NOVA: "Decoding the Universe: Quantum" (Big House Productions, Inc., WGBH Educational Foundation, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After “San Diego: America’s Wildest City” November 6, KPBS showed a much more interesting program on the NOVA series, “Decoding the Universe: Quantum.” The show started with a curious disclaimer: “The following NOVA program contains scenes of quantum physics, which is known to cause confusion, anxiety, and even heartbreak. Please see your physicist if symptoms persist.” Quantum physics or quantum mechanics, as the theory is alternately called, started in 1927 at an international conference of physicists in Brussels. There’s a group photo and you can see Albert Einstein front and center, even though Einstein had no use for some of quantum physics’s wilder claims, including the fact that the conventional drawing of an atom – a nucleus and a set of electrons orbiting itself in nice little ellipses – was totally wrong. Electrons actually behave in unpredictable ways that locate them more or less around the nucleus, but as physicist Shohini Ghose said on the program, “Is the electron everywhere at the same time? Is it nowhere at all? Is it at one place and we just don’t know? All of those questions are actually outside of what quantum theory itself actually can answer. It’s not part of the theory at all. So, if you ask me, your guess is as good as mine. Unfortunately, that’s the best I can do.” This was one of the aspects of quantum theory that put Einstein off, even though its roots were in both general and special relativity, the big ideas Einstein had come up with in 1905 and 1916, respectively. (Einstein famously said, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe,” whereas the essence of quantum theory is that God does indeed play dice with the universe.)

It was Einstein who, based on a few minor discrepancies in the orbit of the planet Mercury between where Isaac Newton said it would be and what it actually was, reasoned that the entire universe is run by bizarre forces that, among other things, change the working definition of time. The documentary cited Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar (2014), particularly the scene in which, as I wrote in my moviemagg blog post for Interstellar (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/09/interstellar-paramount-warner-bros.html), “Cooper (Matthew McConaghuey) is repeatedly warned by the NASA scientists that time will go by much differently for him than it will for the people he leaves behind on earth, which is how he remains visibly the same age throughout while his kids had to be played by a succession of different actors (Timothée Chalamet grows up to be Casey Affleck, which strains credibility more than a bit), but it’s still a shock when Cooper meets his daughter in the hospital where she’s a doddering old woman facing death – though she’s also acclaimed as the savior of humanity and the base they’re on is named after her.” Einstein also posited the theory of “gravitational waves,” objects with real mass that would travel through space at the speed of light and cause ripples in the gravitational force. According to Northeastern University physicist Tiffany Nichols, Einstein didn’t believe it at first – he ran through the equations at least three times before he was finally convinced he was right.

And even when Einstein conceded the existence of gravitational waves, he was convinced they were too minute ever to be discovered – which remained true until the 1980’s, when scientists created the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) as a joint project of the California and Massachusetts Institutes of Technology. According to Rana Adhikari, one of the physicists attached to the project, “I’m going to show you the whole laser interferometer. In here, that’s a prototype of the LIGO system.” It consists of two arms at right angles to each other. A very stable infrared laser feeds into a beam splitter, which directs half the beam down each arm. “Half of the light goes one way and half goes the other way,” Adhikari explained. “And then you have mirrors at the ends and they reflect the light back. … Instead of having exact cancellation and destructive interference, you have a little bit of light leaking out. And that little bit of light that leaks out is what we detect.” They actually built two LIGO’s, the one at Caltech where the arms are 44 yards and one in Colorado where they’re 2 ½ miles each. “The more stable your laser is, the more things in the universe you can measure,” Adhikari said. “And there’s no limit to it. So, every year, when we get lasers better and better, we’ll be able to see further out into the universe and see tinier things in the microscopic nature of reality, matter, space and time, anything like that. You just have to keep working on this one tool and make it better and better.” There were also discussions of a phenomenon called “quantum entanglement,” in which particles widely separated from each other nonetheless develop an electromagnetic bond that makes them act as one; and “qubit computing,” a more complex sort of computer that instead of the simple binary chip we know about, which can be only on or off, registering one or zero, can have many different states and can use those states to do far more complex calculations.

The trick in making a qubit computer work is that the central processing unit (CPU) has to be at an insanely cold temperature – just 15/100th of a degree above absolute zero – and computer scientist Olivia Lanes showed off the IBM Quantum Computer System Two. She explained that the vast array of pipes and gadgets on top of it are not the computer itself, as most people would assume from looking at it, but just the mega-freezer designed to keep the chip cold enough to work. The actual chip is about the size of a fingernail. “It has to be so insanely cold, because we use superconductors to make our qubits,” Lanes explained. “And then, furthermore, we want to remove any type of noise or thermal excitations, which can disturb the qubits and make them behave in ways that we don’t like. There was also a discussion of atomic clocks, which use the internal vibrations within a certain element’s atoms (mostly cesium, though some newer and even more precise ones use strontium) to tell time with far greater precision than anyone has before. According to Jun Ye of the National Institutes of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, his atomic clocks can actually measure the difference between time at the top of the Empire State Building and time at its base. The show’s main point is the sheer ubiquity of quantum technology; as Nadya Mason of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago said, “Quantum mechanics already permeates everything we do.” And the show’s narrator, Jay O. Sanders (speaking a script written by Daniel McCabe, who also co-directed the show with Jaroslav Sakol), called it “the most successful scientific theory of the last one hundred years.” If you listen to music on a CD (read by a laser beam, one of the earliest real-world developments of quantum physics), rely on GPS (which stands for Global Positioning System) to direct you, or use a cell phone, you’re drawing on quantum technology whether you think about it or not.