279 - Paul Davies: The Second Quantum Mechanics Revolution

32:02If I wanted to write it down, there would not be enough atoms in the universe for me to write out what that state is. And so to believe that our laws of quantum mechanics will unfailingly apply, even though they could never be expressed, even if you had a super intelligence who wanted to write down let alone solve the equations of a quantum computer with more than a few hundred qubits it's not enough stuff in the entire universe to enable that to happen it seems to me that's a sort of constant limit and if quantum mechanics is to break down then that is the complexity measure that comes to mind immediately say 400 entangled particles or qubits.

32:51And in the industry, they're pushing for thousands. So we could see this happening very soon. You thought this was your run club era. Turns out it was more of a thinking about run club era. The good news? Someone's marathon training is about to start. Sell your workout gear on Depop. Just snap a few photos and we'll take care of the rest. they get their race day fit and you get a payout for trying someone on Depop wants what you've got start selling now Depop where taste recognizes taste tomorrow morning is knocking stock your fridge now how about a creamy mocha frappuccino drink or a sweet vanilla smooth caramel maybe or white chocolate mocha whichever you choose delicious coffee awaits find Starbucks frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries Well, I'm glad that you brought us back to Quantum 2.0 and said that we can get deeper into that book.

33:54You mentioned that the first quantum revolution, it was, I mean, character, it was a conceptual and philosophical revolution. Concepts like superposition upended our view of reality. And what I'm curious about is we've talked about how successful quantum theory has been, but that doesn't mean there aren't open problems such as resolving the measurement problem to everyone's satisfaction or seeing if it holds up under conditions of complexity or quantizing gravity. But I'm curious about just what exactly this new revolution is. Is it a revolution in the science, a revolution in the applications of the science?

34:45Just what character is this revolution? So quantum 2.0 is not a new replacement theory of quantum mechanics. It is quantum mechanics, but it is looking at it in a slightly different way. And so the best way of explaining that is just quantum 1.0, which is responsible for all of the information technology we take for granted. We're talking now with fancy electronics, optoelectronics, or if I take out my cell phone, it's packed full of quantum devices. And so early successes of quantum mechanics were things like the transistor and the laser and the superconductor and MRI machines and nuclear power, and it goes on and on.

35:38but electronics manipulates information but it does it in gross quantities so for example the famous sort of miracle microchip that is packing billions of components into a tiny area well what are these components they really just sort of glorify gates they can be sort of on or off or they can be controlled in various ways but they're just little switches. And when they're on, trillions and trillions of electrons flow through. And it's not just one electron, trillions and trillions. So although they're very small

36:23and getting smaller all the time, nevertheless, it's the bulk properties of electrons and the same thing with photons. The big departure for quantum information science is to encode the information not in these gates. I should say the gates on or off could correspond to one or zero. If you've got a lot of those, you can turn the information you want to encode or calculate, turn it into binary arithmetic. And so that's the way that works with those gates. But quantum information science, quantum 2.0, you encode the information in the individual particles, individual electrons, individual atoms or ions, individual photons.

37:13You can sculpt photon states to represent very specific types of information. And furthermore, you can couple them together in a very weird property called entanglement, in which two particles that might be far apart nevertheless belong to a single quantum state such that what happens to one is correlated with what happens to the other in a way that makes no sense if these particles really did possess well-defined properties prior to observation. And so these are all the things you can do in quantum 2.0, and it's very, very powerful. probably it's often said it's crypt that it's exponentially more powerful than say supercomputing and that's true in the in the mathematical sense of the term exponential and let me just give you a simple example of that if you toss a coin it's going to come down either heads or tails and that's a binary result and if you inspect it and you find that it is the heads then you gain one bit of information according to the classical definition that's used in information theory.

38:32If you have two coins you get two bits, three coins you get three, ten coins you get ten bits and that's sort of pretty obvious all of that. Well the thing is in quantum mechanics you can have a superposition in which a coin might be in a blend of heads and tails it might be you know mostly heads with a little bit of tails or 50 50 or the mostly tails with a little bit heads and everything in between and if you have a row of coins and i'm talking metaphorically with coins you couldn't live with real coins but with atoms spinning atoms you sort of um you have a row of them have 10 of them and entangle them together uh you now don't have 10 bits of information you have uh it depends a little bit how you count but you know roughly 2 to the power of 10.

