The Blindboy Podcast - Speaking to a Quantum Physicist about Quantum Computers and Irish Mythology

Episode Date: November 2, 2022

JC Seamus Davis is an Irish professor of quantum physics. We speak about the complex quantum world and contrast it with Irish mythology. We did this to celebrate Science Week 2022, which takes place from the 13th of November sfi.ie Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bola bus you fussy gobnets. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. It is the 2nd of November and if you're in Dublin and you're not doing anything tonight, come along to my live podcast in Vicar Street. Last night was sold out, it was a magnificent, fantastic night and the last few tickets are still available for tonight and I have a cracking guest and it'll be wonderful fun so come along if you're not doing anything else tonight. I have a bit of a mind-bending episode for you this week. This week's episode is about quantum physics and I speak to a quantum physicist and I'm doing this because science week is coming up. Science week is the 13th to the 20th of November and this year's Science Week is quite special because it sees a return to loads of in-person events. I've been involved with Science

Week since about 2011 because it's a fantastic initiative that democratises science for people and also because I love science. And what always made Science Week special for me as an adult is as you know, I didn't have a particularly enjoyable time in school. I failed my leave insert. I had undiagnosed autism. My personal experience growing up as a child and a teenager was, I was kind of given the message that science was not for me. Even though I was interested in it,

passionate, curious about the world, creative, all of the facets that would make a person a good scientist. But because I struggled so badly in school, the message was kind of given to me in subtle and not so subtle ways that science was not for me. Science was for the quote unquote serious students. And I would have internalized that and told myself that science wasn't for me. But I couldn't quench my curiosity. So I pursued an interest in science as a teenager, as an extracurricular activity. Something I read about privately in my bedroom from encyclopaedias. And maintained a lifelong interest in, as a layperson will say. If you've ever listened to one of my podcasts where I speak about the history of colours and painting and pigments,

that's chemistry. When I speak about psychotherapeutic theory, that's the science of psychology. If I do a podcast about music, and music is symmetrical vibrations of air. That's physics. And when I speak about music and how symmetrical vibrations of air can have emotional resonance with our brains, that's the intersection of physics and psychology and biology too. So I adore science. And Science Week for me has always been a space that makes me feel welcome in science. And a space for healing.

And when I say healing, whenever I've attended a Science Week event or gone to a demonstration or a talk with a scientist or had a scientist on this podcast, or had a scientist on this podcast, the sense of inclusion and accessibility that I feel, I'm healing the wounds of teenage me who was told he couldn't do biology or couldn't do chemistry because these are important subjects and I'm too poorly behaved and I'll distract the other students who want to learn. So instead I was just encouraged into whatever other subjects had vacancies. And Science Week as an adult helps me to heal around those areas. It helps me feel included and valid in scientific conversations. So for this year for Science Week, there's just tons of events happening all over Ireland right loads lots of brilliant free events for kids for adults with the purpose of democratizing science

bringing science into the community for people to engage and enjoy it so if you're a curious person I strongly suggest engaging with Science Week which starts on the 13th of November. And if you want to find out, I'm not even going to list out the events because there's honestly so many. Just go to the Science Foundation Ireland's website, sfi.ie, and look up the list of events. And they're all over Ireland. And the other thing too.

You might end up finding a new career for yourself. I mean you could be in your mid to late 20s. In your 30s. In your 40s. You're a different human being to who you were when you were 16, 17. Doing the leave insert. You might go to a Science Week event. And go fuck it. This is amazing to a Science Week event and go, fuck it.

This is amazing. How can I try and do this? Could I go into physics? Could I go into chemistry? Biology? Could I do this? And the beauty is, as a mature student,

if you can put the work in, if you can get the funds together, you absolutely can. And you could be on a new path to find a greater sense of meaning because as you know with me i'm often tempted to just decide to go back and finish my psychology qualification and then other times i'm like i know I'm shit at maths but could I go and study physics could I do that because I adore it I can understand it using language and pictures I'm fascinated with it I'm curious with it but could I do that right now I'm I'm happy being a podcaster and a writer but that's the purpose of the conversation I have today with Dr. Seamus Davis,

who is an Irish quantum physicist, a world-renowned quantum physicist who's from West Cork. But Seamus is a professor of quantum physics in UCC in Cork. He's a professor of physics in the University of Oxford in UK. He's a professor of physics in Cornell over in New York in America. Seamus Davis is an expert, a bona fide expert in the field of quantum physics, which is an utterly fascinating area

because it's so difficult to understand. It's the area of physics which is concerned with the nature of reality itself. It's the area of physics that comes to conclusions that to brain. Look like fucking magic. All rules of. What I would call rationality. Break down at the quantum level. And the goal of this chat. Between me and Seamus Davis.

Is. I'm an artist. I'm a writer. And I have an interest in quantum physics. But this is a professor of quantum physics, an expert in quantum physics. And the conversation we had is interdisciplinary. Can an artist and a writer sit down with a quantum physicist and try and have a shared conversation about quantum physics?

And we did, and it was great crack and we brought irish mythology into it and everything this the chat we have it's not particularly heavy because remember i'm a lay person i don't understand quantum physics the way that seamus can so seamus is speaking in a democratized language that I can understand. So it's not particularly heavy. But having said that, quantum mechanics is fucking nuts. No matter how simple you make it, sometimes it's like trying to imagine a color that doesn't exist.

That's what it feels like. Imagining a color that doesn't exist. I can't say to you you it's a bit like red or it's a bit like blue no it's a brand new primary color i can't show it to you and because of that i can't it's very difficult to use language to explain it to you and sometimes quantum physics can feel like that because it's so far outside of what we understand to be reality and time but it's the unfathomability of it that makes it beautiful it's like tasting a new strange food and you don't know if you like it or not it's like eating a Sichuan peppercorn it's an ingredient in Chinese cooking if you ever get the chance to eat a Sichuan peppercorn. It's an ingredient in Chinese cooking. If you ever get the chance to eat a Sichuan peppercorn, do. I can't describe it to you.

