific laws are objective entities in the world out there.
I can't make any sense of that view at all. I'm not suggesting that human constructs are completely arbitrary, obviously they're constrained by the reality that they are attempting to grasp, and some constructions work better than others, and the best constructions work fantastically well, they're extremely predictive and they give a very good account of things. But constructions they remain. There aren't any numbers of things in the world until someone has thought of a class of things to count. You've got to have a class of things before you can do any counting, and that involves perceiving the similarity between one object and another.
Robyn Williams: Yes, isn't it interesting that science really does work, however mad it seems, and in physics there has been madness. And even though some of the experiments have shown the standard model in physics to be kind of right, there are still massive contradictions. But a few weeks ago we had a portrait of Alan Turing, and the person presenting that program, Sharon Carleton, showed that even with numbers, like one and one is two, or two and two is four, Russell and Whitehead spent about 200 pages in their great work trying to get the proof to that simple sum organised. So if you actually look at what is certain in knowledge, you're really struggling, aren't you, it's extraordinary.
Michael Frayn: What Russell and Whitehead were trying to do was to demonstrate that the roots of mathematics are in logic and that mathematics can be reduced to certain logical principles, and they came up against certain paradoxes, very difficult to give a complete...and in fact it turns out impossible to give a complete account of any system. Any system turns out to be theoretically incomplete.
But philosophers over the years have been searching for this kind of certainty. I suppose the thing everyone was after, the model that everyone had in mind, was the syllogism, because in the syllogism everything seems to be open and shut. You've got your premises and the conclusion follows from them absolutely and you don't need to have any knowledge of the world, go out and measure things and examine things. If you know the premises, you know the conclusion.
And it seems to me this is an ignis fatuus, this is a false model. It's not a model that can be applied to our understanding of the world in general, which is completely different and does involve looking at things and trying to make sense of them. And however precise the instruments you've got for looking at the world, there is always room for interpretation and there is always room for argument about what the evidence is proving.
Robyn Williams: Yes, that's not to denigrate science or knowledge, it's simply to show that it's conditional.
Michael Frayn: Not in any way to denigrate science. Science is the greatest human achievement, and it is absolutely astonishing. I mean, if you begin to think about it for a moment, the way that human beings have observed and reasoned, have observed what they can observe around them, which is quite a limited range of phenomena, and have reasoned from that their way back to billions of years earlier and billions of years in the future and billions of miles out into space beyond what they can actually observe, it is the most extraordinary and phenomenal construction of thought. And believe me, I'm not attempting to breathe on this amazing construction, just to demonstrate that it is even more amazing, I think, than a lot of scientists will admit, that it does involve the participation of human beings, it does involve the human imagination, it does involve something that comes out of human beings which is their contribution to the structure of the universe.
Robyn Williams: You of course trained in philosophy, you read it at Cambridge. How do you keep up with science itself? Do you read books on a regular basis, or do you just remember things?
Michael Frayn: My memory is extremely poor. I wouldn't for a moment claim to keep up with science. I am not in any sense a scientist, I have almost no understanding, and as Feynman said, who made enormous efforts to explain physics to laymen, but he said, all the same, explaining physics to someone who doesn't have mathematics (and I don't) is like trying to explain the music to the tone deaf, there is no way you can do it. So I am forever excluded from this magic garden.
Robyn Williams: Yes, but you write with immense detail and depth in many of your works, not least Copenhagen the play and, as I said, The Human Touch. You must bone up pretty thoroughly.
Michael Frayn: Yes, I certainly do, and the only saviour for me is that a great many wonderful science writers for the layman, including a lot of the scientists themselves, Feynman among them, they have tried to make science as comprehensible as it ever can be to the outsider. And I certainly have read a lot of their work. Often understanding that is very difficult. Thank God there are science writers and scientists who are prepared to do that.
Robyn Williams: The great thing about Feynman, apart from the fact he liked playing the bongos, was he did some of his best work in topless bars, and had a great sense of humour. You have gone from the farce, Skios, Noises Off, the play, which has been revived quite recently, to very deep and philosophical plays such as Copenhagen. Do you have a mood that takes you to the fun writing, having done the deeply serious writing, or does it not have a pattern?
Michael Frayn: Well, ideas just come, and sometimes they're for serious things and sometimes they are for less serious things. This seems to me reasonable in that the life in which we are all involved is sometimes serious, sometimes very painful, sometimes ridiculous. I don't see why all aspects of it shouldn't be represented in novels and plays.
I have to say that even in some of the comic stuff, even in Skios there is a reference, once again, to this fundamental difficulty; is the world, objective reality out there, are we contributing, by our own inventions, but contributing to the structure of reality? It seems to me we are and it seems to me that human beings, out of their own initiative, out of their own inventions, have been responsible for shaping a lot of the world in which we live.
Robyn Williams: Certainly. And the ending of Skios, I needn't tell you, if you haven't read the wonderful book already, the farce is glorious, the embarrassment supreme, and towards the end you think which way is it going to go? And you give us two endings...well, you give us one and a half, you choose one for us. But you take us almost to the multi-universe where one thing could be happening and then another. Was that intentional?
Michael Frayn: I don't know about multi-universe. But the book makes a prediction at some point, having set all the elements up, of what is likely to happen, are they all likely to interact, and then demonstrates that some absolutely random outside event, some just passing fancy in some other person's head can throw the whole thing off kilter and abort the expected ending and change events completely.
Robyn Williams: It goes in a completely different direction. And of course the figure of Athena looking down on what we loosely call civilisation with a serene look on her brow. What point will you making then about the ways in which we've reached the zenith of humankind?
Michael Frayn: Well, the Fred Toppler Foundation where all this takes place is devoted to propagating the values of European civilisation, and Athena is not only, as everyone knows, the goddess of wisdom, but the goddess of civilisation. And she, in her turn, having come back serenely from the classical world, apparently a wiser figure, gets involved in the chaos.
Robyn Williams: And as Athena contemplates the farcical end of civilisation and we all blunder and dither to oblivion, despite the wonders that science can promise, we bid farewell to Michael Frayn. His novel is Skios, a total hoot, and we hope that he and his equally brilliant wife, Claire Tomalin, can make it to the Sydney Writers' Festival next year, she to talk about Charles Dickens, her latest biography.
The Science Show is produced by David Fisher and David Lawford. I'm Robyn Williams, and next week, volcanoes and turtles.
The Firebird by Igor Stravinsky
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulezz
- Robyn Williams
- David Fisher