39:23So it's gone up exponentially. And so by encoding information in the quantum degrees of freedom, and not just in the gross properties of quantum-operated devices like gates, put it in the individual degrees of freedom, you gain this exponential advantage. And that's what underpins the promise of quantum computing, exponentially more powerful than a standard sort of supercomputer. And that comes about because of the ability to exploit superposition and entanglement and encode the information. And not just encode it, but manipulate it. You have to basically isolate the system from its environment.

40:04You input the information into the quantum degrees of freedom that you have selected, and you then evolve or allow the system to evolve in a certain way. And then when it reaches the answer, it's like the output, you can then read out what it's done. So I often say the power of a quantum computer is due to the fact that it's computing simultaneously in all of the parallel realities that exist. Whereas if you have just a supercomputer, and there's just one world and one reality and the gate is either on or off, it's not in a blended amalgam of both. But down at the individual level, you could have amalgams of both.

40:49And so you could think of it that it's a quantum computer is computing simultaneously in all of these different branches of the universe. That's a somewhat flawed way of looking at it, but it's really very difficult to communicate in plain language what is basically a mathematical property that attaches to quantum computing, but whichever way you cut it, you come out with exponential enhancement of classical computational power. And that's what makes it so appealing, why so much money has been poured into it, and why governments are paying close attention, because it really is a game changer. We had a scaled-up, fully functional quantum computer.

41:36it could entirely transform the international strategic landscape. So governments are really very worried. There's a bit of an arms race going on. I'd like to come right back to quantum computing in a moment. But for the first quantum revolution, you mentioned a number of technological advances that came out of it, microchips, lasers, MRI machines. Are there other technologies that we should also discuss beyond quantum computing that could be the result of advances in our understanding of quantum mechanics over the next 10 to 20 years? yes certainly quantum computing tends to get the headlines but quantum cryptography quantum teleportation and quantum sensing are also important I'll just briefly deal with the first two because they're a little bit gimmicky still quantum cryptography is a way of I send you a message encoded in quantum degrees of freedom which is completely tamper-proof because, as I've been explaining, when we do a measurement or observation of the quantum world, we sort of project out a particular reality from this amalgam.

43:03And that's an irreversible, detectable thing. So if I'm sending you a message and there's an eavesdropper who's tried to read my message, they'll have projected out something from the state that I'm sending you and you will notice that. so that's one particular i mean it exists as a commercial enterprise that's one particular thing quantum teleportation is a way of me sending something from one place to another without it passing through the space in between and you can do that too using this weird property of entanglement entanglement i keep using this term it's basically a sort of telepathic link or tether between two widely separated particles.

43:46And it means that what is done in one place and what is done at the other place are correlated in a way that makes no sense if there was a real world with particles having real properties prior to them being measured. So this entanglement is an important part. It's the way you can do quantum teleportation because you set up an entanglement between two distant places and then a bit of information or a qubit, as it's called in quantum information science, a qubit can be transmitted from, say, Alice to Bob without going through the space between them. You can't send that information fast on the night because it only works if Alice can tell Bob what particular property of the system has to be measured so they can extract, so Bob can extract the information that was sent.

44:39so it's a big misconception that quantum mechanics allows faster than light telepathy or something so it's simply not true but it does allow for this type of teleportation a long time before we get to the beam me up scotty scenario but in terms of sending individual qubits that technology exists. So again, this gets a lot of media coverage because it is pretty sensational. But in terms of just straightforward, you know, can I go down through my local shopping center and buy a quantum device, then most of the commercialization of quantum information science is in the realm of sensing. And it's easy to understand how that comes about.

45:29So the reason quantum computing is so very difficult is because quantum states are extremely fragile. I've been talking about these sort of blended alternative realities. Well, the slightest nudge can mess up the blending. And so if you want to preserve the blending until the system has worked its way through and giving you the answer to the problem that you're seeking, that if you don't want that to be messed up, then it has to be isolated from its environment. In practice, that often means cooling the quantum computer down to near absolute zero and screening it out, isolating it from surrounding disturbances.

46:12But if the name of the game is to detect disturbances, if what you want to do is have a way of measuring things to phenomenal accuracy, then that fragility, that the quantum states becomes a virtue. Because if the slightest little stray magnetic field is going to wreck your quantum computer calculation, then if what you want to do is to measure tiny, tiny magnetic fields, well, then a quantum information device is the way to do it. And the magnetic fields are a very real example. There are quantum magnetic magnetometers, magnetic field sensors with extraordinary accuracy. And a fun application of that in healthcare is helmets that have quantum magnetic sensors in them that, to put it dramatically, can read your thoughts.