I cannot. It's not sweet. It's not salty. It's not tart. It's the Chinese describe it as numbing. I cannot describe to you the taste of a Sichuan peppercorn until you taste it. And when you do taste it you're just going to be like

what the fuck is this I don't know how I feel about this that's what the experience of trying to explain and then trying to fathom quantum physics is like it's Sichuan peppercorns I'm talking out of my hoop now

here is the chat that I had with the quantum physicist Seamus Davis for Science Week 2022, which begins on the 13th of November. Okay, Seamus, you are a quantum physicist. Quantum physics is an area that me and my listeners were utterly fascinated like i'm utterly fascinated in the area and one of the things that draws me towards it is it's not just because it's so fascinating but because of the unique way that it tickles my brain because the limitations of language like the sheer limitations of me trying to understand what quantum physics is or the quantum world is using just language and

visualizations it tickles my brain and it feels impossible and there's something almost funny about it and could you try and explain quantum physics to us in as simple terms as possible well uh first of all the brain tickling thing is the same for everyone for professional physicists just the same as everyone else and i've always thought the reason for that is that you know we evolved in a world where we had to you know hunt deer and gather berries and fish and we we just didn't develop the mental machinery which is necessary to to accept and understand quantum mechanics so i think everybody faces the same challenge in that regard then um that regard then um yeah go ahead what no no you go ahead go uh so i was i was about to say that so i i can state that quantum physics is the fundamental theory of physics underpinning

everything and it's the best physics theory that we've ever achieved. Probably mathematicians wouldn't agree with me, but I think it's a pinnacle of intellectual achievement of the human race. And much of our modern society and our way of life actually depends on quantum mechanics, even though we don't acknowledge that every day. Then what is it? It's a theory for how objects in our universe exist and interact with each other. And we used to think that the theory only worked for objects, you know, at the atomic scale, a billion times smaller than a human being. But we now know that that was just a kind of a psychological hang up. There's no distance scale at which quantum mechanics doesn't work. What?

I did not know that. I assumed quantum mechanics was the really, really, really small, smaller than an atom. You mean that it's not just smaller than an atom? Well, if you go and look at a quantum computer, which you can do now, they're a lot bigger than an atom and they don't work based

on atoms. They work based on circuits inside like the circuits in your mobile telephone and those circuits are big enough for a human being to see but they're fully quantum mechanical so so yeah the idea that quantum mechanics is only hidden from us at the atomic scale was a convenient piece of fake news a 100 years ago but we now know it's false so before i get on to my next question i want to strip it back just in case someone listening just simply does not know what quantum mechanics are um my basic understanding right the most basic understanding is when you look at when scientists look at quantum particles they can change their behavior

depending on whether they're being looked at or not and that rocks the sheer foundation of what i call rational observation i understand the world to be a solid thing that's there all the time and that's reliable but then when you go into quantum physics it's like things change depending on when you're where depending on whether you're looking at them or not and then i start thinking oh my god does that mean atoms are smart i don't understand this and then i stopped thinking i shut down well it's certainly true that you can arrange quantum mechanical experiments so that what you will detect depends on how you do the detecting. That part is true. But the idea that everything is ephemeral, that's false.

The hydrogen atoms in your body were formed at the beginning of the universe, you know, 15 and a half billion years ago. And they're perfectly stable. And you and I are, and this isn't a psychological statement, it's a physics statement. We're perfectly stable. Our whole environment is stable. Quantum mechanics absolutely allows everything to be stable and well-defined. That's one of its benefits, not one of its problems. So does stuff start getting really weird only when you go subatomic no stuff starts getting really weird when you start making superpositions so superposition in quantum mechanics is when you can have an object it could be an electron but nowadays it could be a circuit in a quantum computer.

And that object can be in two states. And a simple way to think about it is like a coin. Imagine a euro coin. If you put it on the desk in front of you, it can either be heads or tails. Those are the two states. And in the way our minds work, we believe that an object must be in one state or in the other state but according to the rules of quantum mechanics that's actually not true it could be in a superposition it could be in a mixture of both states and it's at that point that things start to get very weird because surely time then comes into it because it does it

does i'm like how like saying to somebody something is both things at once that's the bit that gets the brain scratching because that goes against what i call rationality well yeah it certainly goes against um against standard uh human expectations of how the world works but we've now had quantum mechanics for for almost a century and you can do you know experiments to test what i've just just said have been done billions of times and they always yield the same answer that it is possible to put objects in our universe in a superposition of two states at the same time. So my human, so I'm, when I say there with confidence, reality, that's actually the arrogance of my human brain. My brain isn't equipped to see reality.

I wouldn't call it arrogance. isn't equipped to see reality. I wouldn't call it arrogance. I mean, philosophers, and I'm not a philosopher, but they have argued for centuries about the capability, for millennia actually, about the capability of the human brain to accurately detect reality. And that's a whole different... Of course, Rene Descartes.

Descartes, when he would say, what's the world like for a bat who can't see? Yeah. So I think you need a different podcast with a philosopher to address that question. But that's a question about the way the human brain is wired. If you ask a question about, you know, carrying out an experiment, you make an apparatus. It has a quantum system in it. You press a button and it puts the system in a superposition of two states.

You use the theory to predict what happens as a function of time and then you make a measurement to find out what state it's in at the end. That sequence of experiments has been done successfully for a hundred years. We know it's correct. But it's an interesting thing you said there

about philosophy, we'll say like you're a scientist but i can't help but observe that like so much of your work intersects with philosophy you're like you're studying like what is reality i mean when you go at that level it's what is reality and that's a question that religion has been trying to battle with for a long time philosophers psychology what are the fundamental mechanics of what what is reality everything you say is perfectly correct how do you keep your scientist hat on with that shit? It is very tough, actually. So many scientists, especially physicists, they like to focus in on the one straightforward thing

that they're studying, right? And if you do that, you can keep your physics hat on. You put it on at seven o'clock in the morning and you take it off in the evening. But, you know know you're absolutely right if you want to do your job properly you should put on your philosopher hat every now and then and step back from what you're doing and think what does this really mean because one thing i often wonder about and i don't know is it is it pseudo-scientific or not but i remember hearing about there's a

certain type of bird i think it's a sparrow and they found that this sparrow uses quantum entanglement in its brain in order to navigate the magnetosphere of the earth or something yeah have you heard of that i have yes it's if it's biologists love that fact because it links their field with fundamental fields of physics especially that's what i want to know about quantum biology i want to know it like and i understand i might be asking you questions that are that are outside your field so i'm asking for opinion but yeah quantum biology fascinates me. The idea that even in the human brain that there's quantum processes. Well, no, wait.

So everything in the universe is quantum mechanical. Including my brain. Absolutely. Okay, speaking now as a physicist. Because it's made from atoms. Because it's made from atoms and the rules governing those atoms are quantum mechanics. So that's a reductionist view of science, but it's the one I hold. Everything comes from physics.

