SIO356: Quantum Computers: How the Hell? No really

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:17 Thomas: And welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 356. I'm Thomas, and once again I am apologizing for a delay. A bunch of reasons. I can't tell you all of them. Really wish I could. I wish I can tell you every single reason. But just please rest assured that I'm doing my absolute best. I still have to get episodes out because it's how I live. So I will, but they'll be clumped here at the end of the month. I wanted to be...

I'm trying to get back to a regular thing, I promise. I thought I was going to to you this month, but we got some clumpage. Explain after the episode here. I don't want to bog down the beginning with a bunch of preamble. Here's what I'll say. Today's episode, as you may have seen probably from the title, is about quantum computing. And I'm splitting this into two parts. One is a lot of the basics.

I have to warn you, if you are an expert in like just normal computers, you may your tear your hair out at how much, not only me, but also my guests realized that we didn't know about like, you think, you know, what goes on in a computer and, and, you know, I'm, I'm a pretty nerdy guy. I like computers, built computers.

I'm interested in this stuff, but even still, I realized like, oh wait, when push comes to shove, I thought I knew some of this stuff off the top of my head. And I didn't, I didn't. So we, we you squirmed around a little bit in terms of trying to figure out the classical computer equivalent of some stuff and what was going on. So apologies for that.

I will warn you if you're an expert in that and you're prone to being frustrated when people probably don't get something, put on a hat and then you maybe won't tear off your hair or something. I don't know. It's not a big deal. I just, it was funny in retrospect upon editing. But here's the other thing I want to say. After this part one, I'm I'm going to talk to you because I've become obsessed with this topic.

It's one of the explanations for why this episode is late. I also have a bunch of things to tell you. So tune in after. I'm gonna break this into two parts. After part one here, I've got just a bunch of stuff I want to tell you. And that's all I'll say. A bunch of stuff about the delay, quantum computing. But in the meantime, please enjoy this delightful interview with Anne, who, by the way, had filled out my form on the website. That's how I found her.

So please, if you're an expert in something, got an expertise and you got a proposal for an episode to do here, please click on the link that I think is in the show notes and fill out that form. That's how I found Anne or Anne found me or whatever you want to say. That's how we became quantum entangled. Now, that's presumptuous. I won't say that. So here we go. One about quantum computers.

This is more on the kind of the base, some of the basics of how stuff works. And then part two is more about what's going on in the real world of quantum computing. Really fascinating stuff. You might be surprised too. There are a lot of really surprising things in the course of this entire interview. Really surprising takeaways that that I definitely didn't know and I'm super happy to know now. So here you go.

Let's get over to the interview, but I'll see you after for a bunch of things that I have to say. I am joined mysteriously by Anne. That's all you'll tell me. Apparently you'll have to kill me. I don't know. How's it going today, Anne?

0:03:16 Anne: Going well. It's been a fun day. How about you?

0:03:19 Thomas: Yeah, same. Hurricane force wins. We'll see if this recording keeps going. There's, I'll tell you, I don't believe in anything, but if I did, I would say something's trying to stop us from recording. There's been every force, including children, which is the greatest force of all, the most powerful force in terms of stopping recordings. But no, we're pushing through. We're prevailing. I'm really excited to speak to you.

0:03:40 Anne: Likewise. I've been looking forward to this.

0:03:43 Thomas: Awesome. Well, why don't you tell folks what you can about, what is it? Could you tell folks your, you know, expertise, qualifications, what you do, anything that you think you can?

0:03:54 Anne: So I'm a physicist. Guess you would say a quantum physicist. For the government, so, I'm your standard government stooge. It is a fun world to be in. Opinion, it's certainly better than academia because I actually get to spend most of my day doing science and not writing grants. So

0:04:04 Thomas: Oh, wow. All right. A little trash talk for the academics who come on the show. It's okay. We start a rivalry. I like it. Well, I love it. Was super excited. You were one of the many amazing people who took the time to kind of fill out the form and do a proposal for an episode. And I saw yours, and it's, you're Ant-Man, basically. I think is the technical term for it. You're exactly Ant-Man. Is that right?

0:04:22 Anne: Yeah, that's right.

0:04:37 Anne: Only saw one of those movies.

0:04:38 Thomas: I, that's so funny, I'm normally the person who hasn't seen him, but no, he's Ant-Man's the superhero, it's all quantum, it's just always the point is movies, they just say quantum and then it solves everything, and you're the person who actually, you know, probably knows why none of that makes sense. Is that fair to say? Yeah.

0:04:55 Anne: This happens a lot in my job. Will say quantum, and a lot of people will assume that will solve all their problems.

0:05:00 Thomas: Yeah. So.

0:05:02 Anne: And then there's a handful of us that have to sit in a room and go, oh, how do we do that?

0:05:10 Thomas: Um, it's not actually a magic get out of jail free word for anything you want to accomplish. Do you have to tell a lot of people that? That must be a bummer.

0:05:17 Anne: The Time. Have a thing that we say, we call it the quantum winter, which is this like fear of when the quantum buzzword dies down and then people like stop throwing money at it and then there won't be jobs.

0:05:17 Thomas: Oh. Oh. Okay. I didn't think of it from that angle. Okay, that's the upside of it. You're like, yeah, no point, if you ever need some bullshit money, you're just like, yeah, well, here's the thing about quantum gravity field crystals, is it's gonna solve the tax loophole. I don't know, it's the budget, it's everything, you can just say everything. I met another quantum, quantum physicist one time, and I say, said this, and it's now what I say every time, which is, well, every single thing you watch must be annoying. Like every single movie, TV show, everything, or is this just my negative mindset? Maybe for you, you don't mind, but I would think it's got to be one of the most annoying jobs to have or fields of expertise to have, because every single movie is like, yeah, quantum. And then they say something completely stupid that's not real. Does that ever get old? It's

0:06:14 Anne: No, I, so I watched the show Quantum Leap. I really enjoyed that one, even though that's, it had nothing about quantum in it.

0:06:21 Thomas: The guy who's the self-help type guy who just does quantum bullshit everything. Do You ever hear? Yes.

0:06:26 Anne: Deepak Chopra.

0:06:27 Thomas: Yes. Divak Chopra. Does he call you a lot?

0:06:27 Anne: I his quotes in my presentations.

0:06:31 Thomas: That's, you have a favorite offhand?

0:06:35 Anne: Some it's like just gobbledygook about the observer effect. It's something about like how we don't have a reality until we observe it and showing that with a picture of Dr. Manhattan.

0:06:39 Thomas: Sure. Oh. There's one, there's a reference I kind of get, but only from the HBO series that was amazing that got canceled because we can't have good things. Um, but so, all that aside, uh, it's super cool to speak to you, and we're thinking maybe for this uh first recording that you could explain a bit about quantum, quantum computing to us, because quantum computing is something I'm sure, you know, listeners to my show have heard of likely. I've heard of it a lot. I'm had it explained a lot, I always forget exactly what it is and how it works. And I'm sure there's plenty of people who are like me and don't remember these things. So could you start us off, maybe with a bit, kind of a basics explainer, quantum computing 101, to

0:07:25 Anne: I think where I'd like to start is like know, just picture in your head a quantum computer and like you probably went to that, like that Google search, in of, you know, it, it looks like a rings of copper and it's got wires coming down and it, it looks really cool.

0:07:29 Thomas: Easy. Done. Oh, it worked.

