Our Quantum Future: Module 1 - Introduction & Quantum Basics

hi everybody I'm Peter dadus Welcome to our course on our Quantum future how Quantum Tech will impact our world and I'm here with my dear friend Jack hit who is the expert in this field is going to be teaching this course and I'm here to be your eyes and ears and ask the questions that you might want to ask of him so let me introduce Jack so Jack is a successful serial entrepreneur he established his first company earthweb dice as a company that he ultimately took public uh he then LED his company through t 12

quarters as a public company which is extraordinary uh the company is now on New York Stock Exchange Jack currently leads Ai and Quantum Quantum group at alphabet X formerly known as Google X Jack focuses on both the foundations of AI and the applications of AI in the real world so he's also the co-author of numerous Publications on AI and Quantum Computing he is the author of this new book amazingly Quantum Computing and applied approach we'll talk about what's in this in a little bit so Jack uh let's jump in it's great to have you here

pal you've outlined four modules that we're going to go through individual Parts uh the first on the introduction of quantum and the quantum Basics uh which is probably the level that I remember from my Quantum courses back at MIT and then uh Quantum sensing Quantum Communications and then we'll dive into uh what you defined as part one and part two of computing Sciences so let me turn over to you and uh let's jump in sure so so Peter I think yeah to start off why don't we go back and let's recap quantum mechanics itself because

I think that the three modules that we're going to go through Quantum sensing Quantum Communications and Quantum Computing are going to make a whole lot more sense uh to us and everyone viewing this uh as we go through uh understanding these core fundamentals and these are really surprising kinds of things about our world if you recall back from your college days uh what's interesting is that in the year 1900 box Plank and Albert Einstein and all the scientists of the time were faced with the reality of Crisis there were things they were they were seeing

in their measurements that did not make sense with the classical Theory they had from Isaac Newton the theory that held us going for 200 250 years just wasn't Jing with experiment and so it forced a crisis yeah that's a crisis and so it forced a new Theory to be born MOX blank started that revolution in a talk that he gave in a paper that he wrote up about that in the year 1900 Albert Einstein followed through in 1905 his honest morales's miracle year we had four Blockbuster papers we should all aspire to have one of

those Pap how uh he was about uh 29 about 30 years old at the time and he had this honest Moralis in fact he got the Nobel Prize his Nobel Prize not for the special Theory relativity not for the general theory of relativity not for anything in relativity which is what often he's associated with but actually his 1905 paper that helped establish the foundations of quantum mechanics itself the paper on the photo El electric effect this one of the crises that that physicist had at the time was how is it that we have photons coming

down from the Sun or from a light source impinging on a piece of metal and getting one of those electrons to bounce out of its place the photoelectric effect that is the basis of solar panels today and so many other types of phenomenon this was a big conundrum and puzzlement and sure enough Einstein building on what MOX plank did in 1900 explained it using what now we call quantum mechanics amazing and so let's now go through and talk about some of these Core Concepts so the whole world of computing that you and I are familiar

with that we grew up in we were born in we call classical Computing classical Computing so anything that's not Quantum let's just call it classical right and so we're in the upper leftand quadrant today that's been the since 1950 the earliest really digital computers till today we're in the upper leftand quadrant of this chart right here classical data what I mean by classical sensors is stuff coming from EKGs from you know from brain scans from all kinds of different sensors that we can get and then we process it on an Intel chip and AMD chip

a chip that's in our phones and our laptops and our big cloud servers our supercomputers all these are classical we take analog signal and turn into ones and zeros right it'll take any kind of signal analog digital make sure it's ones and zeros and then process it in what we know today as programming languages on a processor with a CPU and memory and hard drives and all the stuff that we know today uh and that is the realm that we've all lived in for the past 70 years but we're now about to enter the lower

right hand quadrant this QQ quadrant a quadrant where two new Innovations are coming together new kinds of sensors these Quantum sensors we'll be talking about that in a minute and then most importantly the ability to process information in on a quantum mechanical Computing device a device that was conceived of years ago and we'll talk about the birth of this idea and now you and I Peter are living in the moment where in the last few years labs and companies around the world have actually built these I mean really is this moment Ian this is it

was just recently a team at Google announced Quantum Supremacy which is extraordinary it is and we'll describe you'll describe what that means we'll describe we'll describe exactly what that means this is a a Sputnik moment yeah this is a Sputnik moment in the Computing world and it's really exciting to be living and to be with uh so many exciting other researchers and companies in the space so that really precipitated my writing this book because were there books about Quantum Computing sure there are a number of great books about Quantum Computing but Peter these were written

10 15 20 years ago before this very moment where we actually have these incipient devices that we can actually program and run and so there was a a need for a updated book that actually took all the theory and understanding from the past 20 30 years and built on that to offer people the ability to actually program code and understand the applications of this kind of computer so let's look at this before we get into the all the science and the details how are people going to use this and are people going to use this

well the world economic Forum the folks who create the Davos conference every year they went out to the CIO CTO of the global 1000 companies and interviewed them and surveyed them and said hey over the next three years between 2019 and 2022 How likely are you to adopt this series of Technologies and they were asking about cloud computing and mobile and iot and the the usual things that we talk about but sure enough in that list is quantum Computing and to my surprise Quantum Computing came came out at 36% now if you would asked me

intuitively I would probably have guessed that CTO caos might have said maybe 5% of them or 10% of them might say they're going to adop qu Computing but the word is getting out articles are being written in the business press certainly and I think soon maybe the popular press and books are coming out more materials are coming out so CTO and cosos are beginning to see that this has Enterprise applications and today in the course of our segment today Peter we'll talk about what those applications are for these large trillion dollar Industries so today Peter

we're going to go through Three core pillars of the quantum information Sciences area so qis Quantum information Sciences that's our big topic today we're going to drill into Computing sensing and communication we'll spend most of the time on Computing but before we do that we'll kind of take a quick tour of the land of sensing and the land of communications before we get to our final destination in Computing I love it love it cool so as we kind of tour this General space we can see from this particular chart here and first really focus on

the horizontal axis on the bottom and you see what does that say that's the number of cubits that you can actually address and control in a system so one cubit 10 cubits 100 cubits maybe up to a million or 10 million cubits and you what you can see from this chart which is so interesting is that while Quantum Computing in two blue clouds that you see there let's talk about the left blue cloud yes we're in that regime right now we're in that period right now where we can control 50 to 100 cubits individually and

address them and manipulate them and read them off you know after that so that's the first blue cloud on the left we're in that in that space right now but notice that Quantum communication and Quantum sensing need far fewer cubits they need between one and maybe 20 cubits we certainly can do that today so while Quantum Computing gets a lot of the headlines out there actually I'd like today for you and I to put a bit of Spotlight on these two other pillars of quantum sensing and communication because actually they're even more near term amazing

okay so before we dive in we talked about Albert Einstein a little bit and how he was there literally one of the founders of quantum mechanics itself the whole idea that the world is not necessarily continuous in all its phenomenon but maybe discretized and thus the word Quantum from Latin Quantum how much right and so how much I.E a unit a specific unit so it turns out that electrons uh running around a nucleus of an atom cannot be anywhere in distance from that nucleus but they have to be in discrete orbitals or levels of energy

away from that nucleus so that's an example of a Quantum phenomenon it's not continuous it is discretized in units of energy levels we say from the nucleus itself so that's an example of something that is discrete not continuous and Albert Einstein had a big hand to play in 19 1905 and subsequently informing what we know today as quantum mechanics yet here he is towards the end of his life now this is only three four years before he died he was inquired with a letter from one Daniel liin from uh New Jersey and uh asked him

a couple interesting questions about quantum mechanics Daniel's son Seth brought this letter to me this is a personal letter from Einstein to Seth's father and in it what does Einstein say he answers the question about quantum mechanics and then goes on to say this and I highlight this from the letter that you just saw that this theory of quantum mechanics reminds Einstein of a system of delusionary thought from a paranoia okay concocted in incoherent elements and so what does that mean that means that even Einstein himself Peter could not really Embrace ultimately the implications and

the weirdness of quantum mechanics it must have been so extraordinary because as scientists they were used to very very clearly defined uh rules and here comes something that makes no sense right intuitively it doesn't make sense yet it is the most tested Theory we've ever had in science it has been tested and retested and it makes predictions and those predictions are right and so we know this is true now just because our human minds are not really capable of wrapping ourselves fully around it doesn't mean it's not true and you in your courses constantly are

talking about how exponential thinking for example is very hard for the human mind to wrap itself around the old adage of the person who came to the king and did a wonderful thing and the King said take anything you need and I said he said I'll take one rice on the first square of my chessboard 64 Square chessboard I'll take double that two grains of rice on the second uh square of this chessboard and then we'll double from there and shff the King said oh of course you can have that I mean what's a few

grains of rice in My Kingdom but of course we now know that this was more rice than ever was produced you know in the history of humans and so so the fact is that exponential thinking is very hard for humans to think of and in an analogous way the quantum way of looking at the universe is also difficult now one of the things I think we may want to do and this is the subject of another video Peter one day would be to make actually do what happened to me due to unusual circumstances I actually

