It’s a rather unlikely group of scientists. They’re experts in codes and code-breaking. Leading researchers in the baffling world of quantum physics. And they’ve built the most advanced computer in the universe. And together they are taking on one common enemy: hackers. Horizon: Defeating the Hackers, ***** Rupert Penry-Jones, Dr Franco Wong et al reporting, BBC 2013
Quantum mechanics – weird. ‘With a single atom … where anything is starts to break down … Things can be in many places at the same time.’ ibid.
The processor … The quantum chip considers every possible solution all at the same time. ibid.
In the weird world of the very small, things can be in more than one place at once. But all that changes at the moment you actually look and measure where something is. It’s known as the Observer Effect. ibid.
A message: a one or a zero. It means if you are sending a quantum message, you can tell if someone else is observing. If there is an eavesdropper on the line. ibid.
A bizarre realm in which we are giants: the weird world of the very small. This is a journey into the heart of matter. Horizon: How Small is the Universe? BBC 2012
We may find that our universe is just one of many. ibid.
As you look smaller and smaller, no-one knows if they’ll ever be an end. ibid.
The illusion of solidity comes from the fuzzy cloud of charged electrons. ibid.
And what you find when you smash a proton to pieces is that it too is largely empty space. It’s made of three tiny fundamental particles called quarks. ibid.
The Standard Model – a set of seventeen fundamental particles including quarks and electrons that make up everything we know. ibid.
String Theory ... Instead of the seventeen particles of the standard model, everything is made from a single object – an incredibly tiny loop of string. ibid.
String Theory is underpinned by some fiendishly complex maths ... We live in eleven-dimension hyperspace. ibid.
There's an idea once thought so radical that just mentioning it was considered pure insanity ... They think that our universe is not alone. Horizon: Which Universe Are We In? BBC 2015
Which one are we living in? ibid.
This is eternal inflation. ibid.
How does a universe actually work? ibid.
Quantum Physics: ‘In the mid-twentieth century Hugh Everett came up with what he originally called the Many Worlds Theory of Quantum Mechanics.’ ibid.
Professor Laura Mersini-Houghton has a radically new vision of the multiverse ... She combined the physics of string theory with those of quantum mechanics. ibid.
All of Laura’s predictions have since been observed, including this cold spot she claims is the trace of another universe once entangled with our own. It’s a discovery beyond anything she dared hope for. ibid.
Our perception of the universe is an illusion: they are connecting two of Europe’s largest telescopes … Perhaps the strangest idea in science: quantum entanglement … Can particles be connected as if they joined together even if they are millions of miles apart? Einstein rejected the idea … Is Entanglement real? Einstein’s Quantum Riddle ***** BBC 2020
The electron is just a wave of fuzzy probability. ibid.
Quantum Physics: Its mathematics were elegant and beautiful. ibid.
The Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox: a seemingly magical effect … How could two particles act in unison? ibid.
The particles were fuzzy and undefined until the moment they were observed. ibid.
In theory this technique could be used to create a totally secure global communications network. These are the first steps of a completely unhackable quantum internet of the future. Made possible by quantum entanglement. ibid.
Quantum theory accounts for the anomalous behaviour of light and atoms. It’s astonishingly accurate but notoriously difficult to grasp. Richard Dawkins: Enemies of Reason: The Irrational Health Service, Channel 4 2007
Quantum Physics has two extraordinary qualities: one, it is very very mysterious to the human mind ... Also, the predictions that you can deduce from quantum theory are astonishingly accurate. Professor Richard Dawkins, interview Have Your Say
The power of the new quantum mechanics in giving us a better understanding of events on an atomic scale is becoming increasingly evident. The structure of the helium atom, the existence of half-quantum numbers in band spectra, the continuous spatial distribution of photo-electrons, and the phenomenon of radioactive disintegration, to mention only a few examples, are achievements of the new theory which had baffled the old. Arthur Compton, foreword to English edition of Werner Heisenberg's The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory 1930
If the world has begun with a single quantum, the notions of space and would altogether fail to have any meaning at the beginning; they would only begin to have a sensible meaning when the original quantum had been divided into a sufficient number of quanta. If this suggestion is correct, the beginning of the world happened a little before the beginning of space and time. I think that such a beginning of the world is far enough from the present order of Nature to be not at all repugnant. It may be difficult to follow up the idea in detail as we are not yet able to count the quantum packets in every case. For example, it may be that an atomic nucleus must be counted as a unique quantum, the atomic number acting as a kind of quantum number. If the future development of quantum theory happens to turn in that direction, we could conceive the beginning of the universe in the form of a unique atom, the atomic weight of which is the total mass of the universe. This highly unstable atom would divide in smaller and smaller atoms by a kind of super-radioactive process. Monsignor Georges Lemaître, article Nature 1931, ‘The Beginning of the World from the Point of View of Quantum Theory’
On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays we use the wave theory; on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays we think in streams of flying energy quanta or corpuscles. William Bragg, The Robert Boyle Lecture 1921, ‘Electrons and Ether Waves’
Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated ‘building blocks’, but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way. The human observer constitute the final link in the chain of observational processes, and the properties of any atomic object can be understood only in terms of the object’s interaction with the observer. Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics, 1975
The mathematical framework of quantum theory has passed countless successful tests and is now universally accepted as a consistent and accurate description of all atomic phenomena. The verbal interpretation, on the other hand – i.e. the metaphysics of quantum theory – is on far less solid ground. In fact, in more than forty years physicists have not been able to provide a clear metaphysical model. ibid.
We don’t know what we are talking about. Many of us believed that string theory was a very dramatic break with our previous notions of quantum theory. But now we learn that string theory, well, is not that much of a break. The state of physics today is like it was when we were mystified by radioactivity. They were missing something absolutely fundamental. We are missing perhaps something as profound as they were back then. David Gross, 23rd Solvay Conference in Physics, Brussels, closing address December 2005
Laws of quantum mechanics itself cannot be formulated ... without recourse to the concept of consciousness. Eugene Paul Wigner
[Paul] Dirac’s unique understanding of sub-atomic particles won him a Nobel and led to a series of breakthroughs in Quantum Physics. Secrets of the Universe: Great Scientists in Their Own Words, BBC 2014
Einstein’s 1935 attack on quantum theory produced a front-page headline in The New York Times and has never been satisfactorily refuted; indeed, as of the mid-1990s, the latest experimentational evidence has breathed new life into the critique.
His greater preoccupation was the ultimate task of uniting the phenomena of light and gravity into a single theory. Einstein never was able, as one biographer put it, to ‘accept that the universe was fragmented into relativity on one side and quantum mechanics on the other. Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind