Quantum Supremacy by Kaku

Ref: Michio Kaku (2023). Quantum Supremacy. Doubleday.

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Summary

• Google, Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Rigetti, IonQ and Honeywell are all building quantum computer prototypes.

• Despite the impressive technical achievements made by Google and others in recent years, a workable quantum computer that can solve real-world problems is still many years in the future.

• Areas where quantum computers can overtake conventional digital computers include search engines, optimization, and simulation that may assist in optimizing Haber Bosch, discerning how photosynthesis occurs at room temperature, and the protein folding process. Perhaps the greatest benefit is to use quantum computers to simulate hundreds of vital chemical processes. The dream would be to predict the outcome of any chemical reaction at the atomic level without using chemicals at all, only quantum computers. This new branch of science, computational chemistry, determines chemical properties not by experiment, but by simulating them in a quantum computer, which may one day eliminate expensive and time-consuming testing.

• How Quantum Computers are possible

• 1) Superposition: Before you observe an object, it exists in many possible states. So, an electron can be in two places at the same time. This vastly increases computer power, since you have more states to calculate with.

• 2) Entanglement: When two particles are coherent and you separate them, they can still influence each other. This interaction takes place instantly. This allows atoms to communicate with each other, even when separated. This means that computer power grows exponentially as more and more qubits are added that can interact with each other, far faster than ordinary computers. 

• 3) Sum over Paths: When a particle moves between two points, it sums over all possible paths connecting these two points. The most likely path is the classical, nonquantum path, but all these other paths also contribute to the final quantum path of the particle. This means that even paths which are extremely unlikely may become real. 

• 4) Tunneling: When faced with a large energy barrier, normally a particle fails to penetrate it. But in quantum mechanics, there is a small but finite probability that you can “tunnel” or penetrate through the barrier. This might be why the complex chemical reactions of life can proceed at room temperature, even without vast amounts of energy.

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---PART I RISE OF QUANTUM COMPUTERS

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1 END OF THE AGE OF SILICON

• Moore’s Law: Si-chip based computing power doubles approximately every 18 months. 

• Moore’s law can be extended all the way back to the 1800s, to the age of mechanical computers. Back then, engineers used spinning cylinders, cogs, gears, and wheels to perform simple arithmetic operations. At the turn of the last century, these calculators began to use electricity, replacing gears with relays and cables. During WWII, computers used vast arrays of vacuum tubes to break secret government codes. In the postwar era, the transition was made from vacuum tubes to transistors, which could be miniaturized to microscopic size, facilitating continued advances in speed and power. Back in the 1950s, mainframe computers could only be purchased by large corporations and government agencies like the Pentagon and international banks. They were powerful (i.e., ENIAC could do in 30 sec what might take a human 20 hrs). But they were expensive, bulky, and often took up an entire floor of an office building. The microchip revolutionized this entire process.

• Moore’s law is slowing down and may eventually come to a halt. This is because microchips are so compact that the thinnest layer of transistors is ~20 atoms across. When they reach about 5 atoms across, the location of the electron becomes uncertain, and they can leak out and short-circuit the chip or generate so much heat that the chips melt.

• Essentially, all modern computers are based on digital information, which can be encoded in a series of 0s and 1s. The smallest unit of information, a single digit, is called a bit. This sequence of 0s and 1s is fed into a digital processor, which performs the calculation, and then produces an output.

• Richard Feynman in 1959 saw a different approach to digital information. In a prophetic, pathbreaking essay titled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”, he asked: Why not replace this sequence of 0s and 1s with states of atoms, making an atomic computer? Why not replace transistors with the smallest possible object, the atom?

• There are an infinite number of ways that you can have an atom spin. This vastly increases the number of states that are possible. So, the atom can carry much more information, not just in a bit, but a qubit, i.e., a simultaneous mixture of the up and down states. Digital bits can only carry one bit of information at a time, which limits their power, but qubits, or quantum bits, have almost unlimited power.

• For quantum computers to work, atoms have to be arranged precisely so that they vibrate in unison. This is called coherence. But atoms are incredibly small and sensitive objects. The smallest impurity or disturbance from the outside world can cause this array of atoms to fall out of coherence, ruining the entire calculation. This fragility is the main problem facing quantum computers. So, the trillion-dollar question is: Can we control decoherence? In order to minimize the contamination coming from the outside world, scientists use special equipment to drop the temperature to near absolute zero, where unwanted vibrations are at a minimum.

• Entanglement: The interaction of qubits; not possible for ordinary bits.

• Superposition: At the atomic level, objects can exist simultaneously in multiple states.

• Coherence: Atoms arranged precisely so that they vibrate in unison.

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2 END OF THE DIGITAL AGE

• Charles Babbage (1791-1871): English inventor and visionary; created the most powerful mechanical computer of its kind to plot the motion of everything from the planets to ships at sea to interest rates.

• Ada Lovelace (1815-1852): Daughter of the poet Lord Byron, is known for helping Babbage introduce several new concepts in computing. Usually, a mechanical computer required a set of gears and cogs to slowly and painstakingly calculate numbers, one by one. But to generate entire tables full of thousands of mathematical numbers at one time (such as logarithms, interest rates, and navigation charts), one needed a set of instructions to guide the machine across many iterations. In other words, one needed software to guide the sequence of computations in the hardware. She wrote a series of detailed instructions by which the machine could systematically generate what are called Bernoulli numbers, essential for the calculations it performed.

• In Babbage’s day they began to ask an even more fundamental question: Is mathematics complete? Do the rules of mathematics ensure that every true statement can be proven, or are there true statements that can elude the most exceptional minds of the human race because they are, in fact, not provable? 

• David Hilbert (1862-1943): In 1900, the great German mathematician David Hilbert listed the most important unproven mathematical questions of the time, challenging the world’s greatest mathematicians. This remarkable set of unsolved questions would then guide the agenda of mathematics for the next century as, one by one, each unproven theorem would be proven. Over the decades, young mathematicians would find fame and glory as they conquered one of Hilbert’s unfinished theorems. But there was some irony here. One of the unsolved problems listed by Hilbert was the ancient problem of proving all true statements in mathematics when given a set of axioms. 

• Kurt Gödel (1907-1978): In 1931, at a conference where Hilbert was discussing his program, a young Austrian mathematician, Kurt Gödel, proved it was impossible (Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem). Intrigued by Gödel’s theorem, Alan Turing found an ingenious way to reframe the entire question. It would forever change the direction of computer science.

• Alan Turing (1912-1954): Father of computer science and artificial intelligence.