learned quantum mechanics before I learned Newtonian mechanics wow and so for me Quantum is my intellectual home it's where I grew up in and it's how I see the universe later I learned about Newtonian mechanics and the details thereof and I said okay I can see that but let me go back to Quantum because that's so part of it is also education just like we're doing here we're doing an educational seminar here today and you do so many educational seminars on exponential thinking which helps people break out of linear thinking so too I think we

need a revolution in the educational system that allows us to teach Quantum first and then this and how do I know that might be the case because I've taken my own nieces and nephews as guinea pigs and um with all eight of them I've trained them in Quantum before they got to know physics what age was this their kids now they're between seven and 17 right now and so this is a real-time experiment we'll see how it we'll come back and we'll give you an update but the fact is that this is something that I

think we may want to talk about in education so let's now go to the core principles of quantum mechanics so we can set the stage for the rest of our talks today does that make sense yeah let's do that superposition this is the first interesting aspect of quantum mechanics in the classical world we have what we call constancy and we also have the fact that measurement doesn't affect the object itself if we can use maybe the book uh perhaps as a prop over here and so we have this book and if you and I touch

the book weigh the book look at the book impinge light on the book have it bounce off to our eyes it's consistent it's consistent and it does not change the book itself right uh and so we do measurements on things in the classical world again by classical we just mean non-quantum right the pre-quantum world and it does not change the object itself and also if I put it behind me and we don't observe it for some period of time we assume it's still behind there right and so those are things that we're used to that

our intuition tells us about the classical world not so in the understanding that we have from quantum mechanics in quantum mechanics We Now understand that um when something is say for example at the sub Atomic level um it is not necessarily just in this one state and when you measure it nothing happens to it in fact measurement profoundly affects the state of that object and we'll see why that's so important in all the things that we'll talk about today and so how do we find this out well in 1801 100 years before even quantum mechanics

Thomas Young did an experiment called The Double SL experiment and everyone maybe it was that long ago it was it was 1801 yet he couldn't make sense of it what he find at that time time and for the next hundred years after that there was a a big controversy are phenomena that we see in nature particles or waves right is a photon uh which was not named until 1920 but say a a piece of light let's call it that a unit of light was it a a a wave or was it a particle was an

electron a wave or a particle right this was really unknown and it was a lot of going back and forth without going to a lot of details here's what the double slit says if I have an electron beam gun that shoots out electrons and I just shot them through one slit say in this two- slit experiment and it then hit a screen that is detecting those electrons on the other end what do I expect to happen well if it went through the left slit it would appear on the screen right behind the left slit if

it went through the right slit it would appear on the right slit and so that's what classical classically this is what our expectation bullets going through bullets going through you know a certain slit as well and so what we' expect it to appear if we're going to have randomly a a randomly shooting gun that goes left right right left some some kind of combination we'd expect to see a huge number of dots on the for the left and a huge number of dots on the right and nothing else but Peter that's not what we see

what Thomas Young saw and what people repeated again it again and I just recently built an interferometer to again show this you know just to show it to various colleagues nieces and nephews um is that we see a pattern of interference what does interference mean it means that that what we see is not just two bright lines we see that there are multiple lines of varying degrees of of strength of how many electrons hit and in fact we see areas of complete dead zones where there was interference and there's no pattern of electrons there at

all what does that mean that is the Hallmark of a wave at a particle that is something where if I had two waves we can put this back now if I had two waves that are in a wave pool and they were coming towards each other we know that if one of the peaks of one wave hit the peak of another wave they would even go higher constructive constructive interference if one Peak hit the trough of another destructive interference we get nothing as we see over here and then of course truff truff we get even

a deeper depression there but let's just take these two cases of you know the peak and the truff and that would explain the dead zones between these bands and the intense areas would be explained by Peak Peak right coming and truff truff coming so that actually would explain very well evidence for electrons in this case as a wave as a wave and more specifically that we now have repeated this experiment over the past 100 plus years with just one electron going through at a time and we still get this pattern what does that mean that

means that the electron itself was in a super position that is it was in a combination of states of left and right left slit right slit before it finally reached the screen when it was quote measured right and then it hit one of those areas so in fact something can be not just in one state or another it can be in some com combination of these states more specifically and more accurately what we say in physics is it's in an indeterminate state of super position until it's measured until it's measured and so often in the

popular press Peter you might read that something is in this and that some of that but actually it's more accurate for us to say that it's an indeterminate state of superposition than we measure it and it quote collapses to one state or another now for another time in another day we'll talk about the philosophical implications of how does our how does our universe collapse things and what does that mean and there's a whole body of interesting literature on that and are we living in an infinite number of universe exactly and Hugh Everett had something to