That pisses off biologists. anyway now but if you're asking a specific question you know let's say in the operation of my brain or your brain is there quantum entanglement well there could be there's no rule of physics against it you can ask a harder

question you know do we know for certain that there is entanglement in the quantum entanglement in the operation of our brains and the answer to that is no but it's for a subtle question it's because we don't have any machines today which automatically detect quantum entanglement right and shameless what is quantum entanglement because i understand the someone who won the nobel prize this year won the prize for something around quantum entanglement so Because I understand someone who won the Nobel Prize this year won the prize for something around quantum entanglement. So a lot of questions I was asked was, what is quantum entanglement?

Okay, so already we discussed the situation that in quantum mechanics, you can have an object and it can be in two states at the same time. That's not entanglement. That's superposition. Okay. states at the same time. That's not entanglement. That's superposition. Now, if you take two objects, take two euros and put them on the table in front of you, then there are four states. One of them can be heads, tails, and the other one can be heads, tails. So there's four possibilities. And in the classical world, those four possibilities are independent of each other.

And in the classical world, those four possibilities are independent of each other. But quantum entanglement would be that if one of those coins, if one of those coins is heads, the other one is always tails. You would construct the quantum mechanical state so that that rule was built in from the beginning. And then no matter what you would do later, that correspondence between the two states would always be maintained. That's the rule behind quantum entanglement. And the reason why Einstein objected to it is that you could then take one coin to Belfast and the other coin to Cork. And no matter how far apart they are, they somehow would still know that if one is heads, the other is tails. And he claimed that since no information can travel faster than the speed of light, that set of ideas about quantum mechanics must be wrong.

And Ireland's great quantum physicist, John Bell, proved that Einstein was wrong and that entanglement is right. And is this what they do with the Large Hadron Collider? They try and get these two coins from the distance of Belfast and Cork and see what happens. What do we do if we separate these two objects? The experiments for which the Nobel Prize was given last week were the two first-generation experiments designed to test that very idea, designed to test John Bell's theory. Actually, John Bell wasn't trying to prove Einstein wrong.

He thought Einstein was right. He was developing a theory which, if you carry out his experiment, would prove Einstein right. But in fact, it proved Einstein wrong, and Bell had to accept the consequences of his own theory. But anyway, in those experiments, what they do is they take two quantum mechanical objects and they're entangled so that one of them is in one state, let's say heads, and the other one is in the other state, let's say tails. And then they send them off as far as they can. In the modern you send them hundreds of kilometers to detectors and then at the moment when you detect heads of one of them you're guaranteed

to detect tails of the other one even though the time interval between those two detections is so short that you could never have sent any information from one detector to the other it's for experiments like that that they gave the nobel prize but here's the thing again the limitations of my human brain the question i ask is oh my god is that telepathy do you know what i mean that's where my brain goes it's like how is a euro in cork yeah talking instantaneously to a euro in belfast like i call that telepathy how is it why is it not telepathy yeah so nobody knows the answer to that question that i don't know the answer and there's no physicist that i know who knows the answer that's a frontier mystery of nature and when i give lectures to young physicists now in ireland i gave one in ucc a couple of months ago i challenged

them with this is something that the next generation of physicists have to solve. But right now we don't know the answer. Let's take a little break now for the ocarina pause. I'm going to play the ocarina and you're going to hear an advertisement for something. Okay. To be continued... The first omen, I believe, girl, is to be the mother. Mother of what? Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six.

It's the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real. It's not real. It's not real. Who said that? The first omen, only in theaters April 5th.

Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th, when the Toronto Rock host the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. You would have heard an advert there, a digitally inserted advert that was placed there by Acast. If you're enjoying this episode, remember to engage with Science Week.

Just visit sfi.ie and check out all the wonderful science week events this podcast is supported by you the listener via the patreon page patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast if you listen to this podcast regularly if it brings you solace, comfort, entertainment, intrigue, distraction, whatever it is this podcast does for you, please consider becoming a patron of the podcast. Consider paying me for the work that I do to make this podcast possible. Because this podcast is my full-time job. I adore this work. I'm so happy to do this work. But it's how I earn a living. It's how I pay my bills. And the predictability and reliability of having patrons

is what allows me to put out a podcast each week and to maintain a consistent quality. So all I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month that's it you can do it via patreon.com forward slash the blind buy podcast and if you can't afford that don't worry about it you can listen for free you can listen for free because the person who is a patron is paying for you to listen for free. So everybody gets a podcast. I get to earn a living. It's a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness. Also, it keeps this podcast independent. We recently celebrated 50 million listens. That's only possible because legitimately

each week I only speak about what I am genuinely passionate about. And when I have that level of creative control and integrity over what I'm making, I end up putting out the best podcast that I could put out. Because I'm independent. I'm not beholden to advertisers. No advertiser can tell me what to talk about or how to talk about it. So thank you to my patrons. Have any gigs to promote? Tonight

if you want in Vicar Street if you're around Dublin, come along. This Saturday the 5th of November I'm in Wexford at the Speaker 10th. Then on the 18th of November I'm in Brussels and then on the 3rd of December

I'm in the TLT Theatre in Drogheda and then that's it for the year because I'm chilling out on the 3rd of December I'm in the TLT Theatre in Drogheda and then that's it for the year because I'm chilling out on the gigs because I want to focus on making this podcast, delivering it each week and writing my books I love gigging but it's quite time consuming and when I'm on the road and when I'm gigging

I'm not creating so let's get back now to my chat with the absolutely fascinating Seamus Davis do you think so one thing I often when I whenever when I'm trying to think about we say the human's capacity to see something that's beyond our understanding yes I often take it back to to art okay, because that's my field is art. And one thing I'm fascinated about is, so if you look at cave paintings, and cave paintings can be almost 30,000 years old. Yep.

For thousands and thousands of years, tens of thousands of years, humans drew the world they saw in two dimension. That was it. the world they saw in two dimension that was it and then only around the 11th century did art start to explore 3d space on a 2d surface like before the 1200s all representation of the world was flat two dimensions and then they reckon it was because of the development of architecture so when certain painters in italy uh one fellow paolo uccello and giotto in italy they started to paint paintings in cities and because of the straight lines that architecture and cities created they started to develop and understand perspective but as soon as humans were able to see a 3D space

represented on a 2D surface, it no longer confused our brains. It unlocked it. And now anybody can draw 3D on 2D space. Will something happen with quantum physics whereby this shit stops being unfathomable? Oh, well, that's a brilliant question so one thing i've noticed in teaching so i've been teaching quantum mechanics to you know um university

students and graduate students now for around 30 years and 30 years ago you know they were trained to believe that quantum mechanics is mysterious. And we always had to just stop worrying about it. Don't think about it and just do your calculations. But I've noticed now in the last few generations, and by generations, generations of college students are only four years per generation. Younger people are more and more accepting of quantum mechanics as just being reality.