• Turing imagined an infinitely long tape, which contained a series of squares or cells. Inside each square, you could put a 0 or a 1, or you could leave it blank. Then a processor read the tape, and was allowed to make just six simple operations on it. Basically, you could replace a 0 with a 1, or vice versa, and move the processor one square to the left or right: 1) You can read the number in the square, 2) You can write a number in the square, 3) You can move one square to the left, 4) You can move one square to the right, 5) You can change the number in the square, 6) You can stop.

• In binary language, the number one is represented by 1, the number two is represented by 10, the number three is represented by 11, the number four by 100, and so on. There is also a memory where numbers can be stored.) Then the final numerical result emerges from the processor as output. In other words, the Turing machine can take one number and turn it into another according to precise commands in the software. So, Turing reduced mathematics to a game: by systematically replacing 0 with 1 and vice versa, one could encode all of mathematics. Turing introduced his “Turing Machine”, written in Binary language, in 1936.

• Turing then asked himself a simple but important question: Can Gödel’s infamous incompleteness theorem, which involved higher mathematics, be proven using his Turing machine, which was much simpler but still captured the essence of mathematics? Turing then expressed the question raised by Gödel in a concise form: Are there true statements that cannot be computed in a finite amount of time by a Turing machine, given a set of axioms? Like the work of Gödel, Turing showed that the answer is yes.

• Turing and his colleagues set upon this crucial problem of code breaking by designing calculating machines that might systematically crack these impenetrable codes. Their first breakthrough, called the bombe in Mar, 1940, resembled Babbage’s difference engine in some ways. Instead of steam-driven mechanisms like previous machines, whose gears and cogs were slow, difficult to make, and often jammed, the bombe relied on rotors, drums, and relays, all powered by electricity.

• Turing was also involved with another project, Colossus, with an even more ingenious design. Historians believe it was the world’s first programmable digital electronic computer. Instead of mechanical parts like the difference engine or the bombe, they used vacuum tubes, which can send electrical signals near the speed of light. Vacuum tubes can be compared to valves controlling the flow of water. By turning a small valve, one can shut off the water flowing in a much larger pipe, or let it flow unimpeded. This, in turn, can represent the number 0 or 1. Colossus was competed in 1944.

• In the machines at Bletchley Park, a large array of vacuum tubes could perform digital calculations at enormous speeds by turning the flow of electricity on or off in the vacuum tubes.

• Historians such as Harry Hinsley have estimated that the work of Turing and others at Bletchley Park shortened the length of war by about two years and saved over 14M lives.

• In 1950, he opened his landmark paper on the subject by stating, “I propose to consider the question: Can machines think?” Or to put it another way, is the brain a Turing machine of some sort? So Turing came up with the celebrated Turing test. Put a human in a sealed room and a robot in another room. You are allowed to ask each one any written question and read their responses. The challenge is: Can you determine which room held the human? He called this test the imitation game.

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3 RISE OF THE QUANTUM

• Max Planck (1858-1947): The creator of the quantum theory.

• If you move a charged atom fast enough, it radiates EM radiation (like radio or light), according to the laws of Maxwell. The color of a hot object indicates the frequency of the radiation. Using Newton’s theory applied to the atom, and using Maxwell’s theory of light, one can calculate the light emitted from a hot object. So far, so good. But when the calculation is actually performed, disaster strikes. One finds that the energy emitted can become infinite at high frequencies, which is impossible. This was called the Rayleigh-Jeans catastrophe. It showed physicists that there was a gaping hole in Newtonian mechanics.

• When Planck postulated that the energy occurred in packets of a certain size, he found precisely the correct curve linking frequency and energy for light. To do the calculation, he had to introduce a number representing the size of the quantum of energy. He called it h (Planck’s constant, 6.62…x 10-34 joule-seconds).

• Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

• Light, when it hits a metal, can knock out an electron, which creates a small electrical current, known as the photoelectric effect. This is what allows a solar panel to absorb light and convert it into electricity (replaces batteries with solar cells). 

• The man who explained the photoelectric effect was Albert Einstein, and he did it using Planck’s theory. Following Planck, Einstein claimed that light energy could occur in discrete packets or quanta of energy (later called photons) that could knock electrons out of a metal. Thus, a new physical principle began to emerge. Einstein introduced the concept of “duality,” i.e., that light energy has a dual nature. Light could act like a particle, the photon, or a wave, as in optics. Somehow, light had two possible forms.

• Louis de Broglie (1892-1987)

• In 1924, a young grad student, Louis de Broglie, using the ideas of Planck and Einstein, made the next big leap. If light can occur both as a particle and a wave, then why not matter? Perhaps electrons also possessed duality.

• Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961)

• One day, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger was discussing the idea of matter as a wave with a colleague. But if matter can act like a wave, his friend asked, then what is the equation that it must obey? So Schrödinger set out to find the wave equation for electrons. His wave equation is the bedrock of the quantum theory.

• If the electron was a wave, then the wave should form discrete resonances of definite frequencies as it circled around the nucleus. When one catalogued the resonances that an electron could make, one found a wave pattern that fit the description of the H atom perfectly. By comparing the resonances predicted by Schrödinger’s waves with actual elements, one found a remarkable one-to-one correspondence. Physicists, who for decades were stumped trying to understand the atom, were now able to peek inside the atom itself. When one compared these wave patterns to the hundred or so chemical elements found in nature by Dmitri Mendeleev and others, one could explain the chemical properties of the elements using pure mathematics. 

• If the electron was a wave, then what is waving?

• Max Born (1882-1970)

• Physicist Max Born lit the fuse of this explosion by postulating that matter consists of particles, but the probability of finding that particle is given by a wave.

• Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976)

• In some sense, electrons can be two places at the same time. Werner Heisenberg, who came up with an alternative but equivalent formulation of quantum mechanics, would call this the uncertainty principle…Previously, mathematicians were forced to confront the incompleteness theorem, and now physicists had to confront the uncertainty principle.

The Basics of Quantum Mechanics

• 1) Start with the wave function Ψ(x), which describes an electron located at the point x. 

• 2) Insert the wave into the Schrödinger equation HΨ(x) = i(h/2π) ∂tΨ(x). H is the Hamiltonian and corresponds to the energy of the system.

• 3) Each solution of this equation is labeled an index n, so in general, Ψ(x) is a sum or superposition of all these multiple states. 

• The third statement says that in the subatomic world, an electron can exist simultaneously as the sum of different states, which is impossible in Newtonian mechanics. Before a measurement is made, in fact, the electron exists in this netherworld as a collection of different states.