say about that in 1957 in his thesis and that is where we get the uh the many worlds hypothesis of Everett but we'll leave that to another day and now we'll go on to the next slide well we'll talk about Schrodinger's cat and how that how that exemplifies the idea of superposition so a lot of people have heard about Schrodinger's Cat and why did Schrodinger do this and what does it mean he wanted to show that even something of the subatomic world could have implications at the larger macro world that you and I exist in

and so what we have here is a cat in a box uh the cat hopefully is initially alive and in our Parliament today it's a little too um harsh to say dead and alive so I just say asleep and awake okay let's do that okay so initially the cat is awake and there's some kind of potion in that vial that you see there that will put a cat to sleep okay and just take a little nap for a while right Kindler gentler Kindler gentler schinger right okay he was a little harsh in the 1920s and

30s so we have a radioactive substance there say uranium or some kind of radioactive nucle and it's going to emit on some basis that is quantum right because radio nucleid as they Decay that is a Quantum phenomenon we can't predict it we don't know what's going to happen uh it's going to hit that lever and if it does hit that lever it's going to smack that potion and the cat will take a nap for a few hours and of course come back alive after that um so the fact is if we close this box up

and we can't observe it ourselves what happens to the cat and this is the idea of schroen cat that when we close that box and we don't know whether the radio nucle that uranium has decayed or not decayed has emitted or not emitted its radioactive emission to cause this to happen it's the cat is in a super position of awake and asleep so this was Shing when people hear about Shing cat I just want folks to relate it to to this idea of superposition um now let's go to and kind of foreshadow something we're going

to talk about later in Computing which is this idea of the quantum bit the Cubit okay so you and I very much know about bits bits short for binary digits could be a one or a zero a one or a zero and and that's a well understood idea if you and I are typing in a word processor we hit save where do those words go we take the word Peter diamantis those words and we translate it to ones and zeros and they get stored in transistors and memory in the actual computer in a series of

binary digits ones and zero bits binary digits bits ones and zeros so that's great but in the quantum world we have more possibilities we have the ability of having a Quantum bit or a qit and here we can have the possibility of some kind of system we'll talk about them in a little bit which can not only be a zero or one it can also be in a super position of 0 And1 just like the cat can be in a superposition of awake and asleep this new kind of bit this Q bit can be in

a superp position of some amount of zero and some amount of one and therefore we have a much wider computational canvas because now the actual unit of computation itself the Cubit is a much richer world than just one or zero and we're going to come back to this idea but let's now relate to entanglement so one special case of superposition Peter is the idea that two things can be in Tangled with each other what does that mean and this is one of the things that really irked Einstein okay it till the end of his days

he's like I don't like this spooky action at a distance and this spooky action at a distance B the speed of light exactly well it turns out it's not but but it turns out it's very very spooky nonetheless which is I can take two particles I can bring them close to each other I can perform a certain operation and then I can and to correlate them with each other in a certain special way such that even if I pull them far apart where you're on Earth and I'll go to Mars or I'll stay on Earth

and you go to Mars and I have one of the particles and you have the other one and I'll measure mine and automatically yours is now already put in a certain state so and as an example if we're correlated positively that is um when I measure something as up yours is going to be up that would be one kind of correlation in the graphic we have here it's a reverse correlation right inverse correlation so that when I measure mine as up you're going to measure yours immed immediately as down yours immediately is down uh I

know that for sure because we set it up in entanglement that is inversely correlated so think of entanglement as a special kind of quantum sense of correlation sure that's how we're going to think about that we're going to use that later on in our talks here today so Peter that's kind of a a summary of some of the Core Concepts of where do we get quantum mechanics to begin with this crisis in around the year 1850 to 1900 a number of crises that came about MOX plank Albert Einstein uh dck Schrodinger Heisenberg uh Neils Bor

all the key founders of the quantum mechanics field came together and developed this theory that we now know as quantum physics and then years later as we're about to see a number of theorists said wait a second I think we can use this for other kinds of applications including Quantum Computing and that's why superposition and intangent instead of just being theoretical things in a textbook have now become the reality of a new kind of computer fantastic I hope you've enjoyed this module one on our Quantum future as you can see Jack is a beautiful communicator

and a brilliant man and so if you stick with us into our next module we're going to go into the whole realm of quantum sensing and Quantum Communications ultimately now that we understand at least some of the basics what can you do with it how can you make use of it so please join us for module 2 SE a little bit