0:07:43 Thomas: I'll be honest. I can't form a mental image of this because I don't know what it is. Okay, I'll tell you. My mental image of a quantum computer involves a lot of cold gases or whatever. When there's some science -y thing on TV and there's a lot cold, I think it's just the, what's dry ice. I'm picturing the dry ice smoke, and that's cooling everything. That's all I got. That'S the best I can do.

0:07:58 Anne: Yeah. And that's exactly it. Like that, that picture of a quantum computer is just a picture of a fridge.

0:08:14 Thomas: That's what I'm imagining. How close am I?

0:08:16 Anne: Close. Yeah. So anyone who does like a Google search image of computer, you will see this picture. And it's a dill fridge, a refrigerator. And reason for that is that the biggest players in the quantum computing world are doing superconducting qubits. And everything is kept at a very, very cold temperature. Literature.

0:08:37 Thomas: Right. Also, Also, that's my new go -to insult. You fucking dill fridge. All right. Get on over here.

0:08:42 Anne: That's a good one.

0:08:43 Thomas: Look at this dill bridge. You got this thing. That aside. So I was kind of right. So it's, it's one of those things where you got to have everything be super cold because what? Something, it doesn't work if if it's not?

0:08:55 Anne: That is just one type. Qubit is actually very term. Are lots of different ways to have qubits. It's just that the biggest players in quantum computing are the ones who do superconducting qubits, so they are the the ones who get the search image on Google, which I believe includes Google, is pretty highly invested in the superconducting qubit world. Yeah.

0:09:15 Thomas: Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Qubit. I know what a bit is. That's a one or a zero. That's like in basic terms, you know, that's basically something that can be a one or a 0 and you add up a bazillion of those and you do different functions with them and it's super cool and that's computing. But what's a qubit? How does that, how does that work exactly?

0:09:34 Anne: Yeah, so I to think of things in pictures. So if you imagine like, you know, one and a zero is an arrow that has an up and a down, if you look at it from the top, it looks like just a dot. What happens when when you have something that can be in a superposition, so can have a value in one thing that you're interested in, like say you are interested in something's position, it's, you complementary part of that thing, like, say, its momentum is then kind of fuzzy.

0:09:43 Thomas: Okay, sure. All right. Okay.

0:10:11 Anne: Don't really know.

0:10:11 Thomas: Okay, so is this uncertainty principle kind of thing?

0:10:14 Anne: So, for like a qubit, um, and so the, sort of necessarily qubits, but, but the things that I, I care about the most in my world are photons. So that's what I'm going to use for my example here is like, I can have something that is horizontally polarized or vertically polarized, and I can, you know, put it through a beam splitter and I can measure. I get horizontal photons over here, I get vertical photons over there.

0:10:24 Thomas: Okay. Hmm.

0:10:41 Anne: But if I measure with a 45 degree angle change to that, horizontal is now half one state and half the other state.

0:10:42 Thomas: Oh.

0:10:54 Thomas: This is, I'm not sure I follow that, you're okay

0:10:57 Anne: Me try a different example on you. Let's think of a single single photon of light and It's going through a beam splitter that has a 50% chance of making it go up or of reflecting it or having it go straight.

0:11:04 Thomas: Okay.

0:11:17 Thomas: Okay, and if it goes straight the cat dies, and if it reflects that the cat, no, I'm adding cat, the cats help But no, we won't add the cats if you don't want to, there

0:11:23 Anne: We actually do call these Schrodinger cat states.

0:11:28 Thomas: We go, okay.

0:11:29 Anne: Yeah. So yeah, you can think about it that way. Um, Straight The cat dies and If it goes up, the cat lives and

0:11:29 Thomas: All Right. Okay. And The whole Strodinger thing was, we can't, we don't know, or we can t know, or it's both, right? Something like that, yeah.

0:11:42 Anne: His whole point was to point out that this is ridiculous and Could never be true. His goal here, and now we all quote him, which And

0:11:45 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Which Has got to be one of the cooler ways to be like known for something, like, "guys, you don't understand, it's so fucking dumb, the cat would be both alive and dead," and everyone's like, "whoa, wait a minute, the cat is both alive in debt," no, you're not, that, that's fun, I would, if I made a discovery it would be that, like, it would me complaining about something, I mean like, "this is fucking stupid guys," and then they'd be like, "no, you've accidentally made a brilliant discovery." That would be it.

0:12:14 Anne: Not to get too off track, but if you look up Poisson dot there

0:12:19 Thomas: Couldn't look that up because that wasn't words. What is the word?

0:12:23 Anne: It's a man's name, Poisson, and Has something similar, where there is, there's a phenomenon named after him, not because he discovered it, but because a student did, and he complained and called that student stupid, the student proved him wrong And Now it's named after himself, yeah.

0:12:25 Thomas: Oh, oh, oh. Okay. Oh, wow. Oh wait. It's named after the teacher still? Oh, that sucks. What was the thing? Is it too much of a digression?

0:12:41 Anne: It's Admit it's, uh, a light distribution that You get a Poisson spot, yeah.

0:12:47 Thomas: Oh okay. Gotcha. This poor student though. Why is it named after him or her?

0:12:54 Anne: That Is the plight of students. This was like the 1800s. I'm pretty sure it wasn't him.

0:12:55 Thomas: Oh. Oh okay I didn't. Gotcha yeah I know.

0:13:00 Anne: Things are a little bit better now. Not much, but they're a little Bit better.

0:13:03 Thomas: But the cat is, uh, you're talking, so if it's vertical horse, oh man, this is, this sucks, I'm actually not a visual mind, visual person, and it sounds like you are, but I'll do my best.

0:13:08 Anne: Yeah. Yeah, if you have, depending on the path the photon takes, know we it's going to take one because it has to be somewhere. It's just which one did it take? Did it take, you know, straight or did it Take up? We find out is is if we put, you know, if we recombine the paths later. So we split the photon into two paths, and then we put it back into one path. We do that at just the right distance, we can see is that the photon will actually interfere with itself.

0:13:29 Thomas: Okay, okay.

0:13:48 Anne: From this experiment, what we see is that the proton is actually in both paths.

0:13:55 Thomas: At Once you're saying Until you So this is the kind of craziness, this is quantum craziness, where it's essentially everything we've we've heard about on the news, where it's like, like it's, it's two things at some point, but if you, you know, observe it by having one of those thingies, then you can pin it down, but then it's not, okay, I, I'll try to say I understand that.

0:13:56 Anne: Mm -hmm. Yep.

0:14:15 Anne: Think it's a very easy thing for people to understand, because humans are great at holding two contradictory ideas in our head at the same time. What's hard is proving it, or At least in my opinion. I think it is so hard. Think that it is just that it's hard to prove, you go a lot of prerequisites. But but I don't think they're they're actually that bad, so it's kind of like if you have, um, you know how if you have water waves and um, you slap your hands on the water in time with each other, and the waves will build on each other, you'll get a bigger wave, if you slap them out of time with each, then you will cancel them out, and you actually get small waves, yeah.

0:14:22 Thomas: Sure. Okay. Sure. Right. Yeah. I mean, this is audio, audio principles that I have to deal with in real life, you phase cancellation, all that kind of stuff, yep.

0:15:05 Anne: Exactly. So same exact thing happens with photons, the photons are in phase together, then they add up. And if they're out of phase with each other, they cancel out.

