The frontiers of physics: From planets to photons
Professor David Jamieson takes us on a journey of his research in physics; from the history of Galileo’s discoveries to quantum computing
CHRIS HATZIS
Eavesdrop on Experts, a podcast about stories of inspiration and insights. It’s where expert types obsess, confess and profess. I’m Chris Hatzis, let’s eavesdrop on experts changing the world - one lecture, one experiment, one interview at a time.
Whenever Italian astronomer Galileo made a new discovery, he used to note his findings in the form of a complex anagram, as a protection against rival scientists stealing his discoveries to claim them as their own. Luckily for Professor David Jamieson, scientists don’t have to use this method of communication anymore - otherwise he’d really have his work cut out for him.
Professor Jamieson is a physicist at the University of Melbourne and Chief Investigator of the Victorian node of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computer Technology. With expertise that ranges from quantum technology, to the physics of planets, and to science communication, his knowledge just about covers the entire universe.
Dr Andi Horvath sat down with David Jamieson to discuss all things subatomic and astronomical.
ANDI HORVATH
Professor David, you're one of the favourite physicists on campus. People like to go to your lectures.
DAVID JAMIESON
Well, good to hear [laughs].
ANDI HORVATH
You recently did a lecture on the Double Planet, the Physics of the Earth-Moon System. Now, humans have known the effect of the moon's orbit on the earth in terms of tides, but is it a two-way system? Does the earth affect the moon?
DAVID JAMIESON
Yes. Well, our earth-moon system where we live is a very unusual arrangement even by the standards of our solar system because we have this unusually large moon in proportion to the size of the earth. This has - the moon's gravity has a very strong effect on the oceans of the earth and generates the tides, as you say. But also, we have this unusual situation that our moon is big enough to completely cover the sun when there's an eclipse over a large area. That's a remarkable coincidence, that our large moon should have the same size in the sky compared to the even larger sun, which of course is very far away. So I wanted to convey some of the peculiarities of the earth-moon system in my lecture.
ANDI HORVATH
What are some of the peculiarities?
DAVID JAMIESON
Well, the first is that the moon is so large in proportion to the size of the earth. Second of all is that the earth and the moon seem to be made of the same stuff and this has given us clues as to how the earth and the moon came to be. A popular theory that seems to be consistent with most of the facts is that when the earth condensed out of the protosolar nebula, we copped a massive collision with a Mars-sized object, called Theia, which blew the outer layers of the earth out into space, which condensed into the moon. So if you like, when you look up at the moon, what you're seeing is the crust of the earth in orbit around the earth. Our crust is very thin compared to Mars and Venus, which are not blessed by such large moons.
ANDI HORVATH
You once gave a talk to the Royal Society entitled Will the World End in 2012? - How Galileo Created Modern Astronomy that Holds the Answer. We need the answers, and the world didn't end in 2012. What happened?
DAVID JAMIESON
Well, just a bit of context for this, this lecture was actually supposed to be given by Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the famous discoverer of pulsars. But she was detained in the Canary Islands due to a volcanic eruption that prevented her flight taking off, so I was asked at the last minute to step in and give this lecture. The theme of the lecture was originally on the end of the Mayan long calendar, which was receiving a lot of popular press at the time because it seemed, by some accounts to suggest the world was coming to an end [yawns].
ANDI HORVATH
[Laughs]
DAVID JAMIESON
The world was coming to an end, another one of those predictions. Anyway, so that was what I was asked to speak on at short notice. So I realised that this was a good opportunity to promote my interests in my hero, Galileo, at the same time, as well as explaining the origin of calendars and the clockwork - the celestial clockwork, which is the background to all our timekeeping and calendars. So yeah, needless to say, as you've quite rightly pointed out, here we are today. The world didn't come to an end. The Mayan calendar was a particularly ingenious and durable long-term calendar that had been developed as a result of careful astronomical observations looking for regularities in the movement of the celestial objects. Indeed, Galileo also observed these regularities with his astounding astronomical observations in 1609, when for the first time a telescope was pointed at the sky, an astronomical telescope was pointed at the sky and allowing us to see things that had never been seen before.
ANDI HORVATH
Now, tell us about your fascination with Galileo and the planet Neptune.
DAVID JAMIESON
Right, so a long time ago I gave a public lecture on the modelling, the celestial movements of the planets and the stars relative to the earth using computer software. That was very novel at the long-ago times when I gave that lecture because PCs were just becoming widespread. It was very [laughs] early in my career. To illustrate my lecture, I used one of these newly available planetarium software packages to model what Galileo saw through his telescope in 1609, up to 1613, because you could wind the clock back and see what the sky looked like 400 years ago. As an interesting anecdote associated with that, where the - was to reproduce the observations on the computer that Galileo made in 1612 and 1613, where he observed, carefully, the planet Jupiter and its four Galilean moons, which he discovered, never seen before because you can't see them with the unaided eye.
Galileo was a fanatic. He tracked Jupiter night after night, wrote down in his astronomical notebooks what he saw, the position of the planet and its four tiny moons. He tried to understand what was going on. He could see that these moons were orbiting Jupiter and, of course, not the earth. This was the first time an object had been carefully documented, or four objects carefully documented as rotating around an object other than the earth, as was the theory, the geocentric theory at the time. Galileo was a good physicist, so whenever - as he was tracking Jupiter across the sky, a star happened to drift through the field of view, because a planet, after all, is a wandering star, whereas the - a real star is fixed in the sky.
So as Jupiter wandered through the sky on its orbit, he recorded any stars that appeared in the field of view. On a few nights he recorded, faithfully, this star, which, when you wind the planetarium software back to that night, doesn't exist in any star catalogue. The reason why it doesn't exist is because it's not a star. It is indeed a planet, a new planet for Galileo, which, of course, we now know is the planet Neptune. That's all very well. You can't see Neptune with the unaided eye. You need a telescope to spot it. But on one particular night, next to the planet Neptune that Galileo recorded as a star was a real star, which does appear in our star catalogues. What's remarkable on that night when Galileo recorded the position of the real star and Neptune, he wrote in the margin of his notebook, star B, which was Neptune, appeared to move, because it was in close proximity to a real star. So on 24 hours apart, the previous night and the present night, the gap opened up as Neptune moved in its orbit.
So I then came up with a theory that because Galileo was a very smart guy and very open to the new things he was seeing, it must have occurred to him, oh, I've just seen a star move. Oh, a wandering star. That would be a planet, a new planet not recorded in any of the literature, the first planet seen by humanity since deep antiquity. Right, that's good. Now, what shall I do with that piece of information? As he was observing Neptune - and he recorded it on several nights, not just one. Indeed, the night where he saw it move, he had to move his telescope away from Jupiter because this was all happening outside of the field of view. So he'd been tracking this object for a number of weeks. He moved - his telescope only had a very small field of view, so he had to move it away from Jupiter, across into the inky blackness around Jupiter, to pick up this object and the nearby star.
So he was following it, keeping an eye on it. My theory was that he must have known it was a new planet, but once it moved away from Jupiter, or rather once Jupiter [laughs] moved away in its orbit, it would be very hard to find again. He didn't have a computerised pointing system and he didn't know about Newtonian gravity, so he couldn't have calculated its orbit and predicted where it would be on a subsequent night. Eventually, you'd lose it because you can't see it with the unaided eye. Without Jupiter to guide you to a particular point in the sky, you couldn't find it again. Galileo, I think, knew that the night sky was not his personal property and, as a physicist, you can't use your own authority to say something is true. You can only say, I have discovered this, and hope that it will be confirmed by other observers.
So Galileo was of the habit of encoding discoveries in anagrams because he was a - he knew that you had to publish or perish and that if you're going to get credit for a discovery, you had to be the first. No good being the second. So he'd written letters about previous discoveries where he'd encrypted the discovery in an anagram to establish a timestamp for the discovery. Then he'd spent some additional weeks confirming what he'd seen or trying to understand what he'd seen. So he did that for the planet Venus. When you look at Venus through a telescope, it demonstrates phases, like the moon. So he wrote, in Latin, the mother of love follows the shape of Cynthia. That's great, to have a scientific discovery couched in such terms.
Rearranged the letters and put it in an envelope and sent it off to one of the people he was corresponding with, whilst he continued to watch Venus and watch it go through its 270-odd days of phase period so he could figure out, aah, Venus is obviously orbiting the sun because that's the only way to explain why it changes its shape like that. You can't see it with the unaided eye, you need a telescope. Then once he'd figured it out, he could announce that this anagram meant that Venus has phases like the moon. He would, therefore, not be challenged for being the first to discover this remarkable fact.
He also did the same with Saturn. When he observed Saturn through this telescope, it looked like it had two gigantic moons sticking out the side, because he didn't know about rings, of course, and his telescope wasn't good enough to show the rings very clearly. It looked to him like there was Saturn with two giant moons bulging out the side that always stay in the same place. So he wrote that as an anagram as well, but he never really figured out what the heck he was seeing there. The true nature of the rings of Saturn were not discovered - not thoroughly explained until well after Galileo. So I figure, having observed Neptune move, he must have written, in his notebook, an anagram. Maybe, week after week he tried to find it again so he could track it across the sky, but it would not have been easy with his telescope. He was very distracted with other things at this time and so maybe he never back to it, despite the importance of the discovery.
So I had to make up my own anagram as to what I thought Galileo would have said. Above the king of heaven, Jupiter, there is another wandering star, Neptune. So I translated that into Latin and rearranged the letters and said, that's the anagram that I'm looking for in Galileo's papers, but I never found it, despite looking somewhat intensively. So maybe my theory is wrong, or maybe it's still there in some letter yet to be discovered in the Galileo papers.
ANDI HORVATH
Professor David, you're standing on the shoulders of giants…
DAVID JAMIESON
Indeed.
ANDI HORVATH
…and writing anagrams. You're an extraordinary physicist, in the sense that you're - you look out into the cosmos, but you also look into the atomic world. I want to talk about your research in quantum physics and quantum computing. Now, quantum computing is like a whole new ballgame. It's not the zeros and ones, it's zeros, ones and all of the above at the same time. So lower us into quantum computing. Give us the 101 version that we can grasp your research with.
DAVID JAMIESON
Okay, so if we start, first, with classical computing, where we encode information as strings of ones and zeros, the binary system, the bit, either a zero or a one. At the fundamental level that's how information is stored and processed in our conventional computer. Strings of ones and zeros go down the internet and then they're reassembled into words and sounds and pictures and videos at the other end. And this has been a very successful approach and is largely responsible for shaping the modern world. So we now have this marvellous classical computer-based civilisation where everyone is connected, but it's remarkable that the real world doesn't work by classical principles as I've described, where you have a one or a zero in your memory state.
The real world, at its most fundamental level, is quantum mechanical. So a quantum mechanical object has a number of very strange attributes that normally we don't experience it first hand, but if we drill right down to the fundamental building blocks of nature, it's all digital and quantum at that level.
ANDI HORVATH
You're talking about the level of the atom and even lower?
DAVID JAMIESON
At the level of the atom and the electron and the photon, the quantum mechanical particles that are the building blocks of matter that, when assembled together, give us this classical world that is our - of everyday experience.
ANDI HORVATH
But at that level, function in a completely different laws of physics game.
DAVID JAMIESON
Well, that's right. The quantum mechanical laws are responsible for the classical world at the large scale, but we don't harness them directly in human-built, engineered machines. We typically only exploit the classical behaviour of the assemblage of quantum mechanical objects. So about 20 years ago, new ideas began emerging for new types of computers, new ways of transmitting and storing and processing information based on fundamental quantum mechanical laws rather than the classical laws. So the most - some of the most important quantum attributes we want to harness for new technology involves super position and entanglement, fundamental quantum mechanical ideas that we don't have practical experience with in everyday life because they're attributes only of the fundamental building blocks of nature.
So this allows us to build machines - if we're going to be successful at harnessing these attributes - in which the information is encoded not as ones or zero, but ones and zero. So a quantum mechanical object can be in two states or two places at the same time. This is not something we have practical experience with in the everyday world because it only happens at the very smallest building blocks of matter. These attributes can allow us to build machines, in principal and in practice now, that will solve problems that cannot be solved with classical principles. For example, let's take the caffeine molecule, a really important molecule for physics because it docks with all the physics acceptors in your brain and makes them go round faster.
ANDI HORVATH
[Laughs]
DAVID JAMIESON
I'm only joking about that bit.
ANDI HORVATH
I was just going to say, it's not just physicists that like caffeine.
[Laughter]
DAVID JAMIESON
But the caffeine molecule has a particular structure, and we would like to be able to calculate that structure from first principles. We understand perfectly the Schrödinger equation that governs the behaviour of all the electrons that join together all the atoms to make up the caffeine molecule. But even in principle, we can't solve the equations to get the result, what - to get the answer to the question, what is the configuration of the caffeine molecule? Because a classical computer can only deal, even with the best possible super computers with present technology, with about 30 electrons. Because the electron-electron interactions are so complicated, it just can't keep track of them all, whereas a quantum computer, exploiting the fundamental quantum principles, will be able to solve the structure, hopefully, of the caffeine molecule, which has 100 electrons that we have to keep track of. That will remain forever beyond the capability of a classical machine.
ANDI HORVATH
Now, a quantum computer, just to get it straight, is not your next-generation laptop. It's like - I think I've heard you describe it as a large freezer that might be used in laboratories for scientific research.
DAVID JAMIESON
Well, as the great Australian physicist, Gerard Milburn, from the University of Queensland, said, who's been very active in this field, looking at the fundamental theories, it's not the next step, it's not the next laptop. It's a whole new journey. The quantum computer will enable us to do things that we haven't contemplated being able to do with classical machines. Getting onto where we will find quantum computers in the near future, just as now when you use your mobile phone to do a Google search, you have the illusion that your phone is doing a search. It is not doing any such thing. The phone is contacting the internet and passing your enquiry to the super computers in - who knows where they are these days, in the cloud somewhere. They process your request, find the information and send it back to your mobile phone.
So today, our computers largely access resources from the internet. They pull down the resources they need to answer your questions and do the tasks you assign to them. So in the future, that is also how you will access quantum computers, who will be, probably, in very low-temperature refrigeration units so they don't suffer from thermal effects, which would destroy the delicate quantum states that they need for doing their calculations. But to you, you'll just have the quantum computer access portal on your mobile to do things that you might need the power of a quantum computer to do.
ANDI HORVATH
So we will be accessing quantum computing at some point. Is the silicon chip still involved?
DAVID JAMIESON
Yes. Well, silicon, what a marvellous material. So it turns out, strangely enough, that silicon has a lot of physical attributes which make it ideal for building a quantum computer. That's part of my research program, is looking at how to do that. Silicon is a marvellous material because all the silicon atoms occupy a regular crystal lattice in which all the electrons, orbiting silicon atoms, are beautifully paired up. So each electron is like a little bar magnet, and you can imagine all these little bar magnets click together with the north and south poles beautifully aligned with each other to cancel out the field. So you end up with something that's become known as a semiconductor vacuum. It's the next best thing to a real vacuum for doing quantum mechanics because all the electric fields, all the magnetic fields beautifully cancel out and it's a nice clean environment for constructing delicate quantum states for doing computation.