• 4) When a measurement is made, the wave function “collapses,” leaving only one state Ψn(x), i.e., all the other waves are set to zero. 

• The most crucial and outrageous statement is number four, which holds that only after a measurement is made will the wave finally “collapse” and yield the correct answer, giving the probability of finding the electron in that state. One cannot know which state the electron is in until a measurement is made. This is called the measurement problem.

• Everett’s theory says that if you drop this statement that says the wave “collapses” so it never does at all. Each possible solution continues to exist in its own reality, producing, as the theory is known, “many worlds.” Like a river branching into many smaller tributaries, the various waves of the electron keep propagating merrily along, splitting and re-splitting again and again, branching off into other universes forever. In other words, there are an infinite number of parallel universes, none of which ever collapses. Each branch of this multiverse appears real as any other, but they represent all possible quantum states…Parallel universes necessarily emerge when you try to describe the entire universe in quantum terms. Instead of parallel electrons, now we have parallel universes.

• 5) The probability of finding the electron in this state is given by the absolute value of Ψn(x).

• To refute the last statement, Einstein would say, “God does not play dice with the universe.” But according to legend, Niels Bohr fired back, “Stop telling God what to do.”

• It is precisely postulates 3 and 4 that make quantum computers possible. The electron is now described as the simultaneous sum over different quantum states, which gives quantum computers their calculational power. While classical computers only sum over just 0s and 1s, quantum computers sum over all quantum states Ψn(x) between 0 and 1, which vastly increases the number of states and therefore their range and power.

• Imagine, Schrodinger wrote, there is a cat in a sealed box, which contains a vial of poison gas. This vial is connected to a hammer, which is attached to a Geiger counter next to a quantity of uranium. If an atom of the uranium decays, it activates the Geiger counter, which sets off the hammer, thus releasing the poison and killing the cat. Now here is the question that has baffled the world’s top physicists for the past century: Before you open the box, is the cat dead or alive? A Newtonian would say that the answer is obvious: common sense says that the cat is either dead or alive, but not both. You can only be in one state at a time. Even before you opened the box, the cat’s fate was already predetermined…However, Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr had a radically different interpretation. They said that the cat is best represented by the sum of two waves: the wave of the live cat and the dead cat. When the box is still sealed, the cat can only exist as the superposition or sum of two waves simultaneously representing a dead and a live cat.

• In the microworld, things do not exist in definite states, but only as the sum of all possible states.

• Entanglement: The idea that when two objects are coherent with each other (vibrating in the same way), then they remain coherent, even if separated by vast distances.

• This has major implications for quantum computers. It means that, even if the qubits in a quantum computer are separated, they can still interact with each other, which is responsible for the fantastic computational ability of quantum computers.

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4 DAWN OF QUANTUM COMPUTERS

• Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley (1950s)

• Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley used a semiconductor to create transistors. (Metals are conductors, which allow for the free flow of electrons. Insulators, like glass, plastic, or rubber, do not conduct electricity. Semiconductors are in between and can both carry and stop the flow of electrons.) The transistor exploits this crucial property. It is the successor to the old vacuum tube that was ingeniously used by Turing and others.

• A vacuum tube and transistor can be roughly compared to a valve controlling the flow of water in a pipe. With a small valve, you can control the much larger flow of water going through a pipe. You can either shut it off, which corresponds to zero, or leave it open, which corresponds to one. In this way, you can precisely control the flow of water in a complex series of pipes. If you now replace the valve with a transistor and the water pipes with wires conducting electricity, you can create a digital transistorized computer.

• To create a transistor, you start with a template where the image of the circuits you want has been carved out. Then you place the template over a Si wafer. You then apply a beam of UV radiation onto the template, so the image in the template is transferred onto the Si wafer. You then remove the template and add acid. The Si chip is specially treated chemically so that, when you apply the acid, it burns the image you desire in the wafer. The advantage is that these images can be as small as the wavelength of UV light, which is a bit larger than an atom.

• Jack Kilby & Robert Noyce (1958)

• A microchip can be compared to the roadways in a large city. The constant flow of cars is like electrons traveling along the etched circuits. The traffic signals that regulate the flow of traffic correspond to transistors. A red-light stopping traffic is like 0, while a green light that allows traffic to flow is like a 1.

• As the width of the components of a Si chip approaches the size of an atom, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle kicks in, and the electrons’ positions become uncertain, causing them to leak out and short the circuit.

• Richard Feynman (1918-1988)

• Quantum Electrodynamics (QED): The theory of how electrons interact with photons (accurate to 1 part in a billion).

• Feynman rewrote the quantum theory in terms of the principle of least action. In this view, subatomic particles “sniff out” all possible paths. On each path he put a factor related to the action and Planck’s constant. Then he summed or integrated over all possible paths. This is now called the path integral approach, because you are adding up contributions from all the paths an object can take. Much to his shock, he found he could derive the Schrödinger equation. In fact, he found that he could summarize all of quantum physics in terms of this simple principle. So decades after Schrödinger introduced his wave equation by magic, with no derivation, Feynman was able to unify the entirety of quantum mechanics, including the Schrödinger equation, using this path integral approach.

• Mother Nature can perform marvelous quantum reactions at room temperature (such as photosynthesis and the fixing of nitrogen for fertilizers). Under classical physics, there is so much noise and jostling of atoms at room temperature that many chemical processes should be impossible in those conditions. In other words, photosynthesis violates the laws of Newton. So how does Mother Nature solve the problem of decoherence, the most difficult problem in quantum computers, to enable photosynthesis at room temperature?

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5 THE RACE IS ON

• As we go to press, IBM released the 433-qubit Osprey quantum computer and will deploy the 1,121-qubit Condor quantum computer in 2023.

• Quantum Computer Types

• Superconducting Quantum Computer: A type of quantum computer that operates at temperatures near absolute zero, at which the circuits become quantum mechanical (coherent, so the superposition of electrons is undisturbed). Then, by bringing various circuits together, one can entangle them so that quantum calculations are possible. 

• Back in 2019, Google was first out of the gate, announcing that it had achieved quantum supremacy with its Sycamore superconducting quantum computer. However, IBM was not far behind, and later surged ahead with its Eagle quantum processor, which broke the 100-qubit barrier in 2021 and has since developed the 433-qubit Osprey processor.

• Disadvantages: Complex with an elaborate array of tubes and pumps to cool the machine down. This also raises the cost and introduces error. The slightest vibration or impurity can break the coherence of the circuits. Someone sneezing nearby can ruin an experiment. Scientists measure this sensitivity by coherence time, i.e., the length of time that atoms remain coherently vibrating together. In general, the lower the temperature, the slower the motion of the atoms in the environment, and the longer the coherence time. Cooling the machines to temperatures even lower than those in outer space maximizes the coherence time.

