Hundreds of physicists on a remote island: we visit the ultimate quantum party

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0:56Hi, listeners. Benjamin here with another podcast extra. 2025 is a big year for all things quantum, as it's 100 years since the birth of quantum mechanics. One of the events marking this centenary is a conference that's currently going on in a rather remote location, Heligoland, an island off the coast of Germany. One of the people at the conference is Nature's Lizzie Gibney, who's on the ground reporting on the event. She joined me from a hotel lobby yesterday to tell us a bit more about what's been going on. Lizzie, how are you doing? I am well. I am struggling with island internet issues, but thoroughly enjoying being surrounded by hundreds of quantum physicists.

1:45So Heligoland is where you're at then. Paint pictures with words for those of us who haven't mean that because this is quite a small island off the northwest coast of Germany, right? That's absolutely right. It's in the middle of the North Sea. It was a four-hour ferry to get here from Hamburg. The weather is currently beautiful, but it was absolutely hellish getting here. It's tiny. You can run around it, as I did this morning, in about half an hour. Beautiful red cliffs full of native seabirds. It's really out here on its own. There's about one and a half thousand people here normally and we have about 300 quantum physicists so pretty high physicist to islander ratio at the moment and it sounds like potentially maybe a somewhat random place to hold a quantum physics conference but the story of why it's being held on this island is a beautiful one right it is so let me take you back almost exactly 100 years to 1925 when And physicists, you know, were starting to paint a picture of the atom and trying to understand lots of experimental results that had come out and trying to bring together what we now know as quantum mechanics.

2:56And Werner Heisenberg, who was a physicist, he was then just 23 years old. He came to this island. He was escaping from some extreme hay fever that he had. Apparently, the sea breeze and the lack of trees, although there are many trees here now, I know, made for a good place to escape with hay fever. And the legend has it. And I have to say, I think it is quite a legend. We had some great talks from historians on the first night saying it may not have been exactly like this. But anyway, don't let the truth go away. A good story. He was unable to sleep. He had this kind of epiphany about how to reconcile these conflicting mathematical predictions with measurements about how the electrons are around an atom.

3:37And what he realized was to focus on just what's observable. And what's observable is when the electron is in different energy levels. So he invented this kind of mathematics which just looks at the leaps that the electron makes rather than actually thinking we can ever figure out its trajectory the whole time. Let's just focus on what we do know. And he came up with a way called matrix mechanics. It's a bit like you multiply in tables rather than just in a line. And that allows you to do these calculations. So that all happened here. And of course, as we know with science, it's very rarely actually just one person's contribution.

4:11When he got back to dry land, he worked with a bunch of collaborators to actually kind of turn this into a formalism, when they call it the real mathematics of quantum physics. But essentially, that's why we're here. We're all trying to get a little bit of that zhuzh to rub off on us, a bit of genius from the island of Helgoland. And so there's, as you say, 300 quantum physicists on this island. And what's the vibe? The vibe is great. I think everyone is so thrilled to be here. Everyone was ecstatic to get off the boat for a start. Once the seasickness wore off, everyone was just thrilled to be alive.

4:42You know, we've got, I think, at least four Nobel laureates here and people who've done really, really phenomenal stuff. And they're all here. And because of the nature of the conference, we're pretty much trapped here. So they're just around and you can go and talk to them and people just go off after, you know, conference session finishes and have some lunch together. And I guess the idea is that hopefully there are new collaborations and revelations being found here. I mean, that's a good point. So I was going to ask you what the kind of thrust of this conference is. Is it a celebration of the past or is this an academic conference where new results are being put forward?

5:17It is 100 percent an academic conference. At the conference dinner the night in Hamburg before we all came out here, Jack Harris, one of the organizers, called it quantum physics's birthday party. And of course, what would you want as a physicist in terms of your birthday party? but to hear from all of your colleagues and friends about what they're up to. So there has been some debate. Something that I'm particularly interested in and which feels very fitting here on the island is discussion of interpretations of quantum mechanics. So famously quantum physics, the maths works very, very well. But it's incredible to hear how some of these minds think very differently about what it actually means if we try and strip it back to the level of reality.

5:56You know, we talk in an intuitive sense. They all completely disagree on that. So we've had a lot of talks on that, which do hark back a little bit over the 100 years, because some of the debates are still the same as they were in 1925. And we also have lots of other discussions, for instance, of people who are working towards trying to measure quantum gravity. So the fact that we don't have a continuous continuum of light, we actually have it in little packets in photons. And the idea was, what if is gravity actually like that? It would be possible to quantize gravity. So people are working towards that.

6:26Not there yet. Can't make any grand announcements. But so we've got extremely cutting edge discussions, as well as some of that reflection on where the field has got to after 100 years. Of course, you're there in a full reporting capacity. What else has caught your eyes and ears when you've been on the ground? Well, a session I just came out from actually was really interesting. It was a physicist called Marcus Arndt, who's at the University of Vienna. And he's working at trying to observe quantum superposition, which is where you are effectively in two quantum states at once. And you never actually directly see that happening, but you see the results of it because you get interference between those states and then you observe the final state.

7:08And he's trying to do it with ever, ever heavier things. So he's done clusters of thousands of sodium atoms. So that's kind of like metallic clusters and they're getting bigger and bigger. and he was talking today about the path towards proteins, antibodies, and that's the trajectory that they're going towards. And yeah, that one was absolutely fascinating. So they're trying to entangle what? Everything. Is that the plan? So I spoke about quantum interpretations before, and that is one of the questions is like, if you were entangled, what would that feel like? What would that be like? Like depending on how you view quantum physics, some don't think that there is a boundary between classical world, macroscopic world that we live in and quantum.

7:48But the question is, how big a system can you get to be in a superposition or entangled? And we really don't know. And depending on how you view the underlying reality behind quantum physics, you might have a different answer on that. And so that's something that they're trying to push. It's an experiment that actually might help to tell us something about reality. Well, if we can talk about reality for a moment, of course, quantum physics is everywhere, right? How do you think about quantum computing, for example? And it's in many cases been promised as the solution to solving many of the problems that face us in a variety of different fields.

8:22How much chat has there been about the practicality of things and maybe about the realistic nature of getting from X to Y? Because, of course, solving these problems are a ways a ways with things like quantum computers. Yeah, there was a great talk on quantum computing from Misha Lukin, who's at Harvard, and he's using neutral atoms as the quantum bits in his quantum computer. And they had some quite impressive results in terms of how they control the qubits, because you want them to be able to talk to each other and you want to be able to shift them around. You want to be able to correct their errors.

8:53That's a huge issue in quantum computing is that you naturally have your qubits fall out of their quantum state and that ruins your calculations. So you do this idea where you kind of hook them all up together and you make a big quantum state. It's much more stable and it's called quantum error correction. And he was explaining how that works. So there are some really practical, of course, ways of using quantum physics. And that's one of the strange things is that it really works. Like the maths of quantum mechanics is in everything already. You know, it's how we make lasers. It's why an MRI machine works.

9:28it's in a transistor you know that is at the heart of just a normal computer like quantum physics is absolutely everywhere already and the more and more we study it the more just we know that that seems to be true that all the equations work which is why personally I then find it fascinating to know that whilst that is true we still don't quite get what's going on. Well loads of exciting stuff coming out and I'm sure to come out in the final sessions of the conference. Let's leave it there Lizzie Gibney thank you so much for joining me. Thank you very much Ben. Nature's Lizzie Gibney there. To read an essay she's written about the event, look out for a link in the show notes.

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