It's just a coincidence that silicon is the most versatile material for the classical semiconductor industry. But we've had 60 years of technological development of this material and we are hoping to - well, we are using that 60-year knowledge base to build our prototype quantum computer machines in silicon.
ANDI HORVATH
Have I got this right? You fire ion beams into the silicon because you're trying to create a disruption in the lattice because that puts it into a quantum state?
DAVID JAMIESON
Yes, so what - my part of this big project is to insert the dopant atoms that give silicon its useful attributes, both for classical computers, but also for quantum computers. So we want to encode quantum information on arrays of single phosphorus atoms inserted carefully into the right places in the silicon crystal lattice. We do that with ion implantation, a standard industry technique for putting phosphorus into silicon. But our trick is to put one phosphorus atom in at a time because we need to have each phosphorus atom carefully wired up to the external circuits that we use for programming and reading out its quantum state. That's the technique I've developed with my colleagues in my laboratory here in Melbourne.
ANDI HORVATH
I'm so amazed that your interests are subatomic, but also astronomical. You basically cover the universe, Professor David [laughs].
DAVID JAMIESON
Well, perhaps Galileo was the first true physicist, so he set the pace for the way you do things by observation and explanation, which we're still using today.
ANDI HORVATH
How far away are we from the quantum computer being somewhat mainstream?
DAVID JAMIESON
Well, there are small quantum computers now being deployed for secure communications. So these are small, usually photon-based machines that go at the end of an optical fibre, in which information is encoded in quantum states, superimposed on the photons, which then fly down the optical fibres and can be read out at the other end. The beauty of this is that the delicate quantum state encoded on the photon can easily be destroyed by looking at it.
ANDI HORVATH
Oh, no.
DAVID JAMIESON
So if somebody…
ANDI HORVATH
By looking at it?
DAVID JAMIESON
Yeah, by looking at it. So if somebody looks at your stream of quantum-encoded photons travelling down the fibre, they'll lose their quantum state and just become classical. This can be detected at the far end and you know your message has been intercepted because it's gone classical instead of quantum.
ANDI HORVATH
How can looking at it change things?
DAVID JAMIESON
Well, see, this is one of the great…
ANDI HORVATH
Is this Shrödinger's cat?
DAVID JAMIESON
It is Shrödinger's cat. So most bizarre quantum behaviour vanishes when you look at it, so it's a bit hard to explain because we're not used to this in everyday life. But there's a very simple experiment, one of the foundational experiments of physics, which is called the Young's two-slit interference experiment, where you basically shine a light on a barrier which has got two scratches on it, two slits that lets the light through. You'd expect to see a shadow of this barrier as just two fuzzy lines on a screen, but you don't. If the slits are sufficiently small and close together, what you see is a row of lines on the screen, an interference pattern, because light is a wave, as we understand it. The light waves fall on the two slits. More waves emerge from the other side and those waves overlap with each other and create a pattern of bright and dark lines on the screen, an interference pattern.
Any surfer will be familiar with this with waves bouncing off rocks or off headlands and forming a pattern of choppy and still water as the waves overlap. So the same thing works with light. But at the fundamental level, light comes in discrete packets called photons and so you have ask, well, hang on, if you've got a single photon approaching a pair of slits, won't the photon go through either the left slit or the right slit? That's the wrong question because the answer is, yes, it goes through both slits. So it's very hard to understand this if you consider light to be a particle, which it is, because - you know it's a particle because you can put a CCD camera to record where the light falls on the screen. That just goes, bing, bing, bing-bing, bing, bing-bing-bing, as single photons land in the detector and it builds up the interference pattern, the pattern of lines across the screen, not just two fuzzy shadows.
But if you try and look to see which slit the photon went through, you don't get the interference pattern anymore because you destroy the quantum attribute of going through both slits at the same time. Humanity has been grappling with this for 100 years. The standard way to deal with it is to - in a first-year quantum mechanics lecture is you mention this strange attribute and then you never mention it again. You just bury it under all this mathematics so that you can deal with the amazing outcomes of this fundamental quantum attribute. But we are now trying to harness this strange attribute to do useful computing, but we have to make sure that the quantum computer doesn't get disturbed while it's processing the information. That's proving to be a challenge.
ANDI HORVATH
You've seen enormous change in your research career. What's been most surprising to you?
DAVID JAMIESON
Well, certainly the quantum technology revolution has been quite surprising. I didn't see that coming, but when I first heard about it I was really excited about the potential. The computer revolution is sometimes called the first quantum revolution because silicon chips all use fundamental quantum principles right down at the fundamental level, but we only ever exploit them in classical ways with streams of ones or zeros. But the idea then of reprogramming such a device and rebuilding it so that it exploits the quantum principles to actually do the calculation rather than the higher-level classical principles was really exciting to me. That's what I've focused on for the last decade or more.
ANDI HORVATH
This begs me to ask, though, Moore's Law, if - I think that's what it's called, where computing power doubles every 18 months - is that the law? Isn't there a limit to that? Where are we with that?
DAVID JAMIESON
Yes, there is. This is a topic which we often discuss, the implications of Moore's Law, the doubling every 18 months. So the idea is that - well, the practical result is that as you get more and more classical devices crammed into each square millimetre of your silicon chip, you can do more and more powerful things, process more information, process things faster, generate images more quickly for videos and communicate faster through the internet. As you say, Gordon Moore figures this out, or put this out - I think maybe as a semi-humorous idea - with only two data points. The first two silicon chips, the second one was twice as powerful as the first one and it took a year and a half to build. So he said, well, let's extrapolate and assume this continues into the future. We make them smaller. we put more chips. We double the number of devices. We halve their size. This will give us more flexibility and versatility.
It's been continuing ever since the '60s when he laid it down, but it's pegging out because we're now down at the fundamental atomic limit. You can't have half an atom, so you can't have a transistor made from half an atom because nature is - that's the end. So the - that will impose a limit for that method of increasing the power of a classical computer. You might be able to increase the power by having more and more computers working together to do things more quickly or more - do more powerful calculations, like in a super computer. But as I've indicated, there are even limits to doing it that way because of the fundamental problem of the speed of light communicating from the left-hand of the computer with the right-hand side of the computer. Plus these super computers generate an enormous amount of waste heat. That - the cooling problem might kick in even before the quantum limit imposed by the discrete nature of matter, but the quantum computer offers a way around those limitations.
ANDI HORVATH
David, we've passed the 50th anniversary of Apollo. Any reflections?
DAVID JAMIESON
Well, as this was such a huge event for me, and anyone who lived through it, I'm sure, from 50 years ago. I remember being sent home from school to watch Armstrong and Aldrin walk on the moon live on our grainy black and white television. What a wonderful experience that was, and even more wonderful to go out at night and look up at the moon and know there were two people there walking around. That was truly astounding. No human in history had ever had that experience before. But the legacy of Apollo was not so much the dawn of the space age, but really the dawn of the computer age because the challenge of getting people to the moon and back safely required machines of unprecedented power and complexity. So the idea of putting a computer on a machine to control it was entirely novel and they had to build the computer from scratch. It had practically no memory, by modern standards, practically no transistors, by modern standards. But nevertheless, it was enough. The drive to make that mission successful drove a lot of innovation in that area.
I would say this was the start of the computer because the success of the computers in controlling the machines and being a partner in the great enterprise then propagated out into the wider world and we can't do without it anymore. There are too many of us and we live such complicated lives. The computer is absolutely foundational, like air, water and energy. You've got to have the computers, otherwise our whole society grinds to a halt.
ANDI HORVATH
It's our extended phenotype, as the biologists say.
DAVID JAMIESON
Ooh, yeah [laughs].
ANDI HORVATH
Yeah, I know. It's part of our bodies. Professor David, what would you like us to think about next time we ponder the universe above and ponder the universe within our atoms?
DAVID JAMIESON
Well, that's a big question. How long have you got? So, physics is sometimes described in terms of two frontiers. One frontier is cosmological. You look out into the abyss of space, an enormous scale of space and time. Keep it in mind that the light that we see comes from the distant past. Many of the objects in the sky that we can see at night, the light started millions and millions or even billions of years ago to be available to be seen on any given night. So that's a journey into the wide frontier as we explore the cosmos with evermore powerful telescopes and use the laws of physics as the guide to understand what we see. Gravitational waves, who would have thought 100 years after Einstein predicted them, eventually we would be able to detect them and now we can listen to the cosmos as well as watch it with light.
The other frontier is the inward bound, the frontier into the subatomic - the atomic and subatomic building blocks of matter. This is also providing new insights into the way the world works and so this has unlocked the potential of quantum technologies, quantum computing, and with its enormous potential. But also, there are a lot of things down at the subatomic level we don't fully understand. We have the standard model for particle physics that seems to explain, very successfully, the way matter works and interacts, but there are some nagging loose ends that need to be tidied up. We have the precedent that 110 years ago, Einstein tugged at the loose ends dangling out of classical physics and he caused it all to unravel…
[Laughter]
…and has set us on a new journey into relativity and quantum mechanics that we're still travelling on today. Maybe, as we look down into the subatomic building blocks and tug at the loose ends that remain to be explained, new revelations will become available that'll be even more exciting than the ones we've discovered over the past century.
ANDI HORVATH
Professor David Jamieson, thank you.
DAVID JAMIESON
Oh, you're very welcome. It's been great.
CHRIS HATZIS
Thank you to Professor David Jamieson, physicist at the University of Melbourne. And thanks to our reporter Dr Andi Horvath.
Eavesdrop on Experts - stories of inspiration and insights - was made possible by the University of Melbourne. This episode was recorded on July 16, 2019. You’ll find a full transcript on the Pursuit website. Audio engineering by me, Chris Hatzis. Co-production - Silvi Vann-Wall and Dr Andi Horvath. Eavesdrop on Experts is licensed under Creative Commons, Copyright 2019, The University of Melbourne. If you enjoyed this episode, drop us a review on Apple Podcasts and check out the rest of the Eavesdrop episodes in our archive. I’m Chris Hatzis, producer and editor. Join us again next time for another Eavesdrop on Experts.
Physics is sometimes described in terms of two frontiers, says Professor Jamieson, a physicist at the University of Melbourne and Chief Investigator of the Victorian node of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computer Technology.
“One frontier is cosmological. You look out into the abyss of space, an enormous scale of space and time.”
“So that’s a journey into the wide frontier as we explore the cosmos with evermore powerful telescopes and use the laws of physics as the guide to understand what we see.”
He says that the other frontier is the inward bound, the frontier into the subatomic - that is, the atomic and subatomic building blocks of matter.
This research is providing new insights into the way the world works and so has unlocked the potential of quantum technologies, like quantum computing, with its enormous potential.
“We have the standard model for particle physics that seems to explain, very successfully, the way matter works and interacts, but there are some nagging loose ends that need to be tidied up,” Professor Jamieson says.
“We have the precedent that 110 years ago, Einstein tugged at the loose ends dangling out of classical physics and he caused it all to unravel… and that has set us on a new journey into relativity and quantum mechanics that we’re still travelling on today.”
Episode recorded: July 16, 2019.
Interviewer: Dr Andi Horvath.
Producer, audio engineer & editor: Chris Hatzis.
Co-production: Silvi Vann-Wall & Dr Andi Horvath.
Banner image: Shutterstock
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