They have very little resistance to it. They say, okay, this is the truth. This is how the world works. Let's just get on with it. And soon enough, engineers will be the same, in my opinion. So I think the mystery of quantum mechanics at the kind of psychic level is going to diminish. Do you have any theories about why that would be?

I mean, one thing immediately for me is I'm old enough to remember the internet not existing, but young enough to have grown up with the internet being an important part of my teen years. And when I was six six the idea that i would have a smartphone and all the different things that my smartphone can do its capacity to instantly connect with people that was beyond science fiction when i was a kid and i lived through that complete sea change in consciousness and understanding do you think maybe the literacy

of technology that young people have now as a given makes them a bit more accepting of something as strange as quantum physics absolutely and just like you said in the case of 3d perception and art culture changes our world is our world is moving into a world which, for technical reasons, is actually going to be more and more dominated by quantum mechanics. Most physicists and many engineers believe that the 21st century will be the century when quantum mechanics gets implemented throughout our technology set and begins to directly influence our lives and so you know i think your guess is excellent probably 50 years from now young people won't

even know that quantum mechanics is mysterious they'll just know this is how the world works because i remember my so my mother would be in her 80s and she used to tell me when she was living in Tipperary as a kid and electricity first became accessible to the public. People were terrified of it. People were scared of light switches. Yeah. Like even recently, there was a thunderstorm in Dublin last week and some people were commenting about they remember as kids when a thunderstorm would happen you'd turn off the tv and it's like why would you turn off the tv because the lightning would travel down to your house and electrocute the whole family through the television

now this today is bizarre like yeah yeah like because electricity is mad as well like if you think of someone 80 years ago there's an imaginary force that can turn lights on in your house. That's terrifying. Yeah, my grandfather was a lineman for the ESB during rural electrification. Oh my God. That runs in my family. Yeah, so your point is a very good one. So as culture changes,

and if we don't have some disastrous third world War or something, it'll continue to improve. Young people have just become more and more accepting of the ideas which are necessary for them to get on with their lives. And young physicists and engineers now have to use quantum mechanics in order to do their jobs. So as more and more and more of those people are trained it'll become normal and quantum computing Seamus um so again I'm just going to be my understanding of quantum computing if I'm incorrect let me know so I traditional binary computing is ones and zeros and now quantum computing uses superpositions so it can either be a one and zero at the same time and whatever about this it makes computers far more powerful is is that correct

so yes that's perfectly correct but it's reasonably easy to see how it makes them more powerful if you you know imagine i mean we all have 64-bit computers now, but imagine an 8-bit computer, which we would have had in the 1980s and 1990s. So that means the logic engine inside, the engine that does the calculation, it receives a number which has eight binary bits. It has, you know, one or zero at eight places. And then it carries out an operation on that number. It could even do it mechanically. 200 years ago, you would do it mechanically. 1960s, you did it electronically.

But for every operation, there's only one number injected into the calculation engine. Okay. But now suppose it's an eight-bit quantum computer. There's two possibilities on the first bit. Okay, then there's two possibilities on the next bit. If you entangle them, that means four possibilities. If you entangle all 8-bits, then you have an 8-bit number, but you have 256 8-bit numbers that are on the input register at the same time.

So instead of operating on one 8-bit number, if you know what you're doing, you can operate on 256 numbers at the same time. And that's the reason why quantum computing is supposed to become so powerful. Because the input and output registers can operate on many different numbers all at the same time and but as i understand right now the limitations of quantum

computing is that these processes can only occur when the processor is is frozen to a temperature that's below zero that's correct and is that because i quantum computers when i see them it reminds me of seeing photographs of computers from the 1940s or 1950s right these gigantic rooms that basically have about as much power as a usb key now is that where quantum computing is at because it like it's a huge fucking room it's a giant room with this weird what i love about quantum computers they don't even look like computers they look like something a mad plumber would make yeah that's true and gold all the mad plumbing is just to cool the thing down it's actually not okay it's not actually required for the computing. If you looked at the chip, like the Sycamore chip, it looks like a silicon chip.

It doesn't look different than a regular computer chip that you would see on the motherboard of your computer at home. But in order to put each bit, which we call a qubit, into a superposition of two states and to keep it there for a long time. At present, you have to be at ultra low temperatures. Now, that's not a fundamental requirement. That's an engineering requirement. There's no fundamental reason why we couldn't do all of this at room temperature. We just haven't solved all the engineering problems necessary to put each bit in a superposition of two states and keep it there long enough to do a calculation while having the chip at room temperature. Nobody knows how to do that at the moment, but there's a worldwide race to solve that problem. Yeah, because currently there's not a lot of quantum computers.

There's maybe 10. Is that correct? Well, no, that's a subtle question um there are companies that sell superconducting quantum computers ibm rigetti google and so on and the number of those which are known to exist in the public is indeed 10 or 12 wow okay but but but but quantum computers are very important for national security and many people believe that national security agencies around the world uk germany china you you know us japan that they have many more quantum computers which we just don't know about because they're not acknowledged in public.

And what do they, like, is that just because the sheer amount of data that they're handling, they need a quantum computer to do this? Well, the primary reason is cyber warfare. So one of the main things that motivated national security people to pursue quantum computers is that the encryption scheme that we use for the internet now is called RSA and it has survived for almost 40 years very robustly protecting all of our commerce all of our data everything but that RSA system at least on paper can be broken by a quantum computer. So cybersecurity people believe that behind the scenes, behind the scene, there's a massive race.

Either A, to be the first country that can crack the other people's encryption using quantum computers, or B, that can use quantum computers to protect themselves against that encryption. So if I were to guess, there's a lot more than a dozen quantum computers in the world. And the ones we don't know about are all in national security organizations in major countries and federations. So it's almost almost it has echoes of the nuclear arms race of the cold war in the sense that as we move as a society to be more digital if your health system your banking system your energy system is all hooked up to computers now one country could destroy the fabric of society of another country so it's like mutually assured destruction almost it's a race to have the most powerful quantum

computer to prevent the other person doing that attack that would destroy the fabric of that civilization so so we don't know for certain that this is the case, but this situation has been discussed in public now for several decades. So it seems likely that this is the case. And look, it's a true fact of human history that whenever something new is invented, you can use it for good or for evil. And oftentimes it's a race between the two uses. And it seems plausible that we're in the same situation now when it comes to quantum information technology. Well, yeah, it's an extension of humanity itself. Like, one thing I'm always fascinated about is when humans stopped being hunter-gatherers and we started to farm.

And once one group of humans began to farm then they discovered surplus because hunters hunter-gatherers don't have a lot of surplus they're continually moving so as soon as humans had surplus and could store grain then other humans were like well i want some of that so they had to start building walls yeah so and we've been doing this for 10 000 years we're now building the same large walls to keep other people out just on a quantum level i i'm afraid you know as a general observation about human society you're perfectly right and then you know many physicists and many quantum information technologists and companies are afraid that that's what's happening with quantum information technology now. But then the kind of dark side of myself then is like, I know from 20th century history, any time war or the potential for war is driving technology it's when we tend to see advances that

benefit our everyday lives like if you look at just all the things we benefit from on an everyday level that may not exist because of world war ii yeah yeah so of course i agree with you except for one thing which is the good fraction of 100 million people who were killed in World War II. Of course. For the survivors, it's usually beneficial. That's the thing. Yeah. What are the wonderful, beautiful predictions that will happen to improve our quality of life when quantum computers become more widely available?

Right. Do you think a quantum computer is something I'm ever going to have in my living room or will it be in a central cloud server and i just won't be able to have it in my house all right so that's an engineering question so as a matter of fact quantum computers exist and they work now and you can buy one if you want you might need 10 billion euro 10 million euro, but you can buy one. The history of technology shows that if there's a market and if these machines are useful, then they will be miniaturized. The temperature at which they operate will increase. And, you know, 20 years from now, 50 years from now, 80 years from now, there will be desktop quantum computers and laptop and there'll

be quantum telephones without a doubt those are in there's no fundamental physics reason why that can't happen um so i'm pretty we just don't know when it's going to happen right so you you don't know which company to invest in and there's lots of them now but some one of them is going to win the race we know that from history are there any fields that are that you any any we'll say fields that you are excited about if quantum computing becomes uh incorporated into it fields that are trying to solve problems and a quantum computer is the type of thing that will really accelerate that. Yeah, so one is biomolecule design. The molecules in the protein, you know, the proteins in your body are giant molecules and they're critical to our existence and survival, but they're very difficult to understand how they work or to predict how they're going to work

and virtually impossible to design new ones to successfully carry out new functions and the reason for that is there's just too many degrees of freedom in a protein there can be hundreds of thousands of atoms and you know that means the number of confirmations is bigger than any classical computer could ever solve so you know design and quantum computers are known to be a way to solve for the design of better chemicals and biomolecules. So, you know, I think that's a place where we can anticipate direct benefit to society from. And when you say that, are you talking about medicine?

Yeah, medicine, medicine and more generally, you know, improved functioning, you know, of the human body and of the body of animals and plants. These are very, very complicated machines over which we still have very little control. And we don't know how to design the molecules necessary to alter and improve their operation. Quantum computers can do that. Another place I know people are very, very interested, I'm not sure if one considers it to be a benefit to society, is financial engineering. Predicting how the flows of investment and money around the world alter the economies and they should improve human life.

Predicting that is... the economy is like magic like yeah exactly it's so irrational yeah it's completely beyond the scale of what can be predicted with a classical computer so there are many people who hope that quantum computers would make it much more efficient to be able to look a little bit into the future and see what's going to happen in an economy when the conditions are changing i mean we all would love to know now when are the interest rates going to go back down again but nobody knows so could quantum computing because of its sheer size and capacity could it create like a little fake society like a little fake society in a computer and then correctly

have the brain power to predict what might happen what probabilities might happen like a model or is that what you mean yeah that's a deep question i mean what we know is that if you represent the answer to questions like this as a classical problem they cannot be solved solved. So quantum computer people say, if they are ever to be solved, we must have quantum computers. At that level, I think the answer is yes. If you're asking me a specific question, will they solve this problem on a given day?

Nobody knows. That's like asking in 1965, would the iPhone be able to play my movie, right? We can't guess what functionality these machines will bring to society 50 years from now. There's just no way of guessing. Now I'd ask you to put on your philosopher's hat. How do we know that we are not someone else's quantum replication of a civilization? How do we know that our reality is not someone else's quantum computer

and we're doing their predictions for them and that's why everything is so awful? We have absolutely no way of knowing that, that I'm aware of. And that's the type of question which if i had a philosopher hat on is a very good question you could have a good academic life pursuing that question but if i swap hats and put on my physicist hat it's a question a physicist can't touch we we have just no way of addressing a question like that and that there is the that's the tough if i was in your job that would be the tough thing for me is knowing the boundaries between because a thought like that is a very enjoyable and fun thought to have like the idea of is reality a hologram

is reality like one thing and again this is more opinion rather than asking you your professional thing but something i found out recently that really fascinated me is the cia right for 10 years the cia were trying to figure out in the 70s and 80s now this is all this isn't conspiracy theory these documents are fully available now and we can see this is something they did and they're open about it. The CIA wanted to do a thing called remote viewing. Have you heard of remote viewing? I have.

So the CIA wanted to do this remote viewing stuff. Which is basically they were trying to figure out where in the 60s if the Russians have nuclear bombs somewhere, where are they if we can't get satellites there? And they were thinking, some people claim that they can access a transcendent state through meditation where their brain can visit a different part of the world. Absolutely mad shit.

But the CIA figured, maybe it could be true, so let's pump a lot of money into it and tell nobody so they did and they didn't come up with an answer at the end but the CIA did this report called the gateway project after 10 years the only conclusion they could come up with was this would be possible if the universe is a hologram if reality itself is an actual hologram and like do you ever think about that is it possible that our reality is a is a hologram oh i do think about that yeah that is within the realm of physics there's a good deal of theoretical motivation for the idea that um we do live in a holographic boundary of a universe of higher dimensions. So at the level of theory, there are people who, very serious people, who work hard on

those issues. Now, I'm an experimental physicist, and the difficulty with those questions is we don't yet have any, you know, instruments which would allow us to test whether or not we're living in a holographic surface state of a bigger universe um and so at the level of carrying out an experimental test it's it's beyond our capabilities how do you even know yeah that's right so and i was going to make a point about this though there's a kind of a perception of science that you have and i'm sure you don't have this, but there are some people who do. That scientist, you know, goes into a little lab or a dark room and they think for years and they come up with a new idea and they write it down.

And if it's right, it's accepted. But that's not how science works at all, right? So you have an idea, you do an experiment, then you have to go public. have an idea, you do an experiment, then you have to go public. You publish a paper, you go to a conference, you stand up and you say, this is my idea, this is what my results look like. And in the normal operation of the scientific community, half a dozen people in the audience will get up and say, well, you're completely wrong and you're wrong for this reason, or you're wrong for that reason. And then you have to go back to the lab and figure out how to prove that they were wrong when they said you were wrong. And that process goes around and around and around for years and decades and centuries.

And it distills out the facts which are right under all circumstances. Okay. So if you want to get a hardcore scientific result you have to go through that whole process um and another question i have is just we'll say access to this area so this like quantum physics to me and what excites me about it is it seems so creative the the way that quantum physics the questions that quantum physics is trying to answer they feel so enjoyably creative and it's about lateral thinking and out of any area of science it reminds me of of how i think as an artist how i think with my creative brain as an artist.

And I feel comfortable within quantum physics reading about it. However, I'm not, I'm very poor with mathematics. I have quite a creative brain, a capacity for lateral thinking, but my ability to do maths would deny me access to this area. my ability to do maths would deny me access to this area and what i'm wondering is is there space or for people who are the type of brains are that are suited to quantum physics but may not be capable of maths or capable of arithmetic and do you get what i'm saying yeah i do no so the answer is definitely yes, right? So in modern science, usually in any given project, you have a team. A typical team that I would work with would be up to a dozen people.

And they have all different capabilities. Some of them are the math geniuses. Some of them make new materials. Some of them make instruments. Some of them do data analysis. Some of them make instruments some of them do data analysis some of them do the philosophy you know so in in the big world of modern science there is room for anyone who has creative ideas i absolutely now that but the difficulty is the issue no no i would never have been able to study in i would never have been able to, because of, I'm also autistic.

So with my autism, I'm very strong in certain areas and quite weak in others. In the areas that I'm focused on, I can really focus. In the areas that I can't, I really can't. So I would have been denied access to any type of science course simply because of the education system i was brought up in i simply couldn't have accessed these courses and for me it's annoying because i know i would have done quite well in a science field specifically physics because of the amount of lateral thinking that's required so you know what you say about the history of education, especially in Ireland, I was educated in West Cork in the 1970s, is true.

But it doesn't limit a human being throughout their life. No. You know, we could arrange a symposium in Ireland where we invite half the people who to be there would be quantum physicists and the other half to be artists and literati. And we could have an open discussion about new ideas, what their implications are. Oh, we should invite philosophers as well. And as a society, we can all work together to improve things. Then if you come up with some very ingenious question or concept, you know, we can always go back to the lab and get the person who knows how to use the correct piece of mathematics to implement the correct experiment and find out if your idea is

correct or not. So at the level of intellectual engagement, nobody should be barred from anything. And, you know, let me invert this as well. You can probably tell. I'm very interested in history and philosophy and literature. And scientists should also have access to the other side of the blanket, which is the artistic creative side. Are you a fan of Flann O'Brien? I am. And his subatomic theory of the bicycle absolutely absolutely the third policeman one of my favorite books and like that for me that would like when i was a teenager reading that and reading flannery speaking about subatomic theory and how a bicycle could be could take on the personality of a postman and how a postman could take on the personality of a postman and how a postman could take on the personality of a bicycle.

The fun and freedom and enjoyment and creativity of that for the first time in my life made me feel like I had access to science. Flan was speaking my language. I didn't feel intimidated by it. Look, so what we're talking about here is, you know, social fora. So we live in these stovepipe societies now where everyone who works in pharma only talks to people in pharma. Everyone who's an artist, you know, basically

one of my brothers is an artist, they talk to artists. Everyone who writes literature, they talk to their literati colleagues. Everyone who is a physicist, talk to physicists. want to as a physicist talk to physicists in a healthy society there should be more engagement across all of society to explore new ideas both for the benefit for intellectual benefit and for the benefit practical benefit of society did you have you seen any point in history where that was because i sometimes i get a feeling like greek society at the height of greek society you had that intermingling of ideas and you had people from different disciplines freely speaking with each other yeah definitely in classical greece and periclean greece we had that but in more recent times for example in the scottish enlightenment there was a period of about 50 years where Scotland was the center of the intellectual world.

Wow, I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah. Let's see. So who was there? Hume was there. Adams was there. There was a short period where in Edinburgh, the greatest intellectual giants of the world were gathered together and they all spoke to each other as a community. And there have been other periods where that has happened, you know, in Oxford, in Cambridge,

in Harvard, places like that. And, you know, with respect to art, you know, in Paris, in New York, it's a societal thing. It's a case where you have a critical mass of people who are willing to try and communicate with each other. And they all live at the same time and they live in the same place. And just a question about yourself then. Like, so you come from West Cork and you are, you teach in Cornell, in UCC, in Oxford. How do you go from being a lad from West Cork to being one of the most eminent quantum physicists in the world? Like, how the fuck do you do that? Well, I don't know about the journey. Well, I can describe my journey. I went to De La Salle in Skibbereen in the 1970s,

and there was a teacher there. He's still alive. Liam Donovan is his name. And he's a brilliant mathematician and physicist. I used to go into his class. I'd be mesmerized. I'd lose all knowledge of time while I was learning from him. So from what I learned from him, then I went to UCC and there was a brilliant physics program there, world class. And from there, I went to Berkeley as a student and they hired me as a professor and after that I got married I wanted to move closer to home so moved to Cornell and then when the kids grew up wanted to move back to Ireland it's not that complicated in the modern world to move from job to job so in UCC back then in the 70s, was quantum physics being spoken about in the physics program? Oh, it was.

Absolutely. Frank Fahey was the professor of physics then. And he got his PhD in Chicago at the time when they were inventing the nuclear reactor just after the Second World War. So UCC quantum physics in the 1970s and 80s was very serious. It was really world-class education. That's why many of my colleagues, we were able to go out and get good jobs and move through the profession. And by the way, UCC in quantum physics now

is also very, very good. And for someone now who's 18 and they decide, I want to study quantum physics. who's 18 and they decide i want to study quantum physics like what are the what are the beyond being just a physicist who's thinking about quantum physics or doing experiments on it what are the actual practical jobs available to these people what do they go into right that's that's obviously a great question so in the old, the only job you could really go into would be a professional researcher, like a professor, or you could be a researcher in a national lab. You know, we now have some like Tyndall Lab in Cork. And, you know, those jobs, you get to do research for

life. They're wonderful. My job is absolutely wonderful. But in the modern world, so many modern technology companies use quantum mechanics one way or the other. And in the emerging world of quantum technology, quantum computers, quantum encryption, quantum software. In fact, we're not training half enough people to take up the jobs which are going to exist in the world of quantum mechanics 10 and 20 years from now. It's actually going to be an emergency. We'll have to bring people in to Ireland from other countries because we won't have trained enough people to do quantum mechanics at a world-class level. So I think the number of... It'll be like... It's an equivalent question to asking in 1960s, suppose I learn to do semiconductors,

will there be any jobs for me? Well, of course there were, right? And the same thing will be true for quantum mechanics. What is dark matter? By God, you go for the hard questions. By God, you go for the hard questions. So Vera Rubin, who actually was a professor, she was a professor. No, she was a student at Cornell, where I was a professor.

Vera Rubin discovered in the 1970s that the speed at which stars orbit their galaxies is much too high. And the speed at which a planet orbits the sun depends on the mass of the sun. The bigger the mass, the faster the speed. So people deduced from this fact that the speeds of the stars in all galaxies is much too high, that the mass of the galaxy must be much bigger than what we can see, right? Nowadays, you can look at a galaxy, count how many stars, you you know the mass per star so you know the mass of the galaxies if you use that mass you can predict the speed but the speed which is observed is often five six eight ten times higher than it should be so from that people deduce there must be a lot of hidden mass and they call that

hidden mass dark matter now nobody knows what dark matter is nobody even knows whether it exists what they what they do know is that the speeds of orbiting stars are too high and one of the hypotheses is that the universe is full of some gas or fluid of particles which have not been detected which are very massive and they're the source of the dark matter in the galaxies and that could very well be true but no one has ever detected those particles or that fluid so it's still just a hypothesis and we don't have the tools to look for it we don't even know what it looks like if we find this is it a bit like when they were trying to find the Higgs boson yes exactly we we had a much better idea of what the higgs boson would look like than

we have of what dark matter will look like the higgs boson was constrained by the properties of pre-existing particles which we already knew whereas at the moment dark matter as far as i understand is not constrained by anything it it had well no, we know it can't be the particles we're familiar with because otherwise we would have detected it. So it has to be either a new type of particle which has not been suspected, but it's only a hypothesis. So it doesn't have to exist at all.

There might be some other reason why the stars are orbiting at the wrong speed and we just haven't thought of that other reason there's a difference between a hypothesis and effect and dark matter is just a hypothesis are there ever points in your job that make you step back and wonder whether or not all of this was created by something or something sentient, a god? If I swap to my philosopher hat, yes. Most human beings are forced to that point of questioning. Our present understanding is that in the universe,

there's only four particles. There's two quarks, there's the electron, and there's the neutrino. Those are the four material objects there's the neutrino. Those are the four material objects making everything in the universe. And then there's one other particle, which is the photon, which we use to perceive what's around us. That's what light, light is made of photons, right? Yeah. So you could say, you know, at the level of Lego, cosmic Lego, there's only five Lego blocks in the universe. So how could the universe

be constructed in such a beautiful way if there's only five Lego blocks? And the answer to that is quantum mechanics. The rules of quantum mechanics are so subtle and so powerful that you can construct everything we see using only five blocks, but following these weird rules of quantum mechanics. Okay, so these ideas are widely believed by professional physicists. Now, if you swap to your philosopher hat and you say, well, how could you have made the whole universe with just one simple set of rules and five blocks and ended up with this extraordinarily beautiful world? One possibility is it just happened by random or another possibility is it's the creation of something or some

some pre-existing thing and i can't distinguish between those two cases but it's a perfectly valid question is that it is it a uh a toxic question as a physicist if you take your philosophers hat off and now you're a physicist again like is is that so no no yeah so toxic is too strong a term but i described to you earlier that any idea to be accepted in what we now call science including in physics has to survive the criticism of your peers. So if I go to a conference and I say, well, I believe quantum mechanics was created by a certain being that existed before the beginning of the universe,

I can assure you there'll be some colleagues in the audience who will get up and say, that's complete nonsense. It's not a falsifiable idea. It's not science. You's not a falsifiable idea. It's not science. You shouldn't even be raising it. And their criticism is valid within the context of science, even though it's not valid within the context of philosophy. And the last question I want to ask is about time,

because we haven't spoken about time. Time is another thing that scratches my brain, because in my lived experience of reality time is a very linear thing and I know what yesterday is and I have an idea about tomorrow and when I find out that

time isn't that at all that this is just the limitations of my brain and understanding it that fucks up my head. Like, what is the relevance of time within quantum mechanics? If someone says to you, what the fuck was there before time? Like, how does time factor into your job? All right, so that's an extremely deep question.

That's an extremely deep question. Attempts to understand time are much more difficult and challenging than attempts to understand dark matter. Dark matter would be easy compared to time. But time is definitely part of a quantum physicist's job, yeah? Absolutely. The equations of quantum mechanics have this weird property where they do contain time and they do predict how things change in time and if you look around you you'll see that although everything in your environment is made by quantum mechanics it does change in time so at that level time is part of quantum mechanics and in the structure of the theories it becomes part of quantum mechanics

just because quantum mechanics exists in space-time. Space-time is the arena in which quantum mechanics evolves. And the idea of space-time was introduced by Minkowski and Einstein. Space and time are facets of the same fabric of the universe in which we exist. And we don't have any difficulty moving through space forward backward no problem but time is more mysterious we apparently can only move in one direction um but we can't observe time bending can't we we we can and here's the thing i was going to say the equations of quantum mechanics allow us to go backwards in time and there are

various quantum mechanical processes which can be reversed in time. So at the level of quantum mechanics, time isn't the straightforward, get up in the morning, go to work an hour later, go for coffee. It appears to have the capability that you could go in the other direction in time in quantum mechanics. If you don't make a measurement, apparently you can go both directions in time. So just leave it like that for a moment. I wanted to make one other point to you though, right? There are some states in every quantum mechanical problem

that do not evolve in time. They don't perceive time at all. I said to you earlier that the hydrogen atoms, you know, in our bodies are probably 15 and a half billion years old. And they haven't changed. They haven't decayed. They have remained the same. Do you mean literally they're from the Big Bang? Yes. And so most of the hydrogen and helium in the universe are from the Big Bang, a little bit after the Big Bang. And their properties haven't changed in time, through all of that time.

So some quantum mechanical states don't perceive time at all. They're stationary states. They never change. So that's the reason why the world is stable. That's a sense in which we're very lucky that quantum mechanics is the correct theory. Not only does the instability come from quantum mechanics, but the stability comes from quantum mechanics as well. So there's a certain degree of certainty within all the chaos.

Correct. There are states in quantum mechanics which are certainly stable for all time. And when we spoke about quantum entanglement earlier, you've got one euro in Cork and another euro in Belfast, and when you flip them, they flip simultaneously, even though they're far apart. Yep. Does time even factor into that? Because to me, that looks like those two coins

don't give a fuck about time. That's what it appears like to everybody so the the limit people have measured how fast could that we don't believe a signal is being sent from from cork to belfast or vice versa but we do know that the correspondence is maintained at an interval so the shortest interval measured is 10 000 times faster than the speed of light so and i always thought nothing could go faster than the speed well i didn't say anything went faster than the speed of light i just said that the cars the correspondence is maintained 10 000 times faster than the speed of light we know that from experiments

now how could that happen well you know one way it could happen and still have time would be that there's more dimensions of space and in those added dimensions of space kark and belfast are right next to each other okay so there is a possibility that wow this this could make sense if space time is not the simple three-dimensional space that we perceive, but there are other dimensions we can't detect. And the distance between two points is different in those dimensions

than it is in the ones we can perceive. So that's one possibility. Do you know what I find so beautiful about that, Seamus, is we had this shit already in Irish mythology thousands of years ago. Like within Irish mythology, there's the other world, Tir na nÓg. And Irish mythology, it was an oral culture. We didn't have the Western concept of linear time. And within the other world, it was a parallel universe. we didn't have the Western concept of linear time.

And within the other world, it was a parallel universe. So like certain lakes, certain holy wells that we have up and down the country, where the salmon and knowledge comes from. Like that's a place called Conla's Well, which is in Antrim, I believe. It's near the mouth of the Shannon. In Irish mythology, it would say that here is a well of water and this is an opening to the other world what is the other world well it's not the future it's not the past it's just like our world but parallel and things are a little bit different there and this site this little well sometimes knowledge from the other

world can bubble up and that's where we get the, sometimes knowledge from the other world can bubble up. And that's where we get the salmon of knowledge from. The salmon of knowledge was he had knowledge from the other world in his body. But mythology had a better way of explaining this stuff than the limitations, we'll say, of Western linear time. When I look at this stuff even even today is halloween halloween is when figures from the other world this parallel universe could flitter in different frequencies in our present world that that's true but today is sauna it's not halloween a sound of course yeah of course but do you ever do you ever look at mythology of ancient people and go these these

seem to have a they have a better way of storytelling that describes this stuff than the current storytelling that we have right now in western society uh well that's you know that's a vedic the vedic cosmology yeah that that's a very subtle question. So it's true that for quality of human life, all of us have to partake of myth and art and literature and all those other facets of what it is to be a human being. I completely agree with that. And I love to partake of those things. and and i love to partake of those things uh but for the machinery of our modern society to work we do some part of us has to be hard-headed about which facts are what yeah which factory should be built to make which pharma drug to cure which disease because um if you think back to those times when mythology was predominant you you know, the mean age, even after childhood of adults, was only into the late 20s or early 30s.

And so now our lifetimes have been extended by a factor of up to three, mostly by modern technology. And if you ask most people, are they willing to give away a little bit of mythology in order to triple the extent of their lives? They'll usually say yes. So there's a tradeoff here. That's my point. I'd want to say thank you so much for the interview, Seamus, right? Because we've come to the hour. And I want to thank you for having the flexibility to put on your physicist cap and your philosopher's cap at the same time.

That was a really really really enjoyable chat yeah and another thing too what we were speaking about about the benefits of we'll say different disciplines stepping outside of their comfort zones yep that's kind of what we did here and that's the purpose as well of science week which is the reason you and i are speaking i mean i'm someone with an interest in art and you're a physicist and we're both speaking we're both trying to understand the same thing using different languages i suppose because i can't understand the language of maths no matter i'd love to i would love to be able to look at a page full of numbers and understand all that stuff that you're studying you know but it's beyond my access.

Well, that doesn't have to be true, of course. But anyway, I think, you know, the point that the more engagement we have between everyone in our society and culture, art, you know, literature, our history, philosophy and science, the healthier our society will be. I actually feel that very strongly. Actually, one last question, Seamus. I'm sorry, just one last question. Okay. Because this is important.

So I was speaking to a folklorist recently who was, they were reading Irish manuscripts that were a thousand years old, but they were able to understand that were a thousand years old but they were able to understand old Irish right a dead language and because

they could read old Irish they could appreciate the stories that are a thousand years old in a way that I can't as someone who speaks English

yeah as someone who understands mathematics like when you look at quantum physics and remove words and you're just looking at a page of numbers do you feel differently about what you're trying to understand like you're reading a different language is it more i don't know as beautiful the word is there a greater clarity when you're staring at numbers to look at quantum physics yeah there is so for me personally there isn't a greater clarity the cartoon pictures that i would make in my mind as an artist of what's going on can be equally

clear um as the as what i see in mathematics written on the page. However, there is one difference. The reason why we follow, you know, Isaac Newton's scheme is that if you use mathematics, there are predictions hidden in the mathematics that you can't picture in your mind and that can only be teased out by solving the equations. And that part, I don't always enjoy that that part but it is a true property of physics research that there's further hidden knowledge inside the mathematical description of what's going on beyond what a human being can picture in their brain that was the absolutely fascinating Davis speaking about quantum physics I hope that episode was accessible because it's

a tough subject I mean I was racking my brains quite a lot throughout that conversation thank you to Seamus for giving me his time and don't forget to check out Science Week which starts on the 13th of November sfi.ie I'll catch you next And don't forget to check out Science Week, which starts on the 13th of November.

SFI.ie. I'll catch you next week. I have a busy week this week with gigs, but I'll be back next week, as always, with an oral podcast hug. You glorious bollockses. Alright, mind yourselves.

Rub a dog. Enjoy... Enjoy the smell of tarf smoke, even though it's not great for the environment. Enjoy the occasional smell of tarf smoke as it crawls along the air on a cold November night. rock city you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on saturday april 13th when the toronto rock hosts the rochester nighthawks at first ontario center in hamilton at 7 30 p.. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play.

Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. Thank you.