• Ion Trap Quantum Computer: A type of quantum computer that suspends an ion in a trap that consists of a series of electric and magnetic fields, and when multiple ions are introduced, they vibrate as coherent qubits. For example, if the electron axis spins up, then the state is a 0. If it spins down, it is a 1. So the result is a superimposed mixture of two states. Then microwave or laser beams can hit these ions, flipping them and causing them to change state. So these beams act like a processor, turning one configuration of atoms into another, just as a CPU in a digital computer flips transistors between on and off states.

• Photonic Quantum Computers: A type of quantum computer that exploits the fact that light can vibrate in different directions (polarized states). For example, a light beam may be vibrating vertically up and down, or perhaps sideways, left and right. So the number 0 or 1 can be represented by light vibrating in different polarized directions. The photonic quantum computer starts by firing a laser beam at a beam splitter, which is just a finely polished piece of glass, at a forty-five-degree angle. Hitting it, the laser beam fissions in two, with half going forward and the other half being reflected sideways. The important point here is that the two beams are each coherent, vibrating in unison with each other. Then the two coherent beams can hit two polished mirrors, which then reflect the two beams back to a common point, where the two photons get entangled with each other. In this way, we can create a qubit. Thus, the resulting beam is now a superposition of two entangled photons. Now imagine a tabletop consisting of perhaps hundreds of beam splitters and mirrors, which entangle a series of coherent photons together.

• Advantages: Operates at room temperatures; photons are much faster than electrons, traveling ten times the speed of electrical signals.

• Silicon Photonic Computers: A type of quantum computer that uses Si to transmit light (since it is transparent to certain frequencies of IR), which is crucial for entangling photons. First designed in 2016 by PsiQuantum. 

• Topological Quantum Computers: A type of quantum computer that can remain stable at room temperature. Topological computers that cohere’s qubits by issuing indium antimonide nanowires (discovered in 2018 by physicists at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands).

• D-Wave Quantum Computers: A type of quantum computer that excels at optimization. D-Wave computers can optimize data by using magnetic and electric fields to manipulate currents flowing in superconducting wires, until they reach the lowest energy state.

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---PART II QUANTUM COMPUTERS AND SOCIETY---

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6 THE ORIGIN OF LIFE

• Even the simplest molecular process can quickly overwhelm the capacity of a digital computer.

• Carbon has six electrons. Two sit in the first-level orbital, and the remaining four sit individually in the four spaces of the second-level orbitals. This leaves room for four chemical bonds. An element with four bonds is rare among the chemicals in the periodic table. But the rules of quantum mechanics allow this structure to create long, complex chains of C, O, H, and N thereby creating the amino acids.

• Human Genome Project

• Stage One: Mapping the Genome, which provides a dictionary with 20,000 entries and no definitions.

• Stage Two: Determining the Function of the Genes

• Stage Three: Modifying and Improving the Genome

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7 GREENING THE WORLD

• Photosynthesis creates ~15,000 tons of biomass per second, which covers the earth with green vegetation.

• The overall efficiency for turning light into the final product of fuel and biomass (photosynthesis), which requires a series of complex steps and intricate chemical reactions, the efficiency drops down to 1%.

• In the mid-1600s, Jan van Helmont, a Belgian scientist, measured the weight of a plant and its soil. To his surprise, he found that the weight of the soil did not change at all over time. He concluded that plants grew because of the water. Then the chemist Joseph Priestley conducted more detailed experiments, including one in which he put a plant in a glass jar along with a candle. He found that the candle burned out quickly if left alone, but could continue to burn in the presence of the plant, since the plant used up the CO2 in the air and supplied O for the candle.

• The early Earth’s atmosphere was predominantly CO2, which came from the outgassing of ancient volcanoes.

• Calvin Cycle: Pieced together in the 1950s; the complex chemical processes by which CO2 and water turn into carbohydrates. One step always eluded them. How do plants capture the energy of photons of light in the first place? What starts this long chain of events, beginning with the capture of the energy of sunlight?

• Photosynthesis: Begins when photons, the discrete packets of light, hit a leaf that contains chlorophyll. This special molecule absorbs red and blue light, but not green, which is scattered back into the environment. Hence, the green color of plants is due to the fact that green is not absorbed by them…The photon of light impacts chlorophyll, and this creates energy vibrations on the leaf, called excitons, which somehow travel along the surface of the leaf. Eventually, these excitations enter what is called a collection center on the surface of the leaf, where the energy of the exciton is used to convert CO2 into O. Miraculously, the energy of the exciton is carried to the collection center with almost no energy loss at all. For reasons that are still not understood, this process is almost 100% efficient…There is also a second mystery here. The process of photosynthesis happens at room temperature, where random motions of atoms in the environment should destroy any coherence among the excitons. 

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8 FEEDING THE PLANET

• For some mysterious reason, simple bacteria that can grow along the roots of legumes (e.g., in peanuts and beans) are able to extract N from the air and “fix” it with molecules of C, O, and H to create ammonia (NH3), the essential ingredient needed to make fertilizer. Although common bacteria can effortlessly extract N from the air to create life-giving fertilizers, chemists are still at a loss to duplicate Mother Nature so efficiently.

• The N we breathe in the air is actually N2, two N atoms stuck together extremely tightly with three covalent chemical bonds. These bonds are so strong that normal chemical processes cannot break them. N has seven electrons, which can fill up the two available spaces in the 1S orbitals of the first energy level, and five electrons in the second level. To fill up all the orbitals of the first two levels requires ten electrons. This means that, at the second level, two electrons are in the 2S orbital, and the remaining three sit individually in the Px, Py, and Pz orbitals. So there are three electrons that are unpaired. When combined with a second N atom, this gives us three electrons shared between two atoms, reaching the 10 electrons needed to fill the first two orbitals and, most importantly, giving us a triple bond, which is extremely strong.

• Fritz Haber (1868-1934)

• It is estimated that about half of humanity is alive today thanks to the discoveries German chemist Fritz Haber. Haber was the man who discovered how to make artificial fertilizers. 50% of all the food we eat is directly related to his pioneering research…Haber unleashed the Green Revolution, which manufactures almost unlimited quantities of fertilizer that help feed the planet today.

• Haber realized that the only way to split the two N atoms apart was to apply enormous pressure and temperature. By brute force, the N bonds could be broken, he theorized. He made history by finding the right magical combination in the laboratory. If you heated the N gas found in air to 300 C and compressed it with the pressure of 200-300 ATMs, then it was possible to break the N molecule apart and have it recombine with H to form ammonia (NH3). For the first time in history, chemistry could be used to feed the world’s rising population. 

• His process is so energy hungry, that it consumes 2% of the world’s energy output…Today, about half the N molecules in your body are a direct consequence of Haber’s discovery.

• Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP): A molecule that consists of three phosphate groups arranged in a chain, with each group consisting of a P atom surrounded by O and H. The molecule’s energy is stored in an electron located in the last phosphate group. When the body needs energy to perform its biological functions, it uses the energy stored in the electron in the last group. Whenever you flex your muscles, take a breath, or digest food, you are using the energy from ATP to fuel your tissues. The ATP molecule is so elemental that it is found in almost all forms of life, indicating that it evolved billions of years ago.

• When analyzing the N-fixing process in plants, chemists discovered that 12 molecules of ATP are required to supply the energy to break open a single N2 molecule.

• Catalyst: Facilitates a chemical reaction by its presence (does not participate directly in the reaction).

• Nitrogenase: A catalyst used in the N-fixing process that orchestrates the many steps necessary to combine twelve ATP molecules with N to break the triple bond. Nitrogenase work in two stages. First, they bring two reactants together- the catalyst and the reactants, which fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, allowing the two reactants to bind. Second, the energy required for a reaction to occur, called the activation energy, is sometimes too high for the reactants to interact with each other. The catalyst, however, lowers the activation energy so that the reaction can proceed. Then the reactants can combine to create a new chemical and leave the catalyst intact.

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9 ENERGIZING THE WORLD

• The best batteries can store ~200 W-hr/kg of energy, while gasoline can store 12,000 W-hr/kg.

• The simplest battery starts with two metal rods or electrodes placed in separate cups. In both cups is a chemical called an electrolyte, which allows a chemical reaction to take place. Connecting the two cups is a tube in which ions can pass from one cup to the other. Because of the chemical reaction in the electrolyte, electrons leave one electrode, called the anode, and pass onto the other electrode, called the cathode. The movement of electric charges has to be balanced, so while negatively charged electrons pass from the anode to the cathode, there is also a movement of positive ions through the electrolyte-connecting tube. The flow of these charges creates electricity.

• Lithium Ion Battery: Electric batteries composed of Li. The lightweight element has three electrons orbiting the nucleus. The first two electrons fill up the lowest energy level of the atom, the 1S shell, so the third electron, in a higher orbit, is loosely bound, making it easy to remove and energize the battery. This is one reason why it is so easy to generate an electric current with the Li battery. Li-ion batteries have an anode made of graphite, a cathode made of Li Co-oxide, and an electrolyte made of ether…One undesirable feature of Li-ion batteries is that, although they have the highest energy density of any other battery, they still have only 1% of the energy stored in gasoline.

• Li-air battery: Unlike other batteries, which are completely sealed, Li-air batteries allows air to flow in. The O from the air interacts with the Li, releasing the battery’s electrons (and creating Li-peroxide). The big advantage of the Li-air battery is that its energy density is 10x that of the Li-ion battery. This is because the O comes for free from the air, rather than having to be stored within the battery itself.

• Capacitor: Stores static electricity. At its simplest, it consists of two parallel plates, one charged positively and the other charged negatively. The great advantage of capacitors is that they can store electrical energy and then release it very rapidly.

• Successor to Li-ion batteries

• Ultra-Fast C-Electrode: A battery made by NAWA Technologies that uses nanotechnology, which can boost battery power 10x and increase its life span 5x. It claims that an electric car’s range could become 1,000 km, with a charging time of only 5 min to reach 80% capacity. 

• Co-less Batteries: Scientists at the U. of TX and the Chinese company SVOLT claim that they are able to remove the costly and toxic Co from their batteries and replace it with Mn and Al. 

• Li-ion with Hybrid Anodes: Scientists at the University of Eastern Finland have developed a lithium-ion battery with a hybrid anode, using Si and C nanotubes.

• Li-S: Scientists at Monash University in Australia have replaced the Li-ion battery with a Li-S battery. They claim that their battery can power a smartphone for five days or an electric vehicle for 620 miles. 

• Seawater Battery: IBM Research and others are looking into replacing toxic elements like Co and Ni and even the Li-ion battery itself with seawater. IBM claims that a seawater battery would be cheaper and have a higher energy density.

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---PART III QUANTUM MEDICINE

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10 QUANTUM HEALTH

• There has been no development of new classes of antibiotics for the last 30 yrs. 

• Antibiotics 

• Penicillin & Vancomycin: Interfere with the production of a molecule called peptidoglycan, which is essential for creating and strengthening the cell wall of the bacteria. These drugs cause the bacteria’s walls to fall apart.

• Quinolones: Disrupts the bacteria’s reproductive chemistry, so that its DNA does not function properly and cannot reproduce.

• Tetracycline: Interferes with the bacteria’s ability to synthesize a key protein.

• New antibiotics take a long time to develop, often over ten years. These drugs must be carefully tested to make sure that they are safe, which is a time-consuming and costly process. And after a decade of hard work, the final product often cannot pay the bills. The bottom line for many pharmaceutical companies is that the sales must compensate for the cost to make these drugs.

• Modern science has been able to attack viruses using vaccines, but only up to a point. Vaccines work indirectly by stimulating the immune system of the body, rather than by directly attacking the virus.

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11 GENE EDITING AND CURING CANCER

• At the most fundamental level, cancer is a disease of our genes, but it can be triggered by environmental poisons, radiation, and other factors- or just plain bad luck.

• Apoptosis: Cells are genetically programmed to die by necessity, sacrificing themselves to create new complex tissues and organs.

• Liquid Biopsy: A fast, convenient, and versatile way of detecting cancer. At present, liquid biopsies can detect ~50 different types of cancer.

• There are >300 rhinoviruses that can cause colds, and since they constantly mutate, it makes no sense to develop 300 vaccines to hit this moving target. We simply live with it.

• Dogs have been trained to identify lung, breast, ovarian, bladder, and prostate cancer. In fact, dogs have a 99% success rate in detecting prostate cancer by sniffing a patient’s urine sample. In one study, dogs could detect breast cancer with 88% accuracy and lung cancer with 99% accuracy. The reason is that they have 220M nasal scent receptors, while humans have only 5M. So, their sense of smell is many times more accurate than that of humans.

• Methods to Attack Cancer

• 1) Excision: Cut out the tumor.