47:10So the electrical activity in your brain, all these sort of flickering electrical pulses going on inside your head, between your ears, that each little electrical pulse has a magnetic field associated with it and that magnetic field can reach through the skull. And so a helmet can pick up and in quite a fine level of resolution in both space and time can record that electrical activity in your brain through its magnetic skull penetrating signature. And it's more accurate than the familiar EEG, electroencephalography. This is magnetoencephalography. There's one practical example there of quantum sensing in the surface of healthcare, and many others as well, in the healthcare regime.

48:02My favorite has to do really with gravitation, because most of my career has been involved in quantum gravity or quantum effects in gravitational fields. and quantum gravity gradiometers are incredibly sensitive so there are various bits of technology that i can cite here but one particular way of thinking about it is the gravity gets a bit weaker as you get off the ground because you're a little bit further from the center of the earth and you think well that can't make very much difference surely we never notice that we're any lighter at the top of a building than at the bottom, but you are.

48:45And you can measure that effect. It's very easy to measure. It's been measured for many decades. But the point is that a quantum gravity radiometer that will tell you basically your height based upon the quantum effects can tell you a vertical displacement by less than a centimeter, you know, maybe a a particular millimeter, it's so sensitive that it would know it's one extra millimeter away from the center of the Earth because gravity is that tiny, tiny bit weaker. So incredibly sensitive. Who would want such a thing? Oh, well, there are all sorts of reasons why you want to be able to map gravity gradients, for example, in mineral prospecting, because different minerals under the ground have different gravitational pulls, different densities, and so little variations like that can tell you about oil deposits, or can tell you in hydrology where the water is in the water table, or even detect broken pipes or buried treasure cavities under the ground.

49:54All of these things can be achieved with quantum gravity radiometers. So that's another. In realm of navigation uh quantum accelerometers and quantum clocks the quantum clocks um always been dear to my heart because the nature of time is so much part of uh einstein's theory of relativity it's our best theory of gravitation um and uh the the best uh so atomic clocks were around even when i was a student and they're a sort of rather clunky type of quantum clock um but the quantum crocks now available are phenomenal in their accuracy that they would not lose a second in the age of the universe. They're that accurate.

50:42And so you might think, well, who would want such a talk? There are all sorts of particular ways, particular uses, but one use is in navigation. that if you're in a submarine, for example, you can't use GPS. You want to know where you are. One way of finding out where you are is to figure out where you started. And then if you have a device that measures every little movement in a submarine, every left and right turn, up and down, and so on, it gives a tiny disturbance. And it logs all that and puts it all together. can reconstruct your path under the waves. But you need not only a quantum accelerometer that tells you, but detects very, very slight movements, but also a quantum clock to log exactly when they happen.

51:36And this starting technology has been installed in ships and submarines, and it should become very routine, I think, in the coming years because of the threat to GPS. And any navigation system above ground is vulnerable to being spoofed or jammed. So if you've got your own on-board way of figuring out where you are, then that's proof against a bad actor. So these things are very much being developed, commercialized, and I foresee in the coming decade or two that we'll be used to using very, very sensitive quantum devices to measure just about everything that you could think that you wanted to measure.

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53:33I really appreciate the discussion, particularly of quantum sensing, because I've never really heard about that as a coming development as a consequence of our further understanding of quantum mechanics. But before we move back to quantum computing, I just wanted to ask one question. You mentioned the sort of beam me up scenario in quantum teleportation. And I've really only heard of quantum teleportation being used to transmit information. And I'm wondering if it is really a scientific possibility and we're kind of just constrained by technology that would prevent us from using quantum teleportation to teleport macroscopic objects.

54:26And if we were able to do that, just what that might look like in practice. And when you wouldn't use it to literally teleport the object, you would use it to teleport the information necessary to build the object at the other end. So if you could imagine a technology, and I think this may be pie in the sky, where you would have a lab that could build a human being, molecule by molecule, and you wanted to duplicate me in some way of scanning my body, getting a snapshot at some instant, and sending all that, teleporting all that information, and then reconstructing me at the other end. There would be two of me in identical coffees, but in different places.

