We challenged seven physics experts to explain quantum computing to the rest of us, in the time it took Justin Trudeau to do so-35 seconds.

( Mr. Trudeau explained it correctly in 35 seconds)

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ont. last week and offered his explanation for how a quantum computer works,  it sparked intense media coverage from around the world.  It also led to a backlash over whether Trudeau really knew anything about the cutting-edge technology, or was just pretending.

But what happens when experts in quantum computing themselves are asked to explain the technology to a lay audience in 35 seconds, the time Trudeau took to give his explanation? “This is something that cannot be explained well in 35 seconds,” says Aephraim Steinberg, a professor of physics at the University of Toronto and member of the Centre for Quantum Information and Quantum Control. But Steinberg—and a half-dozen other experts from across North America—were willing to step up to our challenge and give it a try.

Justin Trudeau

Prime Minister of Canada, and hardly an expert

Justin Trudeau

“Normal computers work, either there’s power going through a wire or not. It’s 1 or a 0. They’re binary systems. What quantum states allow for is much more complex information to be encoded into a single bit. A regular computer bit is either a 1 or 0—on or off. A quantum state can be much more complex than that because as we know, things can be both particle and wave at the same time and the uncertainty around quantum states allows us to encode more information into a much smaller computer. That’s what exciting about quantum computing.”

Barry Sanders

Director of the Institute for Quantum Information Science at the University of Calgary

Barry Sanders

“A quantum computer is essentially just a computer, but it exploits the quantum capability of parallelism in order to solve certain problems much much faster than could be done without exploiting this capability. This quantum capability of parallelism is about running all possible cases of the problem at the same time. This advantage is particularly noticeable for the factorization problem, which has enormous ramification for secure communication.”

Krysta Svore

Senior researcher and research manager of the Quantum Architectures and Computation Group at Microsoft Research

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Krysta Svore

“Quantum computers go beyond the most powerful supercomputer by harnessing quantum effects in order to speed up calculations. They will take us far beyond what is possible today by accelerating computations that take longer than the lifetime of the universe on a supercomputer into quantum computations that take mere hours or days. With a quantum computer, we hope to find a more efficient way to produce artificial fertilizer, having direct impact on food production around the world, and we hope to combat global warming by learning how to efficiently extract carbon dioxide from the environment. Quantum computers promise to truly transform our world.”

Scott Aaronson

Associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Scott Aaronson

A quantum computer is a proposed device that exploits quantum mechanics to solve certain specific problems like factoring huge numbers much faster than we know how to solve them with any existing computer. Quantum mechanics has been the basic framework of physics since the 1920s. It’s a generalization of the rules of probability themselves. From day to day life, you’d never talk about a minus-20 per cent chance of something happening, but quantum mechanics is based on numbers called amplitudes, which can be positive or negative or even complex numbers. The goal in quantum computing is to choreograph things so that some paths leading to a wrong answer have positive amplitudes and others have negative amplitudes, so on the whole they cancel out and the wrong answer is not observed.

Davide Venturelli

Research scientist at NASA Ames Research Centre

Davide Venturelli

“When you look at how nature behaves at the nanoscale, a lot of things that happen are very weird: atoms can be in two positions at once, they can have entanglement. The idea of quantum computing is to use physics to do math, so use all these properties of the nanoscale to do information processing, faster than digital computers. We are trying to create a quantum computer, which is a programmable device where we can use all these effects on-demand to tailor physics experiments, with atoms, lasers or solid state circuits, that perform algorithms for the solutions of mathematical problems.”

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posted by f.sheikh

(Shared by Sohail Rizvi)

When I was a student I was enjoined to reject the “Cleopatra’s Nose” theory of history, so called after Pascal’s remark in the Pensées : “Cleopatra’s nose: if it had been shorter, everything in the world would have changed.”1 The intent was not to dismiss biography as a way into the structuring of a historical narrative, but to reject the idea that the properties, ideas, or actions of some particular person were the necessary conditions for the unfolding of events in the world. If Josef Djugashvili had never been born, someone else could have been Stalin.

