My eyes might not have rolled, but they certainly narrowed in scepticism. In a promotional video from 2016, he expressed his hopes that musicians might be able to give him insights into quantum mechanics: If you take people who have strong intuition, for example, in waves and wave behaviour, like musicians, will they be able to bring in an extra insight? Can their professional knowledge about waves – the kind of knowledge that a musician has – can that also be used in quantum research? I thought it was a very nice outreach project. The Quantum Music project combined a piano with these quantum sounds to produce strange but beautiful music unlike anything I’d heard before. The quantum properties of the atoms, such as how they interact with one another, determine the frequencies of sound waves that can propagate in the BEC. These same types of vibrations in the air produce the sounds we hear. One aspect that can be studied with a BEC is quantum acoustics – the behaviour of oscillations and vibrations in the cloud. Studying BECs is a way of examining the consequences of quantum mechanics on a larger scale than is typically possible. At this low temperature, the microscopic quantum properties of the individual particles can all be treated collectively as a single, macroscopic quantum entity. This is a cloud of atoms that have been cooled down to just above absolute zero. They developed a device that attaches to each key of a piano so that, when the pianist plays, the information is piped to a computer and synthesiser, which plays ‘quantum’ tones in addition to the familiar reverberations in the piano.Īmong the tones used are those that represent a very quantum object: a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). In the Quantum Music project, physicists and musicians worked together to unite ‘the mysterious worlds of quantum physics and music for the first time’. But coming from Klaus Mølmer it was intriguing. If I hadn’t first heard of Quantum Music from a well-respected physicist, I would have scoffed the same way I did at the other ridiculous uses of the word. It’s used to describe homeopathy, dishwasher detergents and deodorant. As a quantum physicist, I’ve developed a reflexive eyeroll upon hearing the word applied to anything outside of physics. For this reason, the word ‘quantum’ has become shorthand for anything powerful or mystical, whether or not it has anything whatsoever to do with quantum mechanics. Read more about heat leaping across the quantum vacuum of space.Quantum physics is weird and counterintuitive. ![]() At a small enough scale, the researchers found, heat can cross a vacuum by jumping from one fluctuation to the next across the apparently empty space. ![]() Instead, they're full of tiny, random fluctuations that pop into and out of existence. In a 2019 experiment, physicists took advantage of the fact that at the quantum scale, vacuums aren't truly empty. (That's what happens when you turn the heater on in your car, flooding the interior with warm air.) So without radiation, heat can't cross a vacuum.īut quantum physics, as usual, breaks the rules. (Wrap your hands around a warm cup of tea to feel this effect.) Second, a warm fluid can displace a colder fluid. (That's what you're feeling when the sun's rays cross space to beat on your face on a summer day.) Otherwise, in standard physical models, heat moves in two manners: First, energized particles can knock into other particles and transfer their energy. Under normal circumstances, heat can cross a vacuum in only one manner: in the form of radiation. (Image credit: Violet Carter, UC Berkeley) The difficulty is that no one's ever made a quantum computer fast enough to take advantage of those theoretical advantages - or at least no one had, until Google's feat this year.Ī photo shows the experimental device that allowed heat to cross empty space. ![]() They can easily break classical encryption schemes, send perfectly encrypted messages, run some simulations faster than classical computers can and generally solve hard problems very easily. In theory, that quality gives these machines certain advantages over classical computers. Quantum computers rely on strange small-scale physical effects like entanglement, as well as certain basic uncertainties in the nano-universe, to perform their calculations. Google's quantum supremacy claim, if borne out, would mark an inflection point in the history of computing. ![]() (The category of classical computers includes any machine that relies on regular old 1s and 0s, such as the device you're using to read this article.) If one quantum news item from 2019 makes the history books, it will probably be a big announcement that came from Google: The tech company announced that it had achieved " quantum supremacy." That's a fancy way of saying that Google had built a computer that could perform certain tasks faster than any classical computer could.
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