Helgoland: Searching for the past and future of quantum physics on a tiny island

I’ve been to more scientific conferences than I want to count, but the recent conference held on Helgorand Island to celebrate the 100th anniversary of quantum mechanics is one of the strangest in a good way.

This small German island is less than a kilometre long in the North Sea, so there is air from a coastal resort on the heels. Even in the summer it’s not attractive, it smells like small streets full of cheap gift shops, fish and ice cream. Imagine this time hitting the cutting edge experimenter of Quantum Technologies, fresh from discussing work at the city hall next to the Crazy Golf Course. It’s all pretty amazing.

The reason we are here is revealed in the rocks on the cliff road. It has a bronze plaque (see below) that suggests that physicist Werner Heisenberg invented quantum mechanics on an expedition seeking hay relief in 1925. Sadly, that’s not really true. At best, Heisenberg has sketched out a few ideas here. And the version we know better today was published by Erwin Schrödinger in early 1926. This introduced wave functions as a way to predict the evolution of quantum systems.

All the same, but this is a clear year when you assign the 100th anniversary to quantum mechanics. And regardless of how much of Helgorand’s story was due to Heisenberg’s self-mythology – he wrote an account of his breakthrough there just a few years later – Remote Control Island is a rather special place to host parties.

And what a party it is. It’s hard to imagine such a reunion of famous quantum physicists. Here are four Nobel Prize winners: Alan’s side, David Wineland, Anton Zeylinger and Serge Haloche. Between them, they have established the reality of the strange features of quantum mechanics, so that the properties of one particle, no matter how far apart, appear to be instantaneously conditional in the way we measure what we measure. He also created some of the techniques for manipulating individual quantum particles currently used to construct quantum computers.

But it’s here. I think these grand (ISH) men will agree with me that it is the younger generation who will build up some meaning what quantum mechanics really means and turn its infamous counterintuitive nature into new technology and new understandings of nature. Quantum mechanics is famous for acknowledging many different interpretations of what the theory mathematics tells us about the real world, and most of the old security guards are already taking a stand and it seems unlikely to change their opinion.

That impasse was evident in Zeilinger and Aspect’s first evening panel discussion. Jill’s Brothersis the founder of quantum cryptography at the University of Montreal in Canada.

To be fair to these veterans, their ideas were formed in the face of skepticism (or even worse) from their peers, even about the value of thinking about such “basic” questions. They emerged from the era of “silent calculations” – phrases coined by American physicists David Mermin To explain how it was considered a bad form to wonder what quantum mechanics means, my duty is simply to solve the Schrödinger equation. It is no surprise that they had to grow robust scenery and thick skins.

Young researchers seem less arbitrary about quantum infrastructures, and are probably ready to pick up and place different interpretations depending on how useful they are for the problems at hand. There is a bit of Copenhagen’s interpretation here, in many of the worlds. All of these are not statements about reality, but as tools to think.

The new generation is also mercilessly male. for example, Vedika Khemani At Stanford University, California, I spoke at a meeting about the rich and beautiful connection between condensed physics and the ideas of quantum information. This is going to take us from the storage of information on magnetic tapes in the 1950s to error correction techniques essential to quantum calculations today.

It is becoming more and more popular to use quantum mechanics to build new technologies, but theorists are not lazy either. Flaminia Giacomini At the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, I was one of the speakers of quantum, and I felt that by seeking marriage to the granular quantum world, I could reconcile it with gravity by seeking marriage to the smooth, continuous world normally required by quantum gravity, I felt that I could have a clear grasp of what quantum mechanics mean.

You may have thought this was to explore untestable and barely guessable ideas in string theory, one attempt to create such unions. But the truth is, as Giacomi said, “There is no experimental evidence that gravity should be quantitative.” There’s no empirical reason (even if there are a lot of theoretical reasons)

What’s exciting is, at least, this is something I’d like to test in the near future. For example, checking whether two objects can be intertwined through gravity interactions alone. The challenge here is that the object must be large enough to generate significant gravity, but small enough to demonstrate quantum behavior. Several speakers have expressed confidence that they will be able to meet the challenge within about a decade.

For me, the important revelation of the conference is the intertwining of so many quantum theory and experiments. Pulling one will affect others. A detailed understanding of quantum gravity from exquisitely sensitive experiments of trapped particles could enter the paradox of black hole information and introduce new ideas about error correction for quantum computing and new insights into twisted “topology” quantum states.

Working in any of these areas seems likely to ultimately help you understand the old questions that are bothering Heisenberg and his colleagues. What happens when you measure with quantum particles? Anyway, it’s wrong to see it, saying a century later we’re still struggling with those old questions. Instead, quantum mechanics has discovered that it is much richer, more convenient and surprising than founders could ever guess.