• 2) Radiation: Kill cancer cells with X-rays or particle beams. 

• 3) Chemotherapy: Poison cancer cells.

• The B WBC contains Y-shaped antigen receptors that protrude from its cell wall. The goal of the WBC is to latch the tips of its Y receptor to a dangerous antigen so that it can either be destroyed or marked for later destruction. When the WBC is born, the genetic codes in the tips of the Y receptors that match the receptors to specific antigens are randomly mixed. This is the key. So, in principle almost all the codes that the body may ever encounter are already contained within the various random Y receptors, both good and bad.

• Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR): A technology that allows scientists to cut and paste genes.

• There are ~10,000 known genetic diseases afflicting the human race including Sickle cell anemia (afflicts many African Americans), cystic fibrosis (which affects many northern Europeans), and Tay-Sachs (which affects Jewish people) are caused by the misspelling of one or a few letters in our genome.

• Gene p53: When mutated, it is involved in about half of all common cancers including breast, colon, liver, lung, and ovaries. Perhaps one reason why it is so vulnerable to becoming cancerous is that it is an exceptionally long gene, and hence there are many sites on it where mutations may develop. It is a tumor-suppressor gene, which makes it vital in stopping the growth of cancers. For that reason, it is often called “The Guardian of the Genome.”

• CCR5 Gene: A small number of individuals are born with a natural immunity to AIDS because of a mutation in their CCR5 gene. Normally, the protein made by this gene creates an entry point for the AIDS virus to enter a cell. However, in these rare individuals, the CCR5 gene is mutated so the AIDS virus cannot penetrate into a cell.

• Huntington’s Disease: A genetic disease that often causes dementia, mental illness, impaired cognition, and other debilitating symptoms. It is believed that some of the women persecuted at the Salem Witch trials in 1692 suffered from this disease.

• Elephants have a relatively low cancer rate. This became known as Peto’s paradox.

• Greenland sharks can live for up to 500 years, which is probably made possible by a still unknown gene.

• How do bacteria defend themselves against the onslaught of viruses? Bacteria have devised ways to cut up the genes of the invading virus. If a virus tries to attack a bacteria, the bacteria may counterattack by releasing a barrage of chemicals that split the genes of the virus at precise points, thereby stopping the infection. This powerful mechanism was isolated and then used to sever viral genetic codes at desired points. The 2020 Nobel Prize was given to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for their work in perfecting this revolutionary technology.

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12 AI AND QUANTUM COMPUTERS

• Marvin Minsky (1927-2016): An MIT professor who has been called the Father of Artificial Intelligence.

• Artificial Intelligence (AI): A computer that has the ability to learn new and complex tasks.

• Commonsense Problem: Things that humans take for granted, that even a child can understand, are beyond the capability of our most advanced computers.

• AI has stalled because of the lack of computer power. Its capabilities in machine learning, pattern recognition, search engines, and robotics are all constrained by Moore’s Law.

• It is the shape of a protein molecule, with all its intricate knots and twirls, that creates the characteristic properties of that protein and dictates how it behaves, such as providing energy, acting as a catalyst, merging with other proteins, joining with other proteins to create new structures, splitting apart other molecules, etc.

• AlphaFold: An AI program created by the company DeepMind (affiliated with Google and developed AlphaGo) that has deciphered the rough structure of ~350K proteins. Furthermore, it identified 250K shapes that were previously unknown. It deciphered the 3D structure of all the 20,000 proteins listed in the Human Genome Project. AlphaFold’s goal is to 1) map the folded proteins; 2) determine the proteins function; and 3) create new proteins and medicines.

• Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (‘BSE’, ‘Mad Cow Disease’): A prion disease that effects cattle, in which they have trouble walking, become nervous, and even turn violent.

• Prion: A protein which has folded the wrong way. When a prion comes in contact with a normal protein molecule, the prion somehow forces the normal protein to fold up incorrectly.

• Alzheimer’s Disease: A progressive, irreversible, brain disorder, and the most common cause of dementia- that destroys memory, thinking, and language skills. People with a mutation in the APOE4 gene are more susceptible to the disease. Doctors often find that the brains of those with Alzheimer’s have two types of sticky proteins, called the beta and tau amyloid proteins.

• People with a misfolded amyloid protein in their blood, who were still free of symptoms, were 23x more likely to get Alzheimer’s disease. This link could even be confirmed up to 14 yrs before a clinical diagnosis was made.

• “I believe that amyloid beta and tau are both prions, and that Alzheimer’s disease is a double-prion disorder in which these rogue proteins together destroy the brain” – Stanley Prusiner.

• Misshapen molecules only exist in the brain for 48 hrs or so before they are flushed naturally out.

• Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (‘ALS’, ‘Lou Gehrig’s Disease’): A fatal illness that reduces your body to a paralyzed mass of tissue and afflicts at least 16,000 people in the USA. This disease attacks your nervous system, disconnecting your brain, in some sense, from your muscles, and eventually leading to death.

• About 20 genes have been found that are associated with ALS, but four of them account for most of the cases: C9orf72, SOD1, FUS, and TARDBP. When these genes malfunction, they are associated with the death of motor neurons in the brainstem and spinal cord. Of particular interest is the SOD1 gene. It is believed that protein misfolding caused by SOD1 is implicated in ALS. The SOD1 gene makes an enzyme called superoxide dismutase, which breaks down charged oxygen molecules called superoxide radicals, which are potentially dangerous. But when SOD somehow fails to eliminate these superoxide radicals, nerve cells can be damaged. So the misfolding of the protein created by SOD1 could be one of the mechanisms that causes neurons to die.

• Parkinson’s Disease: Afflicts ~1M people in the USA including Michael J. Fox, who has used his celebrity status to raise $1B to combat it. Typically it can cause one’s limbs to tremble uncontrollably, but there are other symptoms as well, such as difficulty walking, loss of smell, and sleep disturbances.

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13 IMMORTALITY

• The Epic of Gilgamesh: The story of an ancient Mesopotamian warrior, which chronicles his heroic exploits as he roamed across the ancient world. He engaged in numerous brave adventures as he rode the plains and deserts, even meeting a wise man who witnessed the Great Flood. Gilgamesh embarked on this journey because he was on a grand mission: to find the secret of living forever. At long last, he found the plant that was the source of immortality. But just before he could eat it, a snake suddenly snatched it from his hands and devoured it.

• Laws of Thermodynamics

• First Law (Conservation of Mass): The total amount of matter and energy is a constant. 

• Second Law (Entropy): In a closed system, chaos and decay always increase. 