0:15:12 Thomas: Right. Right. But but in audio, the thing that doesn't happen is you observe it, and then it turns into like somehow an audio particle. That doesn't happened that I know of.

0:15:23 Anne: It kind of is an audio particle. That would be a phonon.

0:15:27 Thomas: I tell if you're making a brilliant joke or that's real. You're going to have to. Sorry, you're so out there in terms of science. You're gonna have to tell me when you're joking. I apologize.

0:15:35 Anne: Don't worry. I deal with a lot of contractors and they always laugh at what I say because they they have to. When it can always add, you add them or can cancel them out. If we take something that has a, you unit, the lowest quanta of what it is, we see that it still behaves like a wave. It'll still show that, you up or canceling out. The consequence of that is that the photon must have been in two places at the same time. And this isn't just photons. Like I said, this does happen with audio files. It happens with everything.

0:15:47 Thomas: Right. Really?

0:16:16 Anne: The whole world is quantum. Yeah, everything's Quantum. And that's kind of of the funny thing about quantum computing is that, um, computers that we are using and that are malfunctioning are all based on quantum mechanics too. They wouldn't work if quantum mechanics weren't true. Yep.

0:16:17 Thomas: Oh, OK. Right? Right. Because like quantum mechanics is just like, I don't know, a fact about the universe, right? So it's not like you can have a thing. It's not like you make a, an Intel chip. It'S like we've there's no quantum in here. We got we filtered out the quantum for several Brita filters of quantum out. And there's No. So but like, I guess the difference would be, is it explicitly making use of quantum weirdness to be really powerful, which is what my impression of what quantum computing in quotes is.

0:16:40 Anne: Yeah.

0:17:04 Anne: And it's something that is explicitly a quantum effect. It's not a macroscopic effect. Your whole point of getting into the quantum regime is usually to get into either levels of precision that you can't get if you're dealing with the macro world, or you want to take advantage of some quirky behavior like superposition, superposition, that in the regular world, while superposition happens all the time, you know, pretty much the whole world is measuring everything around us all the time. So we don't notice superposition.

0:17:12 Thomas: Right. Mm -hmm. -huh. So that's kind of blowing my mind. I never thought, I thought that this quantum stuff terms of the superposition, I felt that was explicitly some photon. I guess I've never thought about it. So what's, what is the audio equivalent of that? What is the like thing that are particle? I don't know. What is that thing that could be in two places at once for the audio audio version. My blown.

0:18:00 Anne: When you have any kind of, you, it is a different sort of wave. It's, you know, a compression wave when you're talking about audio. But if you really drill down into the atoms of the air, you have one atom interacting with another atom and know, um, I come from the world of condensed matter physics, so we like to model everything as being a wave because it's easier, so that, that's what we call like a phonon. Yeah, like everything's on. Yeah.

0:18:12 Thomas: Oh, okay. Uh -huh. Really? Oh, so that was real. You're finally telling me that was an actual thing. Okay. That's crazy. It's just because everything involves atoms and once you get down to a certain level of smallness, then you're talking quantum no matter what, right? That kind of it? Interesting. Okay, thought light was like a super unique thing because, you know, the speed of light and the relativity and the whatnot, like, I thought light was like especially weird. In Is it not really true?

0:18:30 Anne: Yep.

0:18:54 Anne: Well, so light's just, you radiation. So it's not any functionally different than, say, a radio wave. It's just smaller wavelength.

0:19:05 Thomas: Right, radio waves, sure, but but that's isn't that different than just like audio through a, you know, air medium kind?

0:19:12 Anne: Exactly it. It is that you have medium. Medium. So, oh man, if you really want to drill into the esoterics of it, you can have a, say your force in an atom that's interacting with another atom, like say an electron goes up one level and then falls down a level and that emits some weak force particle, which we like like to call a phonon, and that affects another atom. The people who do, you the esoteric thinking about the four fundamental forces of the universe have coupled weak forces together with electromagnetism. Effectively, at least as far as our equations go, it's the same thing, if that helps.

0:19:57 Thomas: Of, I'm so I'm thinking that this is going to be a struggle because I feel your knowledge is so specialized. I'm hoping we can find a way for, you know, rubes like me to keep up. I think I follow what you're saying, but I guess let's get back to our, um, quantum, our qubit thingy. So how, how are we using this? How are we using this weirdness or order to make a computer or a bit or

0:20:20 Anne: So, so a qubit is just something that can be in two different states, or it can be an a superposition of two states.

0:20:30 Thomas: One or zero, it could be in one or you could use it. It sounds like you could used it like a regular bit if needed, but also it could be like a one and a zero. So how does that help? Wouldn't that just be bad?

0:20:43 Anne: So, what this helps with, I, I think is the best example of this is Grover's algorithm. Not quite as famous Mrs. Shore's algorithm, but I think it's a little bit easier to wrap my head around.

0:20:56 Thomas: I know zero algorithms in a fame sense. I think your average person doesn't have like a famous algorithm they follow on Insta or anything. So explain to us these famous algorithms, I suppose.

0:21:08 Anne: Grover's algorithm, says is he looked at how you could take something that could be a one or a zero or a superposition of both, and how you, you could then use that, if that's encoding information, you could use the fact that it's in a superposition to search through that information faster than you could if it was just a one or a zero. So if it's just a 1 or a 0, and have, you know, 100 zeros, or say I have 99 zeros and I have one 1, and I want to find where the 1 is, I will have to, you know, check each bit as I go. So once I've checked 50 of my bits, I have a 50 % chance that I will have discovered the 1. I have qubits instead of that, I don't actually have to check half half of my bits in order to get a 50 % chance of

0:21:36 Thomas: Interesting. Okay.

0:21:50 Thomas: Hmm. OK. Hmm.

0:22:14 Anne: Finding the one, I can only check a square root of all of my bets, which would be 10, which is significantly fewer, which means it will go much faster.

0:22:28 Thomas: OK, this is the first first question. I love about this is this sounds like something I don't know. Grover was it was Grover Cleveland or somebody else. But it sounds like this is something someone could have figured out on paper like a long time ago. But when what is this? When is this from?

0:22:41 Anne: I don't know how old you are, but this is from 1996. So for a lot of people, this is a long time ago. And he did do it all on paper. This is all on paper.

0:22:47 Thomas: Yeah. Four years ago. Yeah, that. So that's cool. Cool. I love this stuff because it's like, that sounds like something you could, like 1996. Okay. In science terms, I think that's pretty recent in terms of, you know, because I have, terms of quantum physics and when all this stuff started to be figured out, my impression from actually previous episodes I've recorded is that's like early 1900s. They were already making some discoveries on that, right? Or maybe even earlier.

0:23:14 Anne: Yeah.

0:23:14 Thomas: So pretty new in that scale, but it's still cool that someone's probably figuring this out without any, being anywhere even close to having the practical technology available, which I always love. But someone could have thought of that hypothetical a long time ago, just like, okay, what if I could have a bit that could be a superposition? My other question though, is you gave the example of you're trying to find a bit that's a one. So you've got a hundred bits and 99 or zeros and one is a one, um, 99 bits and a one is one. And, uh, so when you bring up the quantum example and, and the, there's the third possibility that they're, that they're in a superposition, are you saying that now you have one that's in a superposition you're looking for, or you're utilizing the one, the bit that can be be in a superposition to look somehow I, what, which, which of those or something? Else, okay.