55:20That is what would happen. It wouldn't be that I would be erased at one end. It's not a cut and paste job, it's a copy and paste job. And at the moment, well, that's not entirely true because if you've got a qubit, if that's what we're dealing with, it is actually a cut and paste job because you destroy the bit you're going to send, the one end, that appears intact at the other end, but you can't, there's something very fundamental in quantum mechanics called the no-claiming theorem. You can't exactly copy a quantum state. So you might be able to copy a human being because you don't need the exact quantum state of every atom and so on, just a rough idea we'll do.

56:09But current quantum teleportation is a cut-and-paste job, but a cruder version could be a copy-and-paste job. but I think we're a very long way from that. There really isn't any incentive, I think, to develop teleportation for anything other than information, but it's fun to think about. I'd love to go back to quantum computing just for a bit, and you repeatedly compared quantum computers to supercomputers. Just so that it's clear to me, what is a supercomputer? Well, it's not a very well-defined term. We realize that we have computers of varying powers. And just a little bit of history shows how old I am, that the first time I used a computer, I was a student in London back in the 1960s.

57:13And in those days, if you wanted to run something on a computer, you had to take a stack of punch cards across town and hand them in. And it was a whole building that was devoted to this IBM computer that would read these cards and run the calculation, go back the next day and get the results printed out on these huge sheets of paper. And you might have called that a supercomputer because it was a whole building. It could do amazingly powerful things compared to a hand calculator or something on Abacus. But that was the beginning of that technology. And then along came the information revolution.

57:56And we all have our own computers in our pockets with phones or laptops and so on. These are all now sort of everyday consumer items. um and so uh we so computers you know went from being some sort of huge thing in a in a building with ed uh to a product you could buy the local shops um but nevertheless if you want to do very large amounts of computing for example for ai um you need uh huge data centers uh not only for data storage but for data processing and so people use the term supercomputer to mean one of these you know not on your desktop not individually open but a commercial device in a big facility but as i said it's not it's a historical thing and so a supercomputer now there are various things on the market and they keep leapfrogging each other in their computational power.

59:07But the great thing about computers is they can be networked. So we've got the internet, we've got the worldwide web, and we can share tasks among a very large number of distributed machines. And so the key, I think, to things like AI is the fact that it doesn't have to be done in downtown Phoenix or something. It's all over the world. So that's what I mean by a supercomputer. Okay. So a supercomputer is really just, in the scheme of things, an incremental kind of improvement over the sort of technology we might have in our homes, whereas a quantum computer is a radically different technology.

59:49That's right. So a supercomputer is just a bigger version of what's sitting on my desk, whereas a quantum computer, I haven't laid my hands on one yet. I think it would cost you a few hundred million if you wanted to have even a sort of rudimentary one. But they do exist. And companies like IBM, for example, you can rent time on their quantum computers if you think it's actually worth it, if what you'll achieve is better than running it on a supercomputer. it. And what then, so given that it's a radically new technology and there's a lot of buzz about it, what are some misconceptions people have about what a quantum computer would be useful for, and how might it actually be used?

1:00:43Well, part of the problem is the physics is is understood to see. And so the idea of quantum computer goes back many decades. And in the early days, I've been following this most of my career, in the early days, people thought, well, what would you do with such a thing? Would it have, it would be difficult to build and would it have any real uses? And this changed in the 1990s when a mathematician called Peter Shaw figured that if you had a quantum computer, you could write an algorithm on it that would do something that sounds very boring mathematically, could factor very large numbers into their primes.

1:01:24And the thing about that is that multiplying prime numbers is the basis of a very large amount of encryption that we use in banking and credit cards and secure messaging and so on. And so if you have a quantum computer that can break the code, by, in effect, factoring very large numbers into their primes, then that means that a large amount of human commercial and personal activity is then compromised. It's often called the quantum apocalypse because you might think, well, it doesn't matter. We can see this coming, and the governments do see it coming, and they're hastily quantum proofing their systems, because you don't have to use the multiplying prime numbers as your encryption protocol.

1:02:21There are other ways of doing it. But stuff that's already out there, that's been encrypted that way in the past, there's nothing we can do about it. If that's been vacuumed up by a bad actor and they're sitting and they can't get into it now, but if they have a quantum computer, they can get into it, then all of the transactions and messaging and so on of the last 50 years is up for grabs, that people can break into that. So things that you thought were totally and completely confidential and stored somewhere, like in the cloud, if that stuff has been hacked, it could all come out. And so this could prove pretty disastrous, very, very disruptive.

1:03:08and of course there is a natural anxiety about it. So that's one of the things that gets a big press for quantum computers. But the reason people are building them, well, some people might be wanting to do exactly that, break into confidential messages, but the sort of more straightforward uses are modelling quantum systems because we've been talking about molecules, complex molecules. Back in 1925, or technically January 1926, Irvin Schrodinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, gave us an equation. Schrodinger's wave equation, which you can use to solve, for example, for the energy levels of a hundred atoms.

1:03:54It's a standard undergraduate problem. But then if you get the students to say, well, you know, we're going to look at the helium atom. Helium has two electrons, not one. It gets really complicated. You can't solve it properly, even for the helium atom. Now you have something like ammonia, or if you had ATP, I mentioned that earlier, could be solved. Schrodinger's equation to work out the shape of the molecule and its chemical processes using by solving Schrodinger's equation becomes very, very difficult. But with The quantum computer, it's a quantum system. Quantum computer modeling a quantum system is going to be exponentially more efficient.

1:04:41And so we can imagine designing molecules, and there might be drugs, for example, in therapy. You design a molecule. You might say, I want a molecule that will have this shape and this affinity and this property and that property. You could design it on the quantum computer. and that could become very, very useful. Then just generally large data sets, if you need to analyze them, like for climate modeling or financial markets or something, or wherever you have that level of complexity, quantum computers are likely to give a great advantage. And so people work out what is the payoff, the commercial payoff from developing the quantum computer and how much could it earn in a year or a decade and so on.

1:05:33These numbers get banded around, it's a little bit hard to know, but I think there is no doubt that if we had a scaled up, and by that I mean say a thousand or ten thousand qubits quantum computer available for commercial use, then a lot of these very, very tough computational problems would suddenly be doable but not everything it's rather limited and one of the things that does limit it is the is the need for the algorithms themselves i've said that peter shore came up with an algorithm to factor very large numbers into primes very quickly but there are not a lot of quantum algorithms and so if the problem that you're it is sold i'll give you one example the traveling salesman problem it's a famous problem you imagine that a salesman has to go to say 10 different cities around the united states and wants to devise some sort of artillery to go from one to the other such that it's not necessary to go to any of them twice and yet you want to minimize the potential distance that you fly.

1:06:48Straightforward problem to state, very very hard to solve and as far as I'm aware there's no general easy algorithm for solving the traveling salesman problem but I and I did think there is a quantum algorithm that would do it either. And so that's for the future. So in other words, what I'm trying to say is that not all complicated problems are likely to be tractable, even with a quantum computer, unless we get new algorithms that will enable us to do that. And so the things you can do with a quantum computer are actually, at the moment a little bit limited, but nevertheless important.

1:07:41Unfortunately, there are just so many more quantum 2.0 questions that I have than we have time for, especially because time is running out and there are a few other topics that I wanted to make sure I asked you about, just because there are things that I've thought about for a long time and I know that you have thought about them as well, so I'm curious to hear your perspective. Just to start with one, complete shift from what we've been talking about. For our listeners who have never heard of the fine-tuning problem, I'm wondering if you could explain what it is and if you have a favored solution to it that helps you sleep at night.

1:08:24Well, the fine-tuning problem is a bit vague, but it sort of refers to the fact that in order for life to exist in the universe, there have to be certain obvious conditions Well, restricting it to life as we know it. The life-giving molecule is carbon, and carbon didn't exist in the Big Bang. It got manufactured inside the stars, which then blew up and spewed the carbon around the universe. And so the carbon atoms in you and me were cooked inside the stars. And the process that leads to the creation of that carbon depends upon some basic physics. but if things were a bit different for that basic physics then the carbon wouldn't exist and you and i wouldn't exist and it's likely that no life would exist and that's just one example of many that what you need to have life in the universe as a list of things carbon is one what about stars you know so the sun keeps life on earth ticking over stable stars like the sun wouldn't exist if the fundamental physics were different.

1:09:33And so it goes on. And so what people normally do is they drop a list of what are called the constants of nature. And what we mean by that, these are parameters that enter into the laws of physics. I'll give you a very simple example, the law of gravitation, which has worked out by Newton. the attraction between two bodies so the earth and the sun we know how that varies according to the distance of of the two objects but the actual amount of the pool the force between the earth and the sun that's you just have to measure it and that's one of the fundamental constants of nature it's a universal constant so once you know that number it will tell you what the force is between two galaxies or two black holes and so on it's the same number as newton's gravitational constant it has a particular number you look it up i can't remember what it is but you can say well suppose that number being different 10 times bigger 10 times smaller would the universe be any different and you can make a list of these numbers and they're 30 something and you can ask the question if you didn't like the universe as it is and you change something and you might make all electrons a bit bigger or neutrinos a bit more massive or the strong nuclear force a bit stronger you can tinker around with any of those things and then ask the question how would the universe change and the answer is that for a lot of those changes it wouldn't make a great deal of difference but there are a few of those parameters where even the slightest change would have lethal consequences.

1:11:22If we have an imaginary universe in which some of those numbers were different, there will be no life. And so then people think, well, how did we get so lucky? Here we are in a universe that's life-encouraging, in which the numbers have come out just right to permit our existence. Is that some sort of divine providence, or is it a lucky fluke, of course, is some other explanation. And many of my colleagues said the other explanation goes back to this multiverse. We were talking earlier about the many universes interpretation of quantum mechanics. Well, it's a sort of variant on that, that maybe there isn't just one universe.

1:12:03Maybe there's an infinite number of universes. And what we've been calling the universe, which is one in this vast stack of different universes that are sort of out there in some sense. And if the universes are born with slightly different values of these numbers, then if you could take a sort of God's eye view of that entire assemblage, you would find that in the vast majority of those universes, life would not be possible. Those universes would go unseen and uncelebrated. But just here and there, just by accident, all the numbers would come out right. A cookie would crumble in the right sort of way.

1:12:47And here we are. We're in one such universe. And you think, well, how do we get so lucky? Well, the answer is, of course, we couldn't exist in any of the bio-hostile universes. It's a truism to say that a universe that cannot support life is going to obviously be unobserved. So we live in a life-encouraging universe because that's, of course, where we can actually live. and so in a nutshell that's what the fine-tuning argument in its possible resolutions are my own feeling about it is i think that the multiverse is it's better than just saying well god did it which doesn't really explain anything but it's full short of a complete explanation so i think at this stage we don't we obviously that no but i'm not sure we've even got the right conceptual framework for tackling it i think um because we accept that the laws of physics with these constants that might be different uh it could be different but the laws of physics are sort of given we accept them as like a brute fact we don't say where the laws of physics come from or why do they have the form that they do we don't have a theory of the laws of physics.

1:14:08It seems to me that if we had a deeper level, deeper theory, a way of trying to understand the nature of the laws of physics themselves, why those laws, and whether they are literally fixed and immutable, or whether they can vary, whether they could have been different, and why, if we have a theory of those laws, then it could be that we can connect our own existence as minds, comprehending, thinking observers in the universe, we can find a way connecting that to the nature of the laws themselves. We don't have such a theory. We can see the ghost of something like that through quantum effects, which can reach back in time, just as they can reach forward in time, and which, as we discussed already, a great length, that the making a measurement or an observation has an effect on the system, it brings into being.

1:15:06If we're measuring that, remember, if we're measuring the position of an atom, the measurement brings into being an atom of the place. Can we conceive that a conscious being like ourselves can bring into being a universe with the right properties to support life? Well, some people think so. John Wheeler, the great American physicist who coined the term black hole, is famous for that. He believed that the accumulated observations of all conscious observers over the entire maybe infinite future history of the universe could in some sense reach back in time and ensure through self-consistency a universe in which those observers would exist.

1:15:53Stephen Hawking came up with a similar idea, and I too flirted with an idea like that in my early book called The Goldilocks, Eligna, Why is the Universe Just Right for Life? These are all ways of trying to connect observers, minds if you like, with the nature of the laws that give rise to those observers. It's a work in progress. I can't say I've made very much progress, but I've thought about it for decades. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need.

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1:17:43Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com, or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. i'm neither a cosmologist nor a string theorist nor anything else but i've always found the multiverse explanation the most palatable not least in part because nothing strikes me about it as obviously spooky in the way that um like god might be so it seems like an acceptable naturalist explanation but i lack any of the requisite expertise to make any progress on the problem or to really think about it in a critically scientific way so i take your point entirely that we may currently lack the requisite scientific concepts or apparatus to even tackle it so that that makes perfectly perfect sense to me one other topic i wanted to ask you about also connected to life is the or i guess the question is what is the origin of life do you have a theory of life and i ask about this just because i've i've spoken with sarah walker lee cronin other people about this on the show and i know that we don't exactly know how life emerged or what distinguishes something that is living from something that is non-living.