• Third Law (Temperature): You can never reach absolute zero in temperature.

• Aging: According to the Second Law, aging is primarily caused by the accumulation of errors at the molecular, genetic, and cellular level…These errors in our DNA happen all the time. DNA lesions at the molecular level, for example, happen 25-115x per minute in our body, or about 36,000-160,000 per cell per day. We also have a DNA repair mechanism in our body, but aging accelerates when these repair mechanisms are overwhelmed by the sheer number of errors in our DNA. Aging occurs when the buildup of errors exceeds our ability to repair them.

• Hayflick Limit: Occurs because there is a cap, called a telomere, at the end of the chromosome, which gets shorter with each reproduction. But like the tips of your shoelace, after too many manipulations, the cap wears off and the shoelace starts to fray. After ~60 reproductions, the telomeres wear off, the chromosome frays, and the cell goes into senescence and eventually dies.

• Telomerase: An enzyme that prevents the telomeres from becoming increasingly shorter.

• Cancer cells also use telomerase to attain immortality. In fact, the presence of telomerase has been detected in 90% of all human tumors.

• Caloric Restriction: The only proven way in which to lengthen the life span of an animal. In other words, if you eat 30% fewer calories, you can live roughly 30% longer, depending on the animal being studied. Caloric restriction may work by decreasing the oxidation rate in our body, which decreases the accumulation of errors, and gives the body time to repair damage it causes naturally.

• Scientists who have studied caloric restriction believe that it may work via the chemical resveratrol (found in red wine), which in turn is produced by the sirtuin gene.

• Embryonic stem cells have the remarkable property of being able to turn into any cell of the human body.

• Tests of people >100 yrs old show that they have a significantly higher level of the DNA repair protein called poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) than younger individuals aged 20-70. This indicates that longer-lived individuals have stronger DNA repair mechanisms to reverse genetic damage and hence live longer.

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---PART IV MODELING THE WORLD AND THE UNIVERSE

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14 GLOBAL WARMING

• Water consists of H and O as H2O. But there is a heavy version of water, where the O-16 and H-1 atoms are replaced by an isotope with extra neutrons, creating O-18 and H-2. The heavier version of H2O evaporates more quickly when it is relatively warm. Thus, by measuring the ratio between the heavy water molecules and the normal molecule, one can calculate the temperature when ice first formed. The more heavy water there is, the colder it was when the snow first fell.

• The last ice age ended ~10 Ka, when much of North America was buried under almost half a mile of solid ice.

• Light from the sun can easily penetrate the earth’s atmosphere. But when it is reflected off the surface of the earth, it loses energy and becomes IR heat radiation. But because IR radiation does not penetrate CO2 very well, the heat is trapped on the earth, thereby heating it up.

• NASA weather satellites can calculate the total amount of energy that the earth receives from the sun. These satellites can also determine the total amount of energy that the earth sends back into outer space. If the earth was in equilibrium, we would see that the input and output of energy are roughly the same. When all factors are carefully considered, one finds that the earth absorbs more energy than it radiates back into space, causing the earth to heat up. If we then compare the net amount of energy captured by the earth, it is about the same as the amount of energy generated by human activity.

• Maritime Change

• Arctic Ice in winter at the North Pole has become thinner by 50% in the last 50 yrs (~1%/yr). By 2050, the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free in the summer (NASA).

• Global sea levels have increased by 8” since 1880. Most likely, it will rise 1-8’ feet by 2100.

• Land Change

• Forest fires, droughts, floods becoming more common.

• Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier’s (‘Doomsday Glacier’) Eastern Ice shelf is likely to shatter. 

• Atmospheric Change

• A weakening of the Polar Vortex above the North Pole which pushes the Jet Stream further south. 

• Climate change solutions include C-sequestration, weather modification (using Ag-I crystals as cloud condensation nuclei), Fe seeding (which encourages algae blooms which absorb CO2), tree planting.

• Meteorology: All computer models of the weather begin by breaking up the surface of the earth into small squares or grid cells. Back in the 1990s, computer models started with square grid sizes of about 311 miles on each side. With increasing computer power, this size gets smaller all the time. Next, these square grids are extended into 3D, so they become square slabs describing various layers of the atmosphere. Typically, the atmosphere is divided into ten vertical slabs. Once the entire earth surface and atmosphere is divided into these discrete slabs, the computer then analyzes the parameters within each slab (humidity, sunlight, temperature, atmospheric pressure, etc.). Using known thermodynamic equations for the atmosphere and energy, they then calculate how temperature and humidity vary across neighboring cells, until the entire earth is covered. In this way, scientists can give a rough estimate of future weather. To check these results, they can be “tested” by what is called hindcasting. The computer program can be run backward in time, so that, starting with the current behavior of the weather, we can see if it can “predict” the weather in the past, when weather conditions were known with accuracy.

• Perhaps the most serious uncertainty is the presence of clouds, which can reflect sunlight back into outer space, thereby reducing the greenhouse effect a bit. Since up to 70% of the earth’s surface on average is covered by clouds, this is an important factor.

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15 THE SUN IN A BOTTLE

• Fission: The splitting of heavy radioactive elements including U and Pu.

• A single commercial fission plant can create 30 tons of high-level nuclear waste in 1 yr.

• Worldwide, there are 370,000 tons of deadly fission products.

• Fusion: The fusion of light elements; done by fusing H to form He.

• 1 gram of heavy H can produce 90,000 kW of electrical energy, or the equivalent of 11 tons of coal.

• Basic ingredients for fusion: 1) a source of H heated to many millions of degrees (hotter than the sun), turning it into plasma; 2) a way to contain the plasma as its heated. In stars, gravity compresses the gas. But on earth, gravity is too weak to do this, so electric and magnetic fields are used. 

• Q: The energy generated by a fusion reactor divided by the energy it consumes. At present, the world’s record for a fusion-plant hovers around Q = .7. Q = 1: Breakeven.

• Superconductivity: The point where all electrical resistance vanishes at super-low temperatures, thereby making possible the most powerful magnetic fields. Lowering the temperature to near absolute zero reduces resistance to electricity, eliminates waste heat, and increases efficiency of the magnetic field. 

• High-Temperature Superconductors: Discovered in 1986, a new class of superconductors that operate at 77 K. Work by cooling down ceramics like yttrium barium copper oxide.

• Room temperature Superconduction is possible, but only if you increase the pressure to  2.6M ATM.