Despite this injunction, a remarkable amount of the history of science has been written through the medium of biographies of “great” scientists to whose brilliant discoveries we owe our understanding of the material world, and this historical methodology has reinforced the common notion that history is made by outstanding individuals. No respectable historian would claim that if Newton had never been born we would still be ignorant about gravitation. Yet we still refer to the regularities of the behavior of physical bodies as “Newton’s Laws,” the general regularities of simple inheritance as “Mendelism,” and the science of biological evolution as “Darwinism.” Even the famous history of science written by the Marxist J.D. Bernal is a recounting of the discoveries and inventions of individuals.

It would be wrong to say that biography is the sole, or even principal, present pathway into an understanding of the history of science. Certainly since Robert Merton’s founding of modern studies of the sociology of science in his 1938 work on seventeenth-century English science,2 the social milieu in which the problems of science arise and the institutional structure of scientific investigation have been central to our understanding of the history of scientific work. There are, however, occasions on which there are orgies of idolatrous celebrations of the lives of famous men, when the Suetonian ideal of history as biography overwhelms us. For Darwinians, 2009 is such a year.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/05/28/why-darwin-2/

Cyber illusionist Marco Tempest uses technology to “invent the impossible.” His unique blend of science, tech, and magic creates one-of-a-kind experiences—most recently, a dancing swarm of twenty-four drones. The power of his illusions comes from the way they tease our imaginations into believing that we are seeing something just beyond what we think we know can be real. As Marco puts it, “Magic makes possible today what science will make tomorrow”.

His interest in technology has inspired several hit talks at TED, and his creative approach is instructive for both aspiring magicians and those of us whose daily lives are firmly grounded in reality. His work reveals the power of persuasion and the value of keeping your imagination open to any inspiration.

In order to create a successful illusion, Marco emphasizes the importance of creating a believable story for the audience. “Once that story is embedded in the mind it’s difficult to change, and that makes it difficult for the audience to discover the secret of the trick,” he explains. “Magic, at its core, is about storytelling.

“Every magician will tell you about spectators they have met who have told them about the tricks that other magicians have performed. And all those tricks seem utterly impossible. That’s because the way the stories have been remembered, with all the vital details missing, they are impossible. The magician created a story that is difficult to unpick. Magicians are unreliable narrators, and audiences equally unreliable witnesses. But that’s what makes the magic a moment to remember.”

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(Shared by Syed Naqvi Sahib)

Can you fly an iPhone to the stars?

In an attempt to leapfrog the planets and vault into the interstellar age, a bevy of scientists and other luminaries from Silicon Valley and beyond, led by Yuri Milner, a Russian philanthropist and Internet entrepreneur, announced a plan on Tuesday to send a fleet of robot spacecraft no bigger than iPhones to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system, 4.37 light-years away.

If it all worked out — a cosmically big “if” that would occur decades and perhaps $10 billion from now — a rocket would deliver a “mother ship” carrying a thousand or so small probes to space. Once in orbit, the probes would unfold thin sails and then, propelled by powerful laser beams from Earth, set off one by one like a flock of migrating butterflies across the universe.

Within two minutes, the probes would be more than 600,000 miles from home — as far as the lasers could maintain a tight beam — and moving at a fifth of the speed of light. But it would still take 20 years for them to get to Alpha Centauri. Those that survived would zip past the star system, making measurements and beaming pictures back to Earth.

Much of this plan is probably half a lifetime away. Mr. Milner and his colleagues estimate that it could take 20 years to get the mission off the ground and into the heavens, 20 years to get to Alpha Centauri and another four years for the word from outer space to come home. And there is still the matter of attracting billions of dollars to pay for it.

“I think you and I will be happy to see the launch,” Mr. Milner, 54, said in an interview, adding that progress in medicine and longevity would determine whether he would live to see the results.

“We came to the conclusion it can be done: interstellar travel,” Mr. Milner said. He announced the project, called Breakthrough Starshot, in a news conference in New York on Tuesday, 55 years after Yuri Gagarin — for whom Mr. Milner is named — became the first human in space.

The English cosmologist and author Stephen Hawking is one of three members of the board of directors for the mission, along with Mr. Milner and Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder.