Latest news with #FrankWilczek
South China Morning Post
14-04-2025
- Science
- South China Morning Post
Opsin your eyes! Quantum sensors are the colour vision magicians inside our heads
In the fifth instalment of his exclusive monthly series for the South China Morning Post, American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek explores the marvel of vision and why we can credit the quantum world for it. Read his previous articles here Advertisement The design of sensors that exploit the strange features of quantum mechanics is a vibrant frontier of modern physics. But nature got there first. Some of the most impressive quantum sensors on Earth have been common for millions of years. They help us to identify objects at great distances; they warn us about unripe food, poisons and predators; they empower us to enjoy the shimmer of jewels and rainbows, or to discern small glittering gold nuggets hidden among common stones. They are the marvellous molecules at the back of our eyeballs, whose response to incoming photons gives us our colour vision. World Quantum Day is a great moment to recognise that vision is a gift to us from the quantum world To appreciate why and how, it is useful to compare vision with hearing. Both are, fundamentally, ways of detecting vibrations. In hearing , the vibrations – or sound waves – are travelling disturbances of pressure, usually in air. In vision, the vibrations are travelling disturbances in electric and magnetic fields – the class of electromagnetic waves we call light. Advertisement These two kinds of vibrations occur at vastly different rates. Sounds perceptible to humans are in the range of 20 to 20,000 hertz; that is, the vibrations occur 20 to 20,000 times per second. For reference, dogs hear higher frequencies too, up to 45,000Hz or so; hence the possibility of dog whistles. The electromagnetic vibrations in visible light occur roughly a trillion times faster.
South China Morning Post
17-03-2025
- Science
- South China Morning Post
Parity at the beach: these shells make a clear distinction between left and right
In the fourth instalment of his exclusive monthly series for the South China Morning Post, American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek looks at the notion of parity violation. Read the previous articles here Advertisement This January we held the first Quantum Connections Winter School, sponsored by USTC, in Sanya, on Hainan Island, close by its long white sandy beach. It was attended in person by about 200 advanced students from around the world (but mostly from China), together with close to 20,000 online observers. Thirteen world-leading figures in quantum physics served as teachers, each giving a lecture course lasting 10 or so hours and answering questions for several hours more. The cutting-edge topics ranged from exotic new states of matter to quantum information processing to time crystals and the search for dark matter axions. The students learned a lot, and I did too. But Quantum Connections was much more than a collection of lecture courses. The students and lecturers shared the same hotel accommodation, ate meals together, and had many opportunities to interact at a human level. Over two weeks, we bonded into a little community. It was an opportunity for renewal and inspiration – especially welcome for those of us escaping colder, darker winter climates. Every morning my wife Betsy Devine and I took a long walk along the seashore, waded in the gentle ebb and flow of ocean waves, watched the sun rise, and admired some of the prettier shells. And there, in the patterns of the shells, we got to see a beautiful example of handedness, or parity violation – a profound and fascinating feature of the world that has played a big role in the history of biology and physics and continues to inspire new questions. Specifically, we noticed that a very common kind of conical seashell makes a clear distinction between left and right. (That is the meaning of 'parity violation'.) The shells in question are cones whose walls are helical whorls of spiral ridges. Advertisement Looking at a few such shells, we noticed a subtle regularity: when you view a shell face-on, with the pointy tip at the bottom, the ridges go up as you scan from left to right. Intrigued, we went on to examine dozens of shells. All of them showed the same preference. We never saw the opposite pattern, with ridges going down from left to right. You might also notice that the openings on top, when exposed to view, are always on the left. Those two regularities are linked, because the snail excreting the shell, working from the bottom up, always maintains an escape hatch.
South China Morning Post
19-02-2025
- South China Morning Post
Why quantum computing is a good news, bad news research project
Published: 11:26am, 19 Feb 2025 In the third instalment of his exclusive monthly series for the South China Morning Post, American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek discusses the significance of Google's new Willow chip and provides a reality check on the state of quantum computing. Read the previous articles here . On December 9, Google released a new computer chip named 'Willow'. It is the central processor – basically, the brain – of the latest and (so far) greatest quantum computer . By showing a clear advantage over conventional supercomputers in a specially crafted mathematical task, and by doing meaningful error correction, Willow achieved two long-sought goals in the field. How important are those achievements, and what do they mean for the future? First, just what is a quantum computer? Physicists today believe quantum mechanics describes the behaviour of all matter. And the creative engineers who use beautifully crafted, focused lasers to sculpt the trillions of tiny, delicate semiconductor transistors at the heart of 'conventional'' modern computers – from laptops to workstations to supercomputers – are virtuoso users of quantum mechanics. In those important ways, all modern computers are quantum computers. Google Quantum AI's Willow chip was launched in December. Photo: Google Quantum AI But the phrase 'quantum computer', as it is commonly used today, means something more special and specific. Quantum computers, in this usage, are computers capable of using superpositions of different logical states. Let me spell out those two key ideas.