1:19:12Do you have any theories or thoughts on this topic? Well, I certainly have lots of thoughts. Whether I've got any theory is a different matter. So I follow very closely what Lee Crenion and Sarah Walker have been doing. And they're trying to come up with a definition of life, which is novel and is, in my view, a good advance. But the short answer is we have no idea how non-life turned into life. How did a mishmash of chemicals spontaneously organize themselves into something which displays all of the remarkable properties of life, including the goal-directedness and information processing and so on?

1:19:59We really don't know. I think there are two origins of life. One is the origin of the stuff, the hardware, the complex molecules, for example, that chemists like Lee Crowley are a bit busy trying to build those molecules. There have been experiments for many, many decades trying to sort of recreate a primordial soup and see whether any of the familiar molecules, you know, like amino acids and nucleotides and stuff that dwarf uses, whether they would spontaneously form just from a chemical soup. The answer is, well, some of them do. You don't go very far down that path. But even if you did, of course, there's a huge difference between getting the right stuff and the information processing and storage and information management that we associate with a living thing.

1:21:03It's a bit like with a computer. You can say, well, it looks like a miracle. It's something like Windows on my computer. How on earth is it done? and you wouldn't expect to find the answer by smashing the computer the bits and looking at the components and even the amazing microchip you would stare at it for a long time and it wouldn't tell you how windows is produced you know that you have to go to talk to a software engineer so the origin arrives the origin of the hardware but the origin of the software and even if we figure out where the stuff comes from, I don't think we have a clue about how complex molecules organize themselves into patterns and networks that process information without having some sort of external designer doing it.

1:21:57We don't know how that happened. I don't think there was an external designer. I think there is an answer to this, but we don't know what it is. And so I think that the main problem is the origin of the software. And furthermore, this gets very close to computation because it's digital encamped information. There's a genetic code. It translates from the four-letter alphabet of DNA to the 20-letter alphabet of amino acids needed for proteins. And so it's encrypted. It's an information channel. It's decrypted. And it's implemented. so all of this computational work came into this digital digital encoded computational work came into being somehow spontaneously a long time ago and we really don't know anything about how they happen to all the principles that underpin it but I should say it goes on more than this isn't just sort of processing bits of information you can certainly measure the number of bits in DNA for example but it's not the actual head count of bits that really matters.

1:23:09It's what they do. And just to give you a very good example, the development of an embryo, it's an information management problem that all the right bits have to be in the right place at the right time. And all of that, the networks, the chemical networks that regulate the growth of different organs and their positions and all the rest of it are under the control of an information network system. Ultimately, the information's in the DNA, but it's distributed genes from distributed networks that can turn each other on and off. So you've got a complex network, information network, gene network, coupled to a complex chemical network in a way that nobody understands how that works.

1:24:01So I think we've got a long, long way to go before we understand the origin of the software or the information processing capability of life, but also that it's beyond just an accumulation of bits of information. It's the management capabilities. The information management is exemplified by the embryo development that is so difficult to understand. We don't, it's a systemic property, it's a contextual property. It seems to involve things like semantics and meaning and so on. And physicists really don't know how to adapt our existing concepts of physics to incorporate things like contextual information management.

1:24:48I don't know where that would go into a mathematical law of physics. So I think a long way to go. Paul, thank you so much for this conversation. We've only really scratched the surface with quantum 2.0, not to mention these other topics that I would have loved to discuss. So maybe one day down the line, we'll pick this up and cover some more topics. But until then, thank you so much for speaking with me today. Well, it's been a huge pleasure. Thank you.

1:25:43We'll see you next time. Real design professionals. Free samples. Zero pressure. Right now, get up to 45 % off site-wide. Plus, get a free professional measure at Blinds.com. Rules and restrictions apply. I'm Glenn Washington, host of Snap Judgment, the award-winning storytelling podcast from KQED. Every week, Snap deals a new card, like the girl whose sister was a monkey, or the man who lived in the woods for 30 years, or even the woman who snuck her lover out of prison. In a dog crate. Pick a card. Any card. Tap the listen now to Snap Judgment from KQED on Spotify.