StarTalk Radio - Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling with John Martinis

Episode Date: January 6, 2026

Can quantum tunneling occur at macroscopic scales? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Chuck Nice sit down with John Martinis, UCSB physicist and 2025 Nobel Prize winner in Physics, to explore superconductivity, quantum tunnelling, and what this means for the future of quantum computing.NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here:https://startalkmedia.com/show/macroscopic-quantum-tunneling-with-john-martinis/Thanks to our Patrons Fran Rew, Shawn Martin, Kyland Holmes, Samantha McCarroll-Hyne, camille wilson, Bryan, Sammi, Denis Alberti, Csharp111, stephanie woods, Mark Claassen, Joan Tarshis, Abby Powell, Zachary Koelling, JWC, Reese, Fran Ochoa, Bert Berrevoets, Barely A Float Farm, Vasant Shankarling, Michael Rodriguez, DiDTim, Ian Cochrane, Brendan, William Heissenberg Ⅲ, Carl Poole, Ryan McGee, Sean Fullard, Our Story Series, dennis van halderen, Ann Svenson, mi ti, Lawrence Cottone, 123, Patrick Avelino, Daniel Arvay, Bert ten Kate, Kristian Rahbek, Robert Wade, Raul Contreras, Thomas Pring, John, S S, SKiTz0721, Joey, Merhawi Gherezghier, Curtis Lee Zeitelhack, Linda Morris, Samantha Conte, Troy Nethery, Russ Hill, Kathy Woida, Milimber, Nathan Craver, Taylor Anderson, Deland Steedman, Emily Lennox, Daniel Lopez, ., DanPeth, Gary, Tony Springer, Kathryn Rhind, jMartin, Isabella Troy Brazoban, Kevin Hobstetter, Linda Pepper, 1701cara, Isaac H, Jonathan Morton, JP, טל אחיטוב Tal Achituv, J. Andrew Medina, Erin Wasser, Evelina Airapetova, Salim Taleb, Logan Sinnett, Catherine Omeara, Andrew Shaw, Lee Senseman, Peter Mattingly, Nick Nordberg, Sam Giffin, LOWERCASEGUY, JoricGaming, Jeffrey Botkin, Ronald Hutchison, and suzie2shoez for supporting us this week. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of StarTalk Radio ad-free and a whole week early.Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Chuck, we bagged another Nobel laureate. Yes, we're keeping them tied up in a closet. 2025 Nobel Prize in physics to macroscopic quantum tunneling. Yeah, man. Coming up on StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, you're a personal astrophysicist. I got with me, Chuck Knight. Chuck, baby. Hey, Neil! Yeah, how you doing, man? I am doing great. I'm feeling good.

We got a good show. We got a good show. You know what everyone was curious about? announced just a couple of months ago. Right. The 2025 Nobel Prize in physics. Yes. And I can't believe that I didn't get it.

No one knows more about fixes than I do. As a matter of fact, My brain is a quantum computer itself. My nickname in the White House is Cupid. That's what they call me. I walk in. Hey, Cupid, figure this out for me. Well, I was kind of surprised as you are.

We've got On the Horn, Professor of Physics at UC Santa Barbara, John Martinez. Did I pronounce your last name correctly, sir? Yeah, that's correct. All right. John Martinez, Professor of Physics, you see Santa Barbara. I've been to Santa Barbara once. That is not a real town. It's a fake town.

It's a movie set. It does look like a movie set. It's like there was no garbage in the street. There's no, I mean, it's super clean. All the houses are like pristine. And I was looking around, I was like, well, there's only a matter of time before the cops show up that I'm here. That's a black man walking around this place. I know for sure somebody about to call.

thought of police. So your expertise is deep in the quantum, and quantum, people love talking and thinking about quantum physics, not only, of course, in the world of physics, but in the public sector. Oh, yeah. People love

them some quantum. It's captured the imagination of the world. The captured the imagination. And I have on my notes here, so you let a team at Google to develop their superconducting quantum computer from 2014 to 2020.

Are you still with them? Or were you on the faculty that whole time? So I was on the faculty that whole time and had a joint appointment. And I still had some students who were working. So I had a joint appointment. And then in 2020, I left Google and been thinking about what needs to happen next in the field and decided to start my own company. That's a very California thing to do.

It is, yeah. You know, it's a very Google. thing to do, too. So in 2025, October, that's the Nobel announcement month, you share the Nobel Prize in Physics

with Michael Deverey, did I pronounce his name correctly? Michelle Deverey. Oh, Michel. Excuse me. French, he's from France. From France. Oh, yes, of course, but of course.

But of course. Well, in the quantum, we have nothing but attitude. And John Clark, I got here, for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling and energy quantization in an electric circuit. Wow. Now, we've had electric circuits for 150 years, dude. So 170 years.

Let's go back to Faraday. So what are you discovering in an electric circuit that nobody else did? Well, very simply, we saw an electric circuit where if you look at how it works, works, it's obeying quantum mechanics. It's using the laws of quantum mechanics. And what's kind of unusual here is you think of quantum mechanics of how atoms work or molecules work. So it's usually on the microscopic small objects. And we showed that for electrical circuit, which the chip is about the size of a dime or so, it's quite big. It's the current and voltages of that that obey quantum mechanics.

But why didn't they always do that? Why is this a discovery so long after we've known about currents and electrons moving through wires? What's going on there? Also, our understanding of things like superconductivity, that's kind of a macroscopic manifestation of quantum physics, isn't it? where the wave function for the electron

becomes so large that all the waves match up and then all the electrons behave as though it's one particle? Is that a fair way to characterize superconductivity? And is that not similar to what you're describing about what you got the award for? Yeah, so that's actually a good question. These are actually a different phenomenon. This is something that Professor Anthony Leggett,

when he first proposed this kind of described, but I can explain this with an analogy. If you take a crystal, for example, I have one here that I happen to have on my desk, this is a quartz crystal. And if you take a crystal, you have the atoms that are binding together in a certain arrangement due to the microscopic quantum mechanics. But because they bind together kind of in the same way over and over again, you can get a naturally grown crystal with huge planes on it that basically describe on a big level, you know, millimeter or centimeter level, what's going on at the atomic level. So quantum mechanics, microscopic quantum mechanics can be seen at a macroscopic level. just by kind of the quantum mechanics repeating itself over and over again.

But in the end, it's still microscopic. I see. So this is the buildup of the geometry, if you will, of the microscopic particles to become a macroscopic. And macroscopic, let's loosely say, you can see it with your eyeballs. Right, yeah. Is that a macroscopic. Okay. So now.

I want to add something that you might like. The fact that you see what's going on on the atom level with your eyes is kind of a magic physics phenomenon. And you might appreciate here in California, that's why so many people think crystals have magic healing powers, okay? Because it's such a strange idea, okay? But it just comes from this fact. No, we did a whole explainer on crystals. On crystals. And they're low energy elsewhere.

Yeah, yeah, how they have, you know, the lowest energy state. People say, I feel this crystal energy. Yeah, it was a direct indictment of California, the state. Yeah, and, you know, I can, it's really, it really comes from something that's quite astounding. So I can see how people get mystified by this. Yeah, but so does Earth and the solar system in the universe. Yeah. So, can I ask as a late person who doesn't understand?

quantum physics at all. Why do you call other people that don't understand things that you do, dumbass? And now here's something you don't understand, and you're just somebody who doesn't understand it. Oh, because I want to understand. Oh, you want to understand. Yeah, that's why I'm not a dumbass. See, the people who just don't care and don't

want to understand, they're dumbass. Got it. Thank you for clarifying. Yeah, I have no problem with ignorance. I am one of the most ignorant people you're ever going to meet, and I'm fine with that. I celebrate my ignorance. I just don't remain in it. That's all. on it.

Asking questions is so important in science. And I think it's great that you want to ask a question. And I'm going to say that in my career, I'm kind of known for sitting in the front row and asking lots of questions to the people. And that's how I learned. Okay. So what's your question?

So, all right, the tunneling part is what has me in the circuit. And maybe this is just, that's what he got to the prize for. That's what's got the prize for. The quantum, macroscopic quantum tunnel. tunneling in an electrical circuit. So I'm interested in the tunneling part and how it's observed in the circuit because if I'm not, if I'm mistaken, just let me work this out so I can make sure I'm understanding what I'm asking.

But the tunneling is when a particle overcomes a barrier even though it doesn't have enough energy to do so, right? Is that right? That's exactly right. Two thumbs up on that one. Okay. So what are you actually observing? when you call it tunneling in the circuit,

is it because are you looking at the wave particle duality? What exactly are you looking at that says, oh, I can see tunneling? Okay, so let me go back to my analogy for a second. If you take a bunch of atoms and you cool it down, it condenses into a solid, okay? And then if you want to describe what's going on with that system, you talk about, let's say, the center of the little particle you made, and you kind of describe the physics of that. You don't have to think about all the individual atoms because they're constrained to be next to each other.

And the same kind of thing happens in superconductivity where the electrons condense into the superconducting state, and it turns out that there's one variable left, which we call the phase, but it turns out that all the electrons, They're kind of paired up. They all of the same phase. And if you do something to the circuit, they all kind of act together in a way to give you a big current. You know, you can get, you know, amps of current in a superconducting wire if you set it upright. Wow. Now, so what happens in terms of the tunneling you're asking is in a superconducting wire,

you basically have the current flow without any redistricting. resistance. Okay. That's what a superconductor is. If you put too much current in the wire, then it kind of breaks the superconductivity. And then you start seeing the voltage across it and then it looks like a regular wire. Okay. Now it turns out going from the zero voltage state to this voltage state has a potential barrier associated with it. And for the particular, circuit we made, there's something called the Joseph's and equations, and then you can do some mathematics and compute what the barrier is, but there's a barrier. And then through that barrier is what you're kind of tunneling through, this energy barrier having to do from going from superconducting to like breaking the superconductivity. All right. Gotcha. So now let me play journalist here, if I may. So what good is that? That's no, that's a good question.

I'm saying, you know, if I'm the Nobel Prize Committee, I'm going to hand out a million dollars. I'm thinking, is that what I'm going to give a million dollars to? People actually have the time thought, well, of course, is going to be quantum mechanics, okay? And then, of course, what we did is an experiment to show that it actually worked. And this kind of weird electrical variable of Bay's quantum mechanics. But the reason it gets practical is you can now build electronic devices that obey quantum mechanics. So the way I like to talk about that is normally people think about the periodic table where you can put the various atoms together to make molecules and you can do useful things with chemistry.

Well, what we have here is if we want to look at quantum mechanics, we actually have a bigger periodic table now. And the new periodic table that we work with are based on inductors and capacitors and things called transmission lines and these jocin junctions. And we have a whole new class of quantum devices that we can make based on this new kind of physics here, this macroscopic physics.

Oh, okay. Okay, so this opens up the kinds of circuits you can design. Right. Okay, so you're really, what you're doing is you're opening the, door to an actual quantum computer. Yeah, what happened is people explored this over the last 40 years, first looking at the basic physics, but in the last, let's say, 30 years or so, people can use this quantum behavior to build a quantum computer.

And the reason why that's interesting is our regular computers are made with electronics, and there's a lot of advantages for doing that. It's small and low power and whatever. and now if you can do a quantum computer with electronics, you can use a lot of the same technology to build it up. Wow. Now, but wait a minute, but the research paper that sort of birthed this path dates from 1985, is that correct?

That's correct. So what's up with the Nobel Committee? They're slow readers. They're slow readers. No, actually, actually, yeah, I've kind of wondered that. myself. But not really. I would say the original experiment was very nice and, you know, showed this. But, you know, it's your question. A lot of times that you don't know if physics is important until you see what it develops into. So maybe at the time, it developed into some

nice physics in the wrote papers, but people would wonder, well, what's going on? But after 40 years, there's a few thousand businesses really working on this phenomenon to see if they can build upon a computer. And the fact that it's just grown, if you like, into a big scientific industry, a new field. And like I say, a new way to make artificial atoms that it's important came out. So it's kind of like fine wine, right? It had to sit there for a while. All right. He's California guy.

So he's got the wine vocabulary. He had the age into the mellow. Gotcha. And I might add here, little known fact, the rules of the Nobel Prize are that if you've already died, you can't win the Nobel Prize. Oh, no. Right. So that makes me wonder why they wait so long so they don't have to give it. Yeah, definitely.

Wow. The loophole is if they announce that you won, and then you die. Oh, well. Then you can still get it. Oh, well, that's comforting. You know, for me, the funny thing is that I did this as a graduate student. That was my thesis project. And then I retired as a professor last year.

So it kind of took my whole career, you know, for this to happen. and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Before we go to Cosmic Queries with our fan base, I just want to make sure we're on this same page with some language here. I think Chuck would you agree, John, that Chuck correctly described quantum tunneling

in his account, would you agree? Well, I explained how it was a quantum mechanical system and different, but I maybe didn't describe how tunneling worked. Let's get the official word on that then. We'll do that, and then we'll go to Joseph's injunctions, and I remembered being taught that in physics class. Notice how I said that. I remember being taught it.

I'm not saying I remembered learning. So Joseph and Junction And another thing here, what's this other term here? A Cooper Bridge? Cooper pairs. Cooper pairs. So start with quantum tunneling, then go to Joseph from Junctions, and then give me Cooper pairs, and tell me what all this is.

So what happens when quantum tunneling is you have this, it's a particle, and there's a barrier, and it has to go through the barrier in order to tunnel. That's what happens with the tunneling. Now, what I've learned talking to journalists and podcasters is another way to explain it. And what happens with quantum mechanics is you can borrow energy and then pay it back because energy is conserved, but you can do that quantum mechanically for a very short time. And the time that you can borrow the energy for is given by the equation. The energy you're borrowing time to time is.

is roughly equal to what's called Planx constant, which in units are 10 to minus 34. It's a tiny amount of time. So if you set up an experiment so the barrier is low enough and it's kind of fast enough to tunnel through, then you can tunnel. And that's what you do in this experiment is you set that up. It's a microwave experiment, so it's very fast. And then these barriers, you can continuously set the very low energies.

And then it can tunnel. What's said of them is that tunneling, it crosses the barrier instantly, even if the barrier is spatially separated. Actually, this is new physics that we did on, when I did in my postdoc, it takes a little bit of time for it, the tunnel. Oh. This is not actually well known. This is an experiment we did a long time ago. Unfortunately, we didn't publish it in a good journal, so no one knows about it. it, but I got to talk about it in my Nobel lecture so that people know about it.

But yes, this is what happened. It's a good way to think about it. Dude, you're telling me I've been misinformed my whole life that a particle that tunnels moves through instantaneously, and you have some obscure research paper that says it's not? Yes, that's absolutely correct. How long does it take? Well, this is what, after I got my thesis in 1986, that's something I worked on in 1987 and 88.

So we were able to do this right away. And the funny story is, my co-authors and I could have decided for a word to call this. We had to invent a word. And we kind of got stuck arguing back and forth and never, you know, published it properly. So it's kind of a sad story. But, you know, words are important.

You still don't have a word for it. You can call it the MTA effect. I call it the tunneling traversal time. Okay, which I think is a pretty good word. That's what I use. The tunneling traversing time. A little too many syllables for me, but T cubed. T cubed.

And how do you calculate how long it takes? Well, so what happens is you connect your superconducting qubit to a resistor that you can change the distance from the cubit from. And what happens is when it's close, it has one tunneling rate, and when it's fall. it has another tunneling rate and that the distance, the time delay it takes from going there to the resistor tells you the tunneling time. And what happens is it takes some time for the tunnel. If it's really close, then the whole tunneling, it sees that resistor. But the resistor is far away at tunnels before it can, you know, it can see the delay.

There's the speed of light delay between the junction and the resistance. And that speed of light delay causes it to not the effect of tunneling in the same way. So what impact does this have on prevailing research, knowing this fact? If you have a tunneling phenomenon that has some complicated other structure around it, then you would want to know if there's a time delay to how it's going to do that. The way I've thought about it in the past is you have like a scanning tunneling microscope and you're tunneling electrons into some metal or something. If the metal has some weird frequency dependence or it has some weird delay associated with how it responds,

then that delay is going to affect the tunneling rate. That's going to matter. Okay. Previous paradigm that tunneling was instantaneous was easy for me to understand that like the wave function just sort of collapsed on the other side of the barrier because the wave function is kind of everywhere.

That becomes instantaneous movement. And somehow I was okay with that. and now you're telling me no it takes time so you know calm yourself so so does what do you say to the instantaneous people is that a camp that now has to dissolve so what i would say is if you have a regular particle with mass okay and then you put a force on it it instantaneously accelerates from that force, okay, because it's just but in systems where that

electron is, that mass is connected to other masses maybe far away, it may not instantaneously move with a simple you know, Newton's law or simple instantaneous. So for more complicated

systems, which you definitely have with these electrical circuits, then your concept of mass becomes more, more complicated. and you have to throw in this physics. All right. Is that okay? No, it's not with me.

I'm sorry. You're stuck on moving, you know, particles, electrons, and atoms or whatever. The quantum mechanics is more general than that. Cool. But I'm kind of, you're making me happy that I'm a macroscopic object, that I can use simple laws to understand. True. Causality and everything else.

Right. And things only really get weird in the quantum realm. But people love visiting it. We're about the same age. Did you read Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland where he, where George Gamow changed the constants of physics? And one of them he changed Planck's constant, if memory serves. So that you'd walk through a doorway and you would like refracts? Oh, yes.

I did not read the book, but Michelle Deverey read that book and was very inspired by it. Yes. Yeah, yeah. It's just, it made it real and tangible for it. Like, one of them, the speed of light was like 60 miles an hour. Wow. So you're driving down the street. Right.

And they just see things. You just see light going by you. How do you see it? That's wild. So just to give you an example, you know, we often talk about this macroscopic quantum tunneling is taking a ball and throwing it against the wall and having it tunnel through if the quantum mechanics was appropriate, which, of course, naturally it would just bounce off and then in our case if the ball is kind of a little bit compressible and you know then you would get maybe a different tunneling rate if it could squeeze and deform a little bit okay now joseph's injunction tell me about those joseph's injunctions

what's your function so the jose injunction is just a it's just two two metals that are separated by a very thin inciting barrier. So, for example, you take aluminum, aluminum wire and you just leave it out in air for a couple minutes. It'll form a very thin aluminum oxide. It likes to oxidize

and you put aluminum on top. But it's thin enough that the actual electrons themselves, or Cooper pairs, can tunnel through that and give you a current. But it's way smaller because it's the tunneling, you know, doesn't happen very often. Okay. So those are

Those are Cooper pairs. No, no. And Joseph's in the junction with Cooper pairs are the pairs of electrons across that junction. Well, the Cooper pairs exist inside the superconductor. Okay. And what happens is when you have just a regular metal, there are electrons that are saying going in one direction. And there's electrons that are going exactly in the opposite directions. And there's other electrons that are going in one direction and in another direction.

The net velocity, if you sum those two velocities at zero, and what superconductivity does is connect all these net zero velocity cooper pairs with the other coop repairs, and then it kind of can condense into the superconducting state. So these are, this is kind of a magic that happened in metals that you, have things that are exactly opposite of each other, but then they can pair up. Someone went the Nobel Prize for understanding this. This is really kind of an amazing conjecture back in the late 50s and the 60s. Well, quantum, you know, it's mind-boggling, and that's just why people like it, especially.

And last thing, before we go to our Q&A, just catch us up with quantum computing. We did a whole show on quantum computing. And I was more confused after than before. Tell me, remind us what a qubit is and why it has utility in quantum computing. So the basic idea of a qubit is very much like a bit, if you know anything about how your computers work. There's a state that can be in zero and one. And you put bets, bits together to show a word or describe a number, and you do some logic operations with that. So what a qubit is, is a bit that's made out of a quantum computer.

And the laws of quantum mechanics can say that it can be both a zero and a one at the same time. Now, let me kind of explain why that's kind of possible. If you take, for example, an atom, hydrogen atom, and you have an electron and proton, there are different charges and they want to stick together, right? but atoms have size okay we you know why do we have size and that's because the electrons aren't just single point particles but they form kind of a cloud around the center nucleus and the electron is on one side and the other it's kind of all around at the same time so so in the same way you can talk about a bit and say it's not zero or one

like classically, but it can be both of them at the same time. I got you. But aren't you making a statistical statement? It's not both of those simultaneously at the same time. It's just statistically it can be either. Yeah. Aren't you really making a probabilistic statement rather than a statement of existence? Yeah, that's the strange thing about quantum mechanics.

You would think that it's like moving around, but it's actually at all the different places at the same time. Right. Until you determine, right? Because once you determine where it is, then the rest of that information is useless because that's where it is. Yeah, that's right. So it has to be kind of everywhere at the same line. And it's a very definite state. And because it's a definite state, you can do computing on it. Okay? So you have this zero and one state. And you can think about taking a single cubit, zero and one state, running it through some simple algorithm. And then, you can think about taking a single cubit, zero and one state, running it through some simple algorithm. And then, And at the end, you get the answer for the zero state and you get the answer for the one state. And you did all that in parallel because it's not statistical. It's a definite, definite thing. Holy crap. Yeah.

So now if you have that stacked on stacked on stacked on stack, you can run in, you can run countless calculations at the same time. That's exactly right. Because with one cubit factor two, who cares? Okay, parallel factor two. But two qubits, there are four states, zero one, zero one, one, one, three cubits, eight, four, sixteen. By the time you get up the 53 cubits, which is what we did in Google, that's 10 to the 16 states in parallel. Damn. Ten to the 16.

Damn. In parallel. That's insane. Yeah. And by the time you get to, you know, hundreds, that's a number. bigger than there are atoms in the universe, okay? So you can do, you do, you can do tremendous, let's say parallel computation. You can become God. But nature doesn't make that easy, okay? And nature, it's hard to take advantage of all those states. So you have to build special

algorithms so that even though it's doing everything in parallel, it kind of points to your answer. And that's why, you know, only certain things work with a quantum computer. But there are important things. But you have to be careful designing it for now. Yeah, well, brute force, it sounds to me, because I'm about to say something. Tell me if I'm right or wrong. This is just out of my mind. I never read it anywhere.

But it sounds to me like brute force encryption busting is child's play from what you just described. Like, there is no more key to anything anywhere on earth if you crack this. You're making a bold statement. I have to, you know, tell you a little bit more. Good, because I'm making this, I'm pulling this out my ass. Yeah, this was the big algorithm in 1990s by Peter Shore saying that in potential you can do that, which was a big thing. And people are now building quantum computers where I can kind of see in the not so distant future that you may be able to break what's called RSA, just as you said. Now, this is the thing people have to remember.

All cryptography systems have a finite lifetime. So this RSA, what people are using right now, it's been around for many decades now, but we're thinking because the quantum computers are nearing the end of life. Okay, just like every other cryptographic system. And people have to switch over to something what's called crypto-safe, which is quantum-safe crypto.

And people have algorithms that are working on, and, you know, it will happen. Yeah, but the way it was first brought to the public, it was, we can never encrypt anything ever again. But what they really meant was the encryption algorithms that were previously established were unbreakable, but now that by the means available at the time, the computing means, and now that we have quantum computing, we need a next generation of cryptography. So that's a fair way to characterize that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, you know, people have known this for a long time,

and there's actually an active program at the NIST government agency that's, you know, taking examples and doing all the analysis. What surprises me as someone who's building a quantum computer, which is really hard, it's going to take decades, is that writing the software and doing the math, they think, you know, takes longer or takes a long time. So, but you have to do it in a way where you really believe that it's going to work. This is hard.

But people are working on it. There are, there are good algorithms there now. Yeah, so you sleep well at night. Yeah, I don't have to worry. Yeah, you can sleep well at night. Those secrets you're carrying the whole world wants. But, yeah, you know, because, you know, I keep the nuclear codes under my pillow. So, you know.

So last thing, we've heard the term quantum supremacy. Is this just sort of Cold War all over again kind of thing? This was a nice term developed by a theorist proposing it, and then we did an experiment. It's basically showing that we could do with a quantum computer, something that would take way longer for a regular computer, a big data center, okay? And that's what we did in 2019, but it was for a mathematical problem. And now what people are doing is working very hard to do something useful in this way, used to do it. And that's harder. It takes bigger computer and more clever algorithms.

So it's not a geopolitical statement, quantum supremacy. Well, some people kind of thought it did. So some people call the quantum advantage. Somehow the word supreme and supremacy was kind of not good. But anyway, that's what it was branded as originally. We're going to go to our Patreon supporters. This is Scott Oppenlander, who says, or OpenLander. Hello, this is Scott Oppenlander, pronounce Scott. Really, Scott. Thanks.

You know, these people. He says, I'm tuning in from Chicago. Hey, Neil, John, and Lord Nice, as quantum computing advances, it seems like its potential power could create risk even greater than the AI challenges we're already wrestling with. Do you see quantum technology as something that might require the same level of early government control as the development of the atomic bomb, at least until we understand it well enough

to regulate it responsibly. I like that, because go back in time, we created the Atomic Energy Commission, which put rules and regulations and guidelines for how we obtain, process, and use nuclear fuel, basically. That would become atomic energy. So do you foresee, John, just echoing this question, a need for a quantum computing commission

so that it doesn't become our overlords. That's right. You know, this is happening in real time right now with AI and large language models, and this has always been the case for supercomputers, and that has been controlled in some way. I think we can take what's going on with modern AI and the like, and there's profound societal impacts there.

And I think we need to use the same structure that you're seeing there to, you know, govern what quantum is doing. Quantum is behind. It's probably where AI and large language models were 10 and 15 years ago. But I think we already have the things in place and we should just kind of learn from that and copy from that to make sure we're okay. As an early model of how to think about the problem. But presumably, you're not one of those who says, put a ban on further research. That wouldn't make any sense to a research scientist.

Well, it's kind of like would you put a ban on AI research and then have other countries or adversaries? You know, it's kind of the same problem as that. And these are hard problems. I'm not saying I have an easy answer. But I think we can use these other examples in computing as a way to guide us. Very good. Yeah, the cat's out the bag.

Yeah, there's. Forget it. All right, what else you got? Very cool. This is Mark Phillips, who says, Greetings, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice, and John, this is Mark from Florisson, Missouri. Missouri. Missouri.

He says, I understand. A qubit exists in a state of superposition, almost like it's stuck in the phantom zone. Oh, do you know the phantom zone? I don't know the phantom zone. That's the prison in the Superman? The little flat, two-dimensional. The flat two-dimensional space that you're banished to?

That's a prison. It's a prison. It's a phantom zone. Gotcha. They're stuck in a two-dimensional shape. Right. And when a nuclear blast opened that up, and that's when you had... And that's how they got freed.

You got the three criminals who came to Earth. Zod. Zod. Neal before Zod. Yeah. He says, my question is about the hardware. How do you physically transmit that fragile quantum state through fiber optic light or copper wiring without it collapsing?

And how does that go? probability signal eventually translate into a hard, real-world data point that a computer can actually use. I like that. Wow, Mark, you are a real downer. So does a Cuban have a lifetime, a life expectancy for it to remain in that state? Yeah, and that's the basic thing of the question, the basic idea is that all these cubits are imperfect. And if you send it down a photon down a fiber optic, it can go kilometers, but eventually it gets absorbed and removed.

Copper wire, it's even much worse. It's why we use superconductors. And all I can say is we've spent decades now understanding this problem and figuring out how to engineer so that we don't lose the quantum energy. But the thing to remember is in any quantum system, you always have to be. these imperfection. So there's always errors in a quantum computer, whereas in a classical computer, you can design your bits so that they can last a long time and you don't have to worry about it. And that's what makes it so hard to build. So part of the challenge then is keeping the quantum computer very cool to reduce the thermal

noise that could decoher your quantum phenomena. Is that That's why we read about this. That's right. We go very cold so there's no noise, no noise. We use superconductors, so there's no dissipation. But, you know, if it's a microwave circuit, it can radiate it acts like an antenna, and the energy can get lost that way. So this is the real challenge to build an experiment is to figure out how to, you know,

get around all these problems. But for now, we're not carrying a quantum computer on our hip. Well, yeah. Because we don't have superconducting materials and... We're not going to see a Texas instrument quantum computer anytime soon. What's funny is we all carry our quantum computer on our hip now, or computer. But that's just a terminal to a big data center where all the crunching is doing. So I kind of feel like quantum computers will be that way.

We have a data terminal and we use it. And then it's often some fancy data. center somewhere in the 1950s and 60s right four function computers filled a room right with a heavy university of pennsylvania with a you know the whole room the whole room was the computer was the computer right and to say oh one day you're going to carry that on your hip no nobody would have no people who looked at you like you were crazy back then right right yeah well just give a shout out then to david drain who asked the question hi dr tyson lord nice professor um have wondered if quantum computing will fit into devices that we have now,

or will it be like terminals and servers, and earlier hardware configurations forever? Yeah, terminals, yeah, I think it'll be remote, although, you know, you could still, companies could still buy, want a computer, but I don't think that's necessary to do that unless you're worried about security or something. Yeah, yeah, you'll carry a terminal on your hip, and it'll speak to the,

server, which will be out in space. So it can be cold enough. Or the backside of the moon, like Elon Musk was saying, where it's really cold. Well, only when the sun isn't shining. Right, right, right. Or it's the bottom of a crater where the sun don't shine. Oh, that's, oh, look at that.

That's right, where the sun never sees. No, it's where the sun don't shine. Say it right. Where the sun don't shine. That's right. We call it the moon's butthole. At the bottom of the, at the poles, they're craters that are deep enough at the sun's...

They never see the sun's rays. Never gets over the ridge of the crater. And so the bottom just stays there. It's dark all the time. It's cold, cold, and water gets there and never leaves. Wow. They're called coal traps, actually. But I hadn't considered what a great place to put a computer.

Would be just such a... Yeah, right in the hole trap on the moon. All right. This is Stephen Pellow and or Stefan, but Stephen, he says, Hello, StarTalk family, Neil, John, Lord Nice. My name is Stephen Pello from Goster City, New Jersey. The Dan Brown book, Origin, touches on the idea of quantum computing driving future AI and changing humanity's trajectory. How do you see the real advancements in quantum computing influencing the next wave of scientific discoveries or even our understanding of our own consciousness?

And let me add to that, given the computing power necessary for current AI needs. Yeah. Is that going to be lessened by quantum computing because it can do it all in less time? Or are we all going to be sitting around in the dark because of quantum computing and AI? Taking all the energy. Taking all the energy.

Yeah, so in other words, what is the future marriage of these two frontiers? Well, yeah, when I worked at Google, we were in the quantum AI lab, and people were thinking just that because AI is so important to Google. Right now, if you want to use AI to ask a quantum question, you know, how a molecule work or how does NMR work or some scientific question that involves quantum mechanics, that's where it might answer these AI might be really powerful and answer these questions first. But then eventually, you know, it'll be better.

So, yeah, it could be that when you query something on your phone in, you know, five, ten years from now, you'll, you'll be. get some quantum computer, you know, aided, aided the result, which would be pretty nice. Very cool. All right. Did we get the last bit of that question, too? What was? The last bit was, how will it affect our understanding of our own consciousness? There's a lot of people who believe that the quantum computing will reach a point where the

computing state will be so advanced that this emerging quality or singularity will happen and consciousness will take place in the computer itself. Like Skynet. Like Skynet. Skynet achieved consciousness in the Terminator. So, yeah. So you'll have an actual sentient, self-aware thinking being that emerged from the ability to make these computations.

Yeah. If you have the number of sort of computational synaptic possibilities such as what goes on in the human brain, right. We're pretty sure that consciousness is emergent, right it wasn't designed into the package it came out of the package so john do you feel or think or see that consciousness might just come out of quantum computing yeah i i think people talk about that it's a possibility but um i'm more of a practical person and uh i don't necessarily You know, I'm working on building a quantum computer and not what's going to happen in 20 years from now.

So, but, yeah, that's definitely possibility. Wow. Very cool. That's because he's going to be dead in 20 years. You don't have to care about what's that. Actually, you joke about that, but that's what I talk about in my talk. So that I'm really trying to accelerate the development of quantum computers. So it happens in your lifetime.

So it'll happen before I die. Yeah, yeah. It's one of the primary rules of a science experiment. Right. Make sure it finishes before you die. You know, the mission to Pluto, that was a payload that was very low mass, put on the most powerful rockets we had so we could get to Pluto as quickly as possible. Yep, yep.

And who was sick in the team and on their deathbed that made that decision? A deathbed promise? We'll get there before you. We'll get there before you go, sir. I promise you. It was the fastest rocket ever launched. Wow. I mean, it attained higher speeds than anything ever.

Yeah, except the rocket that went into the sun, near the sun, but going out to the solar system. Right. And it got out there fast. Yeah. Very cool. Okay, a few more questions. All right. This is Jabok.

He says greetings from... Jabaka? Jubak. Jabok. J-I-B-K. Jabak. Jabok. Okay.

Yeah, he says, greetings from London. Dr. Martinez, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice, quantum computing is, I believe, approaching a stage where it's commercially viable for use for enterprise or even consumer use. Intel recently showed off one of their mass-producible chips. I believe the true power of AI, Agenetic, generative computing could be unlocked when we marry the technology with quantum computing. Could you please share your views on this topic? Thanks to you, Dr. Martinez, and many congratulations, and thank you to all of you guys for what you're doing. So we addressed it a little bit.

A little bit, but really what he's saying is, are we ever going to get there where, because it would make sense, AI and the quantum just go together hand in hand. Like, that is your computer. That is the thing. You don't have any other computer. You just have a quantum computer. that is charged by AI. You also don't have a life

because it's doing everything. Yeah. It's thinking for you. It's pooping for you. Right. It's running the robot that does all the physical work for you, right? It's driving for you.

It's doing everything. You don't need governments because it is the government. It's a computing version of Wally. Right. Remembering Wally? He was just this blob. They all sat around on hovering beds.

Just there with nothing to do. Right. Yeah. You know, people are thinking about that. I mean, with our collaboration, we have people who are collaborating with people are building supercomputers and they know about GPUs. And I think that's the natural way to go. I think you want to think about a quantum computer as a co-processor to a supercomputer, you know,

with the GPUs and language models. But, yeah, that people definitely looking in that direction. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Well, there you have it, Jabok. You got it, buddy. Hope you get to stick around.

you don't have to do anything. All right. This is Matt Curtis, who says, Hello, Geniuses, and Chuck. You know what, Matt? You know what, Matt? Meet me outside. I got your genius right here, buddy.

Why is he insulting me already? So Matt says, hey, this is Matt. from South Carolina here. Quantum computing has made strides in the number of, in the number of cubits available and appears to be accelerating that number. What is the threshold

at which quantum computing becomes useful for things like encryption, for more than things like encryption and breaking and creating, and other realms where the concept shows promise. We know the encryption part, but how do we go

beyond that? And, What can quantum computing do for us in the other realms? But what about weather prediction, for example, where the systems are so complex? Yeah, I mean, right. You can only have certain possibilities because you have no idea how the fluid is going to act in the atmosphere. Well, the atmosphere is the fluid, but how it's going to act. Yeah, that's kind of a good question. You know, there's actually debate in the community whether you can build a small quantum computer,

let's say a thousand cubits. If they're good enough, you can solve some problems. And other people say, no, you have to go to a million qubits and get the mirror corrected for a general purpose. So there's still a lot of the debate. And it's kind of interesting time because people are building things and testing it and trying to figure it out. I think the weather prediction is kind of an interesting application. People have talked about solving these differential occasions in some way. Fortunately, I don't know much about that.

But, yeah, there's a lot of different interests. My personal view is that once we build a quantum computer that's better and bigger and start seeing these applications, then more people, creative people will jump into the field and do it. It's kind of what happened with regular computers. Once you started building them, once it got more powerful, when all these ideas came out. And the Internet itself as well. Exactly. Who would have thought?

Yeah. Who would have thought. So, John, is there? A limit to how many qubits can exist in one place? I don't think there is. It's a matter of engineering and practical consideration on how big you can make it and still not have it lose the energy. And, you know, right now we're at 100,000 and people, you know,

I don't know where it's going to end. And what's the largest one as of this recording? There are cubit counts of about a hundred or so in the superconducting case, and people in neutral atoms are now building thousands of cubits, and that's really exciting to see that. But besides the number, you also have to make them good. There's a lot of other things you have to worry about. But this is advancing very rapidly now. What's this we heard here of a Google Willow chip, and that it can do? a calculation that would otherwise take 10 to the 25 years of a traditional computer to accomplish?

Yeah, this is very similar to the results that I was involved in when I was at Google in 2019. And in the intermediate time, they made it bigger and they've made it better, less errors. So there's a very good development of the technology. This is very healthy for the field. The universe is only 10 to the 10 years old. And so to say that a traditional computer would take 10 to the 25 years, that's, I don't even know what we would have to compute to have to do it that fast. So, I mean, other than weather forecasting, what else needs that level of computing?

Or someone clever person is going to say, here's something no one thought of, because they couldn't have ever calculated it. And here it is, and now it's done routinely by quantum computers. Well, I know one. It could be like the mapping of the human brain, the neurosynaptic functions of the human brain are so varied, and there's so many of them, like that be kind of a cool way to figure out. And these are applications that people are, you know, have to discover and work on. And the real problem right now is taking whatever quantum computer we have,

which has some, you know, limits to its thing, and then taking. the algorithms and try to match them together and do something useful. But as soon as you solve really useful problems all the time, and it's like money goes into the film, the firms, because they're solving useful problems, then you can even develop these more. This is what happened with conventional electronics. Well, kids, here's the takeaway from this.

Study physics. Because guess what? There's going to be no other jobs. Okay? If you're not studying physics, you are, I'm wasting your time, okay? Computers are going to do everything else. Nobody's going to be working except physicists, so you better do it.

I'm just physics and engineers. That's it. So one last question here before we land this plane. The discussions of whether we live in a simulation, could the complexity of our world be sort of a trivial calculation on a willow chip in some alien kid's basement? Yeah. Like if there was a super computer that was like the size of Manhattan, a super... Why make it big? Keep them little. Who cares? Well, no, because I'm saying that shows you the size of the number of cubits that are at work. And they're all stabilized and they're all doing their calculations.

Gotcha. So is that the kind of computer that necessary to simulate our world? Our universe. Or even the universe. Yeah. So I would say if you believe in simulation theory and now that we can do these really complex calculations of the quantum computer, that whatever is doing the simulation has to have a big quantum computer. So that's my conclusion about the simulation. Okay. All right.

So there it is. He's like, no matter what, all roads lead back to me. And even the computer that's simulated the computer has to be a quantum computer. Or at least if they have to have part of it, has to be a quantum computer. It's quantum all the way down. That's what it is. Turtles all the way down. Well, thanks for taking time out of your day,

and you're coming to us from your home in Santa Barbara. And this has been a delight. And can we keep you on speed dial in the future if we have, like, quantum confusion? I had an enjoyable time, and I'm glad that it was such a fun conversation. So, yeah. Excellent, excellent.

He'll be all quantum man about town. There you go. Right. Quantum Man, all about town. All about town. In every part of the town at the same time. Oh. All right.

Again, Professor, thank you. Thank you very much. It's a real pleasure. Chuck, always good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. Yeah. This has been StarTalk, the Nobel Prize edition. Yeah.

2025 on quantum tunneling. Macroscopic quantum tunnel. Sweet. All right. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.