0:24:07 Anne: So the start and the end of life in a quantum computer is going to be as a bit, as either a one or a zero. You are going to input classical information in, and you're going to get classical information out. So, the superposition part only exists in terms that a a quantum computer can instead, like, you know, a regular computer can flip a bit from a one to a zero using all sorts of different gates. A quantum computer can flip from a zero to a one, you know, or a negative one or whatever we want, or it could do a superposition.

0:24:16 Thomas: Right.

0:24:46 Thomas: How does that, so, so, which, I guess I'm again I'm trying to go with the example of you got one, one, and 99 zeros, and you're somehow finding it by checking not 50 percent of them to get to 50 chance, but only 10 of them to get a 50 chance, if I understood you correctly, how, are you, what's the act of checking them then that's going on, or like, which bits are in superposition during that process, is, I guess, hmm.

0:25:11 Anne: So you do, like so for your classical example of whatever your bits of information could be encoding, this could be a particular name in a telephone book. You your answer and you're going to see is one my answer? Is two my answer is three my answer. And there's ways that you can speed this up. You can do a random search and it'll, it'll make it faster. Grover's algorithm algorithm does is it takes this answer and it makes a function so that if you apply the answer to a qubit, it will change the phase of that qubit. So if it's not the answer, it won't change the phase. If it is the answer it will, change the face. And then you can do, you can then run other operations on it so that you can then, now that your answer is in a different phase than all your wrong answers, you can run another operation on it to do another phase change to all of your qubits. And now the probability that you will land on the correct answer is higher higher than all

0:25:54 Thomas: Oh. Okay. Interesting.

0:26:33 Anne: The other qubits.

0:26:35 Thomas: What is it, what is a different phase? That's not like a one or a zero, is that something else entirely, or, oh?

0:26:41 Anne: Would be, you know, how it's, you know, it's actually its physical operation, whether you're, yeah, this would be like either your photon phase.

0:26:47 Thomas: Okay. So? So it's not, it sounds to to me be like it's really about the fact that it could be in a superposition of either one of one and zero. It's, it's utilizing whatever this phase part of it is. Is that right? Right?

0:27:02 Anne: It because that's a fundamental part of how a qubit would exist. Just as if you have a classical bit, it is a physical thing. It's, It's either 5 volts or 0 volts or 3 volts or 0 volts, or whatever you're using to go through your transistor. In your classical computer, you have a physical thing that you're shifting.

0:27:15 Thomas: Okay. Yes.

0:27:26 Anne: It's that physical part that you'RE using to shift, like we like to use transistors because they work really well, that you can put 5 volts through a combination of, you know, resistors and capacitors to, you some conditions, change that 5 volts to 0 volts or change that five volts to negative five volts. And you can do operations on that computer with that physical process.

0:27:51 Thomas: Yeah, okay.

0:27:54 Anne: That's what your quantum computer is doing, too. This is inherently a physical process, so that phase shift is something that exists in the quantum quantum state that is not in the classical computer.

0:28:08 Thomas: Okay. It the phase, the thing that is the one or the zero, or the both? Is that what, what you're saying? Like, it's the equivalent, because you said with the classic, uh, it's the five volts or the zero volts, and that's the one or the zero. Are you saying the phase is like the equivalent of those volts? Hmm.

0:28:25 Anne: The phase is going come in how we would compute them all at the end when we get our answer. So this is part of how you've probably heard this, how you can't look at how a quantum computer is doing its operations. You can only me see the in and out. At least this is what my quantum computing for babies book says. Um, it

0:28:32 Thomas: Really?

0:28:49 Thomas: It's funny, this is the second time this joke has come up, uh, on relativity and special relativity, in the same, same joke came up where, where Brian was like, yeah, special relativity is the easy one. I think he said general relativity is a really hard one, or And he's like, you wouldn't teach that to babies. And I was like, well, actually, I think, I think we do have a relativity for babies book that somebody made. Is this the same? It's got to be the same line of books.

0:29:15 Anne: Is, and I have the general relativity for babies' book too.

0:29:18 Thomas: Nice. Oh, I love it. So that's, that's funny.

0:29:20 Anne: And that's his favorite.

0:29:21 Thomas: Okay. Here. So that's interesting. So you can't, so you can, so, okay. In a a, in classical fucking thing, what a stick of Ram. I don't know. Where, where do you keep all the ones and zeros? I don'T know. Hard drive. I DON'T know like that.

0:29:33 Anne: I would even go more fundamental than that because you don't have anything close to that in a quantum computer right now. We're not even, we are definitely so far away from quantum memory. Um, It's

0:29:43 Thomas: Oh, really? Well then what the hell are we talking about then?

0:29:46 Anne: Talking about like an AND gate, you know, where you have like your truth table where it's, I don't know, I only deal with XOR gates, I forgot what wait, AND is one and one are one, and 1 and 0 or 0. I think

0:29:51 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yep. I think Uh, 25 and 2, uh, no, no, I, I, that stuff I, the kind of thing that I love and I understand when I'm reading it, and then my brain instantly decides to forget every particulars of it, but I know what you mean, it's these logic gates, um, Dan, you're saying we're just, just talking about that with quantum. So we don't, we're not talking about, well, is it the case that you wouldn't need the quantum memory type thing? Like you would, you would use quantum whatever to just process stuff, but then you would still end up with classical results, as you said.

0:30:19 Anne: Yeah So if you're looking at something like Grover's algorithm, there's no, like, you don't need a quantum memory, you just need quantum gates instead of classical logic gates in order to do what he wants

0:30:41 Thomas: Right. Hmm. Oh, that could be an important, that that, so I think that's a thing. And again, um, of what makes me, me, me is I can't let things go. And I don't understand. And apologies for that can be tedious, but we're dealing with a really complicated friggin thing. So sorry. So know I

0:30:48 Anne: No No, that's good, I feel like I'm doing a really bad job of explaining, so I like, I like drilling down to where we can get to where, yes, we understand each other

0:31:09 Thomas: Yeah. Well, I think, I think it's, it's a perennial challenge. And I actually even put it in the form that I was having, having people fill out, where experts just don't remember that they're an expert necessarily. Like you don't, you don't have a good, I don't mean that in a bad way, I mean it like it's hard for experts' brains to go back to the state where they weren't an expert and think like, okay, how does this sound to me when I don't know anything about it?

And I think that's what's genuinely fun about what I try to do with my job, is to try to like bring that out a little bit. And when you're dealing with something this complicated, cause clearly you have incredible, incredible, you specialized knowledge that just not very many normal humans in the world. So, so like, it's even harder for you, I think, because, because of this, the nature of your expertise.

So that hopefully this won't be too tedious if I, if I keep trying to drill down on this with you. So now I think I get where I went wrong, because you gave the example of a one, one and 99 zeros, and you're trying to find the one, and I was thinking that that the quantum bit was part of that hundred bits. I think now you're saying the quantum bit isn't part of it.

Part of that, because that would be like, you know, you're searching through the memory of some kind of hard drive, RAM, whatever. The quantum part is the, or the gates, whatever those thingies are that you're using to search through stuff.

0:32:24 Anne: Exactly, like you're you're starting with stuff that's classical because we live in a classical world, we're going to that's actually went through my head too, you, you're going to want to use a quantum computer to solve a problem in your real life that is going to be classical, yeah

0:32:25 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. And I am a classical girl.

0:32:41 Thomas: Oh, sure. Just genuinely thought that quantum bits meant we were using them, like, like we use normal bits, like, as in they might be in some RAM or stick around our hard drivers, I, I didn't, this is good information to know, we are nowhere near that, you're saying, and all this quantum computing stuff is just is

0:33:00 Anne: It's so much more like, it's, it's really at a more beginning stage than that, um, that like, then, then where a computer is at, because you, what we're looking at is, say you have some information, you, the name Thomas, you encode that in bits. You could encode that into, you, or zeros that are 5 volts or 0 volts. You know, a series of 5 volts, 0 volts, or you could encod it in, say, a photon that's either horizontally polarized or vertically polarized.

0:33:06 Thomas: Okay yeah okay But now that sounds like you're talking about memory, right? Or am I, or am I wrong? Okay.

0:33:39 Anne: Then you want to and then it's about how you wantto process it. So if we have have our, you know, volts or zero volts, we're going to process that by putting it through an AND gate to manipulate those bits. A quantum system, you can, you have this added thing. I could put my horizontal photon into, you that shifts it, that changes it it from being horizontal to being a vertical or versa. But I also have this added that I can shift it into a superposition of both. When I put it in a super position, that allows me to do other physical operations. Because these are, I mean, this is all something that exists in the real world. All these operations are going to be physical.

0:33:51 Thomas: Oh yeah, well I mean it has to be where else, where else would it be, yeah yeah, no, for real, yeah, that, that, think that the breakdown might, might be, honestly, not so much with the quantum, but maybe more with like the, this thing is the equivalent classical thingy. So every time you say, oh, I could store, you know, Thomas in in bits or quantum bits, that just makes me think of like a hard drive, but you're saying not that, or are we talking about like the working memory is where, is it, if not, not in, you know, RAM or hard drive or some sort of memory.

0:34:31 Anne: Don't know. A lot of theorists forget this.

0:35:00 Anne: That would be it. It would be that operation. Your quantum part is only the part that's doing the manipulation. So it goes from classical information. You transfer that into a system that can be a qubit. You do your operations on those qubits, and then it's got to read out to be classical again before you can do anything with it. So there's nothing that we can touch that's in the quantum part of it, really. Like we can build systems that do a lot of operations, like we can put in, it's the equivalent of doing a series of AND gates or NAND gates or XOR gates to do fun calculations. There's equivalent set of those gates for quantum computing. Like you have your C gate, your CNOT gate, your Hadamard gate, and more, but they're equivalent to logic gates that doing a physical process. But at the end of your process, you to have something classical out.

0:35:07 Thomas: Okay. Okay, Right. I get that. Okay, so, so does sound like at some point, either in the memory working or however you're manipulating it with these gates, at that process the classical do get kind of converted to quantum, to qubits, right? So is some sort of memory there, for some extent, okay.

0:36:23 Anne: Yeah, to some extent. Extent. Like, this isn't an instantaneous process there.

0:36:28 Thomas: So Yeah, again, I think I got thrown off when you said we're nowhere near a, uh, hard, you know, I was trying to figure out like, like, is the processor quantum sent? Like, I was trying to figure out where, what these qubits are doing. But I think, I think I get it. So you would have, let's pretend just, and I don't know if this literally is it, but to put it simply, you'd have some data stored somewhere, either hard drive or whatever it is.

Let's say that's all classical gas. That's just classical. It's just as Bach as could be. And Baroque period, but I can't, let's see who's classical, but Mozart class. Mozart? Anyway, I, you, you are accessing that somehow, that's getting going over toward the quantum thingy, the qubits. And it has to, like, I imagine, imprint that in some way to work with it, right? Within this kind of quantum system.

And there it can, like, manipulate it in these quantum ways that are cool and allow us to do extra more and possibly more powerful stuff. And then in the end, you do translate it back into whatever classical results you need. Is that sort of true? How close to true are we talking?

0:37:29 Anne: No, no, I think, I think that works. You, you have something that, you information you want to manipulate, um, choose the system that you're going to represent that with, you're gonna be putting it to a quantum system, you're going to be, you encoding that, you say, going from classical bits to, to quantum bits with some one-to-one conversion and then once you have your qubits, you can do all your, yeah which you know, are are useful in some cases, not useful in all, um, then you're going to have some readout of that at the end of all your operations yeah

0:37:49 Thomas: Do fancy things to it. Okay. Right. Okay, so here's where I'm confused, and apologies, I'm sure there, and I know this for a fact because I've gotten so many of your expert submissions out there. There are people who work in computing and all that nonsense now that are just, they've already thrown their phone in the ocean. But for people like me who, you know, like, I remember this stuff. Where in a normal computer do these AND gates, those kind of gates, these logic gates, where do those exist? Is that in like the motherboard or some shit? I can't remember.

0:38:31 Anne: I think it's like somewhere in those, those integrated circuits, so it's just all a bunch of like billions of, I think we're up to billions of transistors and I think it's like, what does it take, like, I don't know, four or five transistors to make an AND gate or an AND gateway

0:38:35 Thomas: Yeah. Wow. Yeah. I think an AND gate is super simple. I think it's like three or something. It's not very many. But OK, so when I think about like, oh, billions of transistors, I think this and again, I think this is where I am just I've never thought about this. So like my direct actual knowledge of how computers work is I'm finding it's very lacking. So when you talk about transistors that's that's more about these logic gates and less about ones per se. That's how you're manipulating and zeros. Is that kind of accurate to say? Just in a normal system.

0:39:15 Anne: As as far as my pretty limited understanding of that goes, I

0:39:20 Thomas: Whereas in something like RAM or a hard drive, what is the thing that's storing? What is the medium that stores ones and zeroes? I think that's what I'm not remembering, or that's why I'm confusing, is that transistor somehow too, I don't know, yeah

0:39:32 Anne: Think that I I think the only one that I really, um, know a little bit about is like, say, a magnetic hard drive, where you know, or like, say, a CD where you have like little you know, physical divots in the CD. That's your one and zero. Where you're reading out your information. I don't know what is in a solid state drive.

0:39:40 Thomas: Right yes and right Know, it's like so complicated now that like, that's where I was struggling too, because I was like, I remember back in the day, it was sort of magnetic, that was my thought too, it was like magnetic, ones and zero, like ways you can, all it needs to be is a way you can mark something one and mark it zero. Like you literally can make a computer hypothetically out, out of like, I don't know, fucking paper, right?

Like if you just have a way to, you could do all that. It just obviously is massive and slow and wouldn't, you know, but I'm realizing now that we've gotten to these solid state, everything is solid state somehow. I don't know what that means, but we'll just go with the old CD case. So that's very helpful. And I know this has probably been tedious for some people. So the, in terms of that, the ones and zeros, that's all just, just still classical.

And we could even take a CD-ROM and we'll put that in the quantum computer and you're still accessing it the same. But then the logic gates, the way you're doing stuff, functions, everything, everything that a computer like does rather than just, you know, stores or whatever, that's all the quantum -y stuff. And I'll spare you having to exactly explain how that works.

It sounds like it's a complicated algorithm that would be tough to explain, but we'll let it suffice to say now, uh, that somewhere in those gates, those logic gates, which have the different names, if they're quantum, it sounds like, um, just is more powerful, you're just able to search through stuff faster and execute stuff, uh, faster, hypothetically, sure.

0:41:16 Anne: I'm going to say more powerful in some cases, because this isn't true for all cases. We have a handful of algorithms that people wrote on paper, like Grover's algorithm, that, you know, that you could do this on a quantum system. Nobody's done this because it doesn't exist right now.

0:41:40 Thomas: Nobody's done it, really, there's no quantum, all right, now we're getting to the, the meat, okay, this was a struggle and I apologize, but now let's just talk about that. So you're saying, I think I'm following at least enough to know the things we're talking about here. And you're saying this doesn't exist yet. But I thought I saw a picture of a refrigerator, of a dill fridge. Am I being a real dill fridge? Or did I see exactly see a picture of a quantum computer? Or is that fake?

0:42:00 Anne: So

0:42:22 Thomas: All right, so I know I hate to do it to you everybody, but I'm cutting in here. That's the end of part one, because then we get to more what's going on in the current quantum computing world. Here's the thing, everyone. I want to explain my delay a little bit. It's a number of factors. Nothing you wouldn't really already guess, except one thing. So it's the usual stuff. It's the fact that I'm in, again, the most...

Combination of the most important and hardest battle in my life that you probably know about. But it's also in addition to those qualities, it's the stupidest fucking battle in life. So it's those things together. And so that's always going to be a wild card. I can't talk about it, but that is absolutely a factor here. This episode was edited weeks ago and I was going to get these episodes out to you. And then here's what happened. Thing with the thing happened.

Can't talk, not going to talk about it. That was a bit of a delaying thing. It's just stuff takes time. It just takes time and here's the other ingredient that I didn't realize. You know, back in the day, I used to do Atheistically Speaking, which turned into Serious Inquiries Only, twice a week, and I don't think I ever missed a week. I never took time off. I barely ever missed anything, if anything. I don't even remember if I ever missed an episode.

It was on the dot. It was totally on time, you week, week in, week out. And here I was thinking, I'm going to get back to that. I'm gonna get back doing that because that's my focus now. It's Serious Inquiries Only. I love it. Let's get back to it. I'm enjoying it. I've got so many things recorded that I can't wait to get to you. I am going to get to. Then what happened is I realized, like, oh, I used to not have three kids.

So when I was getting all those episodes out on time all the time, I and was doing research and I was doing commentary and I was doing a lot of stuff I want to do now. Like I started trying to do that this month, and what happened was I kept realizing, like, oh, I get like one brain hour per day now. Like, I just, it's so hard, I just don't, I don't have the free time.

I'm sure a lot of you can relate who have you on to have families and realizing it's, it's really hard to do the the amount of work that you used to do. And I still am going to do it. I'm going to solve this. It's just, I, I have to, I have to figure it out. I have to be a little smarter. You know, work harder, not smarter. Smarter, smarter, not harder. See, I already fucked up. God damn it.

I accidentally started working harder instead of smarter. I'm an idiot. And so that's one factor, or sorry, that's the, you know, second factor. Here's the third factor. So I get these episodes ready. They were basically ready on time. And then I became fucking obsessed with quantum computing. I'm telling you. So, like, as you you heard in this episode, I was struggling to try to understand. Here's the thing about me that I'm sure you already know. Have to fully fucking understand something.

This was merely out of respect for my poor guest, who had to suffer through probably a level of, like, rudimentary questioning that I imagine she wasn't expecting, because I just, I can't move on. On. Here's the thing. Think a number of people in our world, I don't know what percentage this is, I think a lot of people are satisfied with having learned enough words to sound like they know what they're talking about. If I'm being kind of, I don't know, like pessimistic about people.

Because look, I could have already said, before even recording this, if somebody asked me what quantum computing was, I can say, oh, oh yeah, you know how a computer has ones and zeros? Well, quantum, a qubit has ones and zeros, and it's got that superposition state. It's like, okay, well, why does that do something? That's the part that I, like, I think a lot of people are just satisfied to have that surface level description of what's going on.

And I just, for whatever reason, maybe it's because now I'm on drugs for my ADHD, I became fixated on that. And I want to make very clear, this is not at all anything wrong with how our guest explained it. I've gone back, now that I've read just countless fucking hours and consumed hours and hours of stuff, and then I listened to the episode again, I see where it all is. She explained everything fine. It's, I hope Anne understands that she's been great.

We've been corresponding, still awesome. I can't wait to do more stuff. But this topic, quantum computing, is something that for whatever reason, And I just feel like I have to understand every single goddamn minute detail of, and that's not something I can spring on anybody without warning. 'Cause I, and I didn't know it would be like that. Like, I just didn't, my brain just latched onto this and I was like, I have to understand this. What is happening here?

How, how the fuck is this working at, at, at an intense level of detail. I'm not satisfied just personally saying I understand something until I really understand it. I, to the point where it's like, like I want to be able to make a goddamn quantum computer. Not really, but I want at least feel like I can really understand where, where is the fucking magic? That's, that's what happened. I'm, I'm listening, I'm getting this explanation from Ann and it sounds like magic.

And that's super cool because quantum physics is magic. It's, I imagine any science enthusiast, like if you're like me and you dabble in a bunch of stuff, you're not an expert, but you know, you pretty smart and dabble on some stuff and like reading and watching videos and all that stuff, you already know, you know, quantum stuff is weird.

You got the superposition, you got the entanglement, you get stuff somehow both the particle and a wave at the same time, and wave particle duality or whatever it is. And there's all kinds of cool stuff, but then it's, it's one thing to be like, oh yeah, that's out there. That's a probabilities. That's interesting. That that's how that exists. That's quantum physics. That's, that's part of our world, I guess.

Another, another, to then be like, yeah, and here's a computer that uses that to do literal fucking magic, like magic spells. It's somehow cheating. Like it's taking computations or whatever that should take you two to the n step. Like, it should just be exponential. There's certain problems that you shouldn't be able to solve within the heat death of the fucking universe, essentially. I'm exaggerating a bit, but not that much, I don't think.

And then you use cheat codes, like you put a game genie on the universe. You blow out the universe cartridge, and then you put the game geny on it. And it's this thing called quantum computing. It's like, yeah, we can do that in, it's still a lot of steps, obviously, because it's still a hard problem.

Like all our passwords and all that that kind of thing, and we can do it in a logarithmic scale, as they say, instead square root of n rather than n over two, which can be a massive difference. And that's just one of them. There's... there's some other ones where there's more savings. And so I just became obsessed with this. I have to know because the game genie works.

I want to know how the fuck we're taking magic and like putting it in a potion and then drinking it. And then all of a sudden we can do magic. I don't know. It's insane. It's insane. How is that happening? How is it possible? And, and I've just become obsessed. I've become obsessed with this idea. So then me, I, a dummy, had the bright idea of, oh, I've gotten this episode ready. I don't remember when it was, but it was fucking right.

This was edited and ready to go. I was like, you know, but I am obsessed with this. I can't stop consuming content and I can't stop reading about it. I want to try to understand it a bit so that I can record a follow-up or record a little, like, what I'm doing right now.

I can report a little, hey, I know it was a little rocky in the recording for me to understand it, but now I do understand it better, because I wanted to be able to give some info that might help people who are coming from where I am coming from, which is fucking nowhere, be able to understand this stuff. Rather, I had the stupid idea of, okay, I'm just going to do that.

I'm just going to deep dive, and I'll deep dive, and I will be able to attach something onto this episode. So I did, and then I ran into the two things I already told you about, which was not as much time in the day that I thought I had, and also other challenges that are taking time in a day. And the third thing is fucking thing is so interesting, and so I couldn't stop. I didn't know how to stop.

I kept reading stuff, watching videos, reading stuff, watching videos. I watched videos that were like have zero views. Like I was watching stuff trying to understand Grover's algorithm that I'm pretty sure I watched like a school project that nobody had watched, like maybe the teacher had watched and nobody else. Like I'm just watching stuff that had literally three views on YouTube because I'm trying to understand this, and I couldn't stop.

And so that just, you know, one day led to another, to another, to another, and then before I knew it, I was two weeks late on this episode or whatever, whatever it is. All that is to say, I think I can put into words that might help another non -expert like me, help you understand it better. Here's the thing about the quantum computing. I just want to know where the magic comes from.

How is it that if you want to search for a one out of a bunch of zeros, how are you doing that faster with quantum computing? How does it help to have a qubit, you know, to have a zero, one, or superposition of both? What is that? How do you actually gain improvements? Where's the magic? Where's the Game Genie? Where's fucking cheat codes?

One question I had in my mind that I didn't ask, but I wish I had was, okay, why does a superposition of both do anything? Why isn't that not just like a third state? So why isn't it just like, okay, you could accomplish that same thing with a classical bit, but with three options, a trit, I don't know, trinary. Why is it that? And I know, by the way, I know that you can't. I'm just using that question to try to fully understand the difference.

So if you can have a 0, 1, or a superposition of both, how is that not the same as just coming up with a trinary bit that's like, okay, it's 0, or it's like 1 half, or it's 1. Like, why doesn't that accomplish the same thing? And the reason is because of fucking quantum magic. It's just goddamn magic. Here's what's crazy, with these qubits, when you get something in superposition, so both a 1 and a 0, it literally is both a one and a zero.

Like it's literally both. And furthermore, now I imagine if you're like me and you've read stuff about quantum physics, again, you're enthusiastic about it, you know that once you measure something, then it collapses the system, and rather, it's, you just get one or zero. So the best analogy I can think of is you toss a coin in the air and is it heads or tails while it's spinning in the air? And you're like, well, no, it's a superposition of both.

Essentially, that's like the equivalent of it is. While it is in the air, it is heads or tail. But it is an analogy, and it breaks down almost instantly, but it kind of helps. But to show where it breaks down, because unlike a coin, with quantum stuff, whatever the fuck, you can do certain things to it while it's in that superposition, but only certain things. Like it has to be certain rules, and it's very complicated. It's math.

It's linear algebra, which I, look, I'd never really took that. And so that was a challenge. I've, I know much more about that than I ever thought I would. I'm multiplying matrices together and fucking all this shit. Here's what's amazing. There's a book. Okay. Remember in algebra class, when you learned about I, the imaginary number, the square root of negative one? And you're like, okay, but that can't, that's not real.

It's literally called an imaginary number by some, because there is no square root of negative one that's not real. So why, how is that? Why are we, what are we talking about here? Why did you just invent a thing that's not real? And then say, like, yeah, well, but what if, you know, that the goddamn thing about that.

So the complex number, those are called complex numbers, that involving I, I guess, loosely speaking, this is all loosely speaking, of course, because I'm not a fucking expert, that math utilizing I that is necessary to describe quantum stuff, isn't that fucking nuts? So somehow the square root of negative one, which is the thing that I thought we all agreed on the rules isn't real, like that can't exist because there isn't a square root negative one, somehow that, though, is real.

Like it's necessary to describe the world somehow. Like, what the fuck does that mean? I want to know if someone's written a good, like, philosophy of science type paper on this, because how the fuck could there be a square root of negative one that, and that concept, that weird, impossible concept is not just like useful, like it's actually necessary to describe our world.

And there's a lot of stuff that's like that, where you're like, well, mathematically, this shouldn't exist, but it's also the only possible way to describe quantum stuff or some other stuff. And that blows my mind. Just thinking about that fact alone, what does that mean? What does that mean for, like, I, the complex number, the square root of negative one, for that to be necessary to describe the world? Well, like, what the fuck, what is, what does it mean? It's a triple rainbow. I don't know.

That's so cool already. That is fucking cool. But anyway, anyway, when that coin's up flipping in the air, you're getting the benefit, and this is all stuff, again, Anne said this, it's just like it didn't click for me, and I'm hoping maybe I can help it click for more people, possibly. Certain things you can do that don't break the rules.

Now, if you do certain things, if we do anything like a measurement, and by the way, being measured or observed in a quantum sense doesn't mean like a literal observer, you know, like it doesn't mean you look at it. That's, that's where, like, I think Deepak Chopra and others go wrong. It doesn't mean that. It just means interacting. Well, I won't be able to define it perfectly, but, but like a wall is an observer.

Like if I shine a light at a wall, the wall is the observer. It just has to interact in a way that makes it choose something or the other, essentially. Like if you pin it down, the photon or whatever, the light is like, eh, you know, sometimes I feel like, sometimes I feel like a wave. Sometimes I feel a particle, and then you're like, yeah, but really, like, which are you? And they're like, I don't know, man, I'm both. I just, I'm both over.

And then you, you hold up like a wall to it and you're like, hit this goddamn wall, shine your beam on this wall. And it's like, all right, well, if you're going to make me pick then, okay, fine, I'll pick one because there's a wall there or something. Um, but there are things you can do. This is what I really did not know. Are things that you can't do.

There's something in that superposition state, there, change it in ways that essentially encode information into it, but that don't break it down, that don't force it out of that state. Quantum, that is where the advantage is gained. One of the basics of quantum computing is a Hadamard gate.

It seems to be like, you know, first step almost of every single quantum algorithm, because it takes a bit, you know, if it's one or zero, and a Hadamard gate, you apply it, and the qubit is now an equal, it's in superposition. So it becomes, instead of the one or the zero, it's, one over square root of two probability of one, and one over square root two probability of zero.

I'll try not to do math because you're listening and that'll be fucking stupid, but basically it's a 50-50 either, but both. And then when you apply another Hadamard gate, so two in a row, then it goes back to what it was, but in the mix there, you also flip the amplitude.

The way that this kind of clicked for me was to look at a certain experiment, or it's called like the Mach-Zehnder experiment or Mach-Zehnder interferometer, and weirdly this eventually looped around and connected two things in my brain that made me understand this, because I didn't understand the fucking use of any of this. It was like, how does it help if it's in that superposition state?

And also super fascinating just as an experiment or just as an illustration of quantum weirdness, because quantum weirdness, for some reason, my religious family, last I talked to them, I don't know, the fucking 90s, they can't, for some reason, religious people have a hard time with quantum stuff. I, they want everything to be like Newtonian, I think, or at least my family's brand of religion, like Catholicism. They just need stuff to be little balls, cannonballs going back and forth somehow. It, otherwise it breaks down. They're like very, very Euclidean, fucking Socrates-esque way of thinking about the world. I don't know why, but it just seems to be.

0:58:06 Thomas: This is a great example of how that's just not reality. Like there isn't anything else going on. There isn't some deeper Newtonian truth. Things are just fucking weird. So, imagine you shine a beam of light and it hits a thingy like a piece of glass. Again, I'm fucking just explaining this in normal person terms. Hopefully, it'll help.

It hits a piece of glass and this piece of glass is made in such a way that it gives you a 50-50 probability to either reflect or to go through it. Now, when it reflects, this is the part that gets a little tricky to explain.

But when it reflects it phase shifts a little bit so let it suffice to say without going into too much detail about that, what that means, if you were to sync it back up with an unshifted one, then it would cancel out. Or if you sync it back up and they're both phase shifted in a way, they can, they make a bigger thing. You know how the waves, like if waves are kind of inverse, then they just cancel out so it's like phase cancellation.

Or if they're in sync or whatever, they're in phase, then it actually like doubles, it's constructive which actually makes it bigger, you know, so it's destructive interference or constructive interference and this beam of light and it hits that first piece of glass and so let's pretend this thing that's going to reflect it 50% of the time is reflecting it 90 degrees essentially and so you can imagine 50% of light going straight through that glass and the other 50% getting reflected at kind of a 90 degrees.

And then imagine both those beams hitting a mirror, which then reflects them. So you've created almost like a diamond, like you're meeting at the thing at the beam splitter and half go up, half go down. Then you get some mirrors, and they both reflect back down to make like essentially a diamond shape. Then you hit another beam splinter. I know this is kind of fucking weird, but it's really fascinating and it helped me a lot.

Then after that beam splitter, you have detectors, one on top, one on bottom. So you've made like a zigzag. Like you're essentially, like I said, it's a diamond shape and then a zig zag. And I feel like this is so hard to explain. You'll just have to look it up. But here's what's going on.

If, you know, the Catholics were right and no quantum stuff happened and photons were either transmitted or reflected by the first beam splitter, then it would do the little pattern and then it would have a 50-50 chance of being transmitted or reflected by the second beam splitter. And then if you had those two detectors set up at the end, what should happen if classical whatever is true, and if it's just too hard to conceptualize this when listening, at least take this away.

If classical bullshit was true, if classical physics with quantum didn't exist, what you would expect is that both detectors would trigger with equal probability. 50% of the time it'd be detector one, 50% detector two, because, oh, you know, sometimes it goes through that thing. Sometimes it doesn't. However, if you do this experiment and you do it perfectly, it has to all be a hundred percent perfect in terms of distances and stuff, because the key is this phase cancellation.

And as you can imagine, to get them exactly right on, you know, like to get that phase cancellation on has to be all super precise. But if you do all that, one detector will trigger. This is because stuff is quantum, stuff is not classical. Essentially, what happens is a photon takes both paths simultaneously. It takes both paths. This is not like, there's no other way to look at it. Like, you know, like this is, that's what it's doing.

Because it takes both paths and one of them has had that shift, that phase shift that I told you about, when it comes back to that second detector, one of the paths cancels out because that other path has the phase cancellation. And so that's why only one of the detectors, if you do the experiment, only one of them triggers. Here's the thing. Here's what really broke it through for me.

It's still in that superposition until it hits some sort of, you know, measurement, some detector or whatever, even though it has that phase shift. So that you can do certain things like, I don't know, shift the phase a little bit or whatever it is to something in superposition without breaking that superposition. So that photon is still on both paths at once, simultaneously, 50-50. It's in super position, taking both paths.

It literally is taking both paths and doesn't break it down until you observe it even though you phase shifted it a little bit and it's hard to explain but that's like really the key especially to the Grover's algorithm which is the main one that I've looked at but I think it's pretty key to all the quantum computing stuff. Being able to do stuff to things in superposition without breaking that superposition is the cheat code, that's what gets you the extra stuff.

So if you have to do an operation that does something to a one or a zero, like in classical computing, and you're like, well, if it's a one, you know, like it's an AND gate or whatever, any of those things that we kind of discussed. Well, if it's 1 and 1, it'll give 1. If 1 and 0 gives you 0, whatever it might be, if that's an AND gate. You can do those things to qubits in superposition and get essentially both calculations done at once.

Seems impossible, but it is. Now, here's why it's not a super-duper miracle to the extent that you would think. And that's because if you observed the thing and collapsed the system, you'd still get one or the other. So like the universe is doing, this is, I saw it put this way, and this helped. The universe is doing both calculations at once. So it's like, essentially, again, it's doubling your computing power in that one example. The universe is doing it.

It's doing both of them because it's in that superposition. But the reason why it's not this super-duper miracle is because it is really hard to get the benefit of that without collapsing the system, without taking a measurement, and then you only get one. If you're, if something's in superposition, you can change the amplitude. So like you can mess with the probabilities.

So a superposition could be 50-50, each thing could be as, 50% zero and 50% one, or it could be 70% zero. And 30% one. And you don't know that you literally cannot know that information without certain conditions being met. Like you would need to, you can't look inside it, a photon or something. There's no way for us to access that short of creating the same situation and then measuring it a bunch of times.

The universe is doing the two calculations, which is fucking insane to me, it's so insane. It's the coolest thing in the world. The universe is doing both calculations or as I've seen some people put it, another universe is doing the other calculation. I think that's actually a pretty plausible explanation. Like there's another universe in which it's doing the one calculation and you're in the universe that's doing the zero calculation or whatever it is.

It's hard to get that information without collapsing the system and then you only get zero or one. So once you observe it, you only have zero or one. But because humans are fucking geniuses, there are certain ways to get the benefits of that without collapsing, the whole thing. That's the part where it just, it gets so goddamn complicated. I think I kind of understand it, but it's, I don't know that I could put it into words. There's certain operations you can do.

And that's some of those quantum gates, you know, the Hadamard gate and then the like CNOT gate. And then, you know, there's certain gates that you can do. There's certain things you can ways you can manipulate qubits that gets you some of that benefit of that multiple calculations and doesn't collapse the superposition. But that's why it's very specific. That's why it's only a few things.

Because of how tricky it is to like gain access to that, the hidden information in the universe or in another parallel universe, if you will. But isn't that fucking cool? Isn't that the coolest goddamn thing? It's insane. It's just crazy. I could, I've been obsessed with this for weeks. I can't get over it. It is the coolest thing. Right. Well, I know this was insane, but again, I became obsessed and I'm not an expert. So I just have a jumble of these insane thoughts going on.

But I hope that might've helped a little bit just if you're coming from where I was. I, those, that's where the magic comes from, it's, it's also entanglement, uh, didn't really get into that, I guess, but like being able to do stuff like flipping a coin and then flipping it again while it's in the air and it giving you heads is one analogy, like just being able to do stuff to something that's in a superposition without breaking that superposition but still encoding information into it.

And then essentially having the universe do more operations for you. That's where it comes from. But I, I still struggle to see how, even though I've gone through these algorithms, how it ends up that we get the benefit of that information. It's still a little tricky. I'm still struggling with it, but I hope this little bit, I don't know, makes you more interested or helps. And it's just so fascinating.

So, with that note of quantum optimism, I guess, tune in to the next one, which I'll post right away. I'm not going to be tedious to make you wait. Tune in to next one to find out what Anne thinks about the future of quantum computing. Is it something where it's all potential on paper, it's rock solid, but can we actually do it, can we accomplish it, is it possible, what's being done now, that's all in part two. So hope you listen in to that.

Thank you so much for listening. Please support the show at patreon.com/seriouspod. Please, please, please, pretty please, seriously, it's so important, it's how I'm surviving right now. Thank you so much to my patrons, and I will speak to you soon, on a personal level, on a patron only thing. In the meantime, time, tune in for part two. See you then.