• Tokamak: The most popular design for the fusion reactor, a Russian design. Start with a cylinder and then wind wire coils completely around it. Take the two ends of the cylinder and connect them together, forming a doughnut. Inject hydrogen gas into the doughnut and then shoot an electric current through the cylinder, which heats up the gas to enormous temperatures. To contain this hot plasma, huge amounts of electrical energy are fed into the coils that surround the doughnut, thereby containing the plasma with a powerful magnetic field and preventing the plasma from hitting the walls of the reactor. Once fusion starts, H nuclei combine to form He, releasing vast amounts of energy. In one design, two isotopes of H, Deu and Tri, are fused together, creating energy, He, and a neutron. This neutron, in turn, carries the energy of fusion outside the reactor, where it hits a blanket of material surrounding the tokamak. This blanket, usually made of beryllium, copper, and steel, heats up, so that water in pipes in the blanket starts to boil. The steam created in this way can push against the blades of a turbine, causing giant magnets to spin. This magnetic field, in turn, pushes against the electrons in the turbine, generating the electricity that eventually winds up in your living room.

• Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST): A Chinese Tokamak fusion reactor that, in 2022, was able to sustain fusion for a full 17 min by heating plasma to 158M C.

• International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER): A 5000-ton fusion prototype reactor financed by 35 nations, include the EU, USA, Japan, and Korea. Designed to eventually hit Q = 10. Its torus is gigantic, 64’ in diameter and 37’ tall. To confine the plasma, its magnets generate a magnetic field that is 280,000 times the earth’s magnetic field. ITER is designed to produce 450 MW of energy.

• SPARC: A research fusion reactor expected to hit breakeven. It’s successor, the ARC reactor, is intended to generate commercial electrical energy.

• National Ignition Facility (NIF): A USA DOE fusion reactor that uses gigantic laser beams instead of powerful magnets to heat up H. NIF uses 192 high-powered laser beams that fire for a billionth of a second. They hit 192 carefully positioned mirrors, which reflect the beam onto a small pellet the size of a pea containing lithium deuteride, which is rich in H. This causes the surface of the pellet to vaporize and collapse, which raises its temperature to tens of millions of degrees. When heated and compressed to such a degree, fusion takes place, and telltale neutrons are emitted. The hope is that these high-energy neutrons will transfer their energy to the blanket, which then heats up and boils water, which is then fed into a turbine to generate commercial energy.

• In 2021, NIF hit a milestone. It was able to produce 10 quadrillion watts of power in 100 trillionths of second, at 100 million degrees K, breaking its previous record. It compressed the fuel pellet to 350B ATM. And finally in December 2022, NIF made headlines around the world with the sensational announcement that it had, for the first time in history, attained Q greater than 1.

• DEMO: The next generation fusion reactor, planned to be completed by 2050. DEMO is designed to hit Q = 25 and produce up to 2 GW of energy.

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16 SIMULATING THE UNIVERSE

• Galileo was the first to see that the moon had deep craters, that the sun had tiny black spots, that Saturn had some kind of “ears” (now known as rings), that Jupiter had four moons of its own, and that Venus had phases like the moon, which proved to him that the earth revolved around the sun and not vice versa.

• There are ~100B times 100B = 1022 stars in the known universe…On average, every star we see at night has a planet going around it.

• Apophis: An asteroid ~1000’ across that will skim the earth’s atmosphere in April 2029.

• After 5B years our sun will have exhausted most of its H fuel and will start to burn He. At that point, it will start to expand enormously, becoming a red giant so large that it will fill the sky and stretch across the entire horizon. It will engulf planets out to Mars. The sky will be on fire…Eventually, the sun will exhaust its He and will shrink into a white dwarf star, which is only the size of the earth but weighs almost as much as the original sun. As it cools, it will become a dead, black dwarf star.

• For truly massive stars in the red giant phase, they will continue to fuse higher and higher elements, until eventually they hit the element Fe, which has so many protons that they repel each other and hence fusion finally stops. Then without fusion, the star collapses under gravity, and temperatures can soar to trillions of degrees. At that point, the star explodes into a supernova, one of the greatest cataclysms in nature.

• Stars like our sun by themselves do not have enough heat to create elements beyond Fe, such as Zn, Cu, gold, Hg, and Co. These elements were created in the heat of a supernova explosion that took place billions of years before our sun was born.

• For a large star, perhaps 10-50x more massive than our sun, there is the possibility that it will explode as a supernova, turn into a neutron star, and perhaps collapse into a black hole.

• Betelgeuse: A red giant star ~500-600 light-years from Earth. Betelgeuse is unstable and will at some point undergo a supernova explosion.

• Coronal Mass Discharges: Occur when the magnetic lines of force on the surface of the sun cross each other, spewing enormous amounts of energy into space.

• Studies have been done looking at the concentration of C-14 and Be-10 in ice cores, hoping to find evidence of prehistoric solar flares. Studies have shown possible ones that erupted in 774–75 CE and 993–94 CE. In fact, the ice core data of the 774–75 CE event indicates that it was perhaps ten times more energetic than the Carrington Event. (And the solar eruption of 993–94 CE was so intense that it left its mark in ancient wood, which historians have used to date the early Viking settlements in the Americas.)

• The event horizon at the heart of the galaxy called M87, ~53M light-years from earth, is a dark sphere encircled by superhot luminous gases.

• Black holes rotate at tremendous velocities. Instead of a pinpoint, it is believed that black holes may collapse into a spinning ring of neutrons.

• The universe is mainly made of mysterious invisible dark matter and dark energy.

• Dark Energy: A strange form of energy that fills the vacuum of space and even causes the universe to expand; comprises ~68% of the known matter/energy content of the universe.

• Dark Matter: Concentrates around galaxies, holding them together.

• Large Hadron Collider (LHC): Operates outside Geneva, Switzerland, as the largest scientific machine ever built. It is a tube 16.6 miles around, with magnets so powerful they can hurl protons to 14T electron volts. At the LHC, two beams of high-energy protons are slammed into each other with an energy of 14T eV, creating energies not found since the beginning of the universe. This titanic collision creates a gigantic shower of subatomic debris. A staggering trillion bytes per second of data is created by this colossal collision, which is then analyzed by a quantum computer.

• Future Circular Collider (FCC): The successor to the LHC to be built at CERN in Switzerland; FCC will have a 62 mile circumference, cost $23B, and reach 100T eV. If it is built, it will re-create the conditions when the universe was born. It should take us as close as humanly possible to the ultimate theory, the Theory of Everything.

• Standard Model (‘Theory of Almost Everything’): The most advanced version of the quantum theory. It consists of a bewildering collection of subatomic particles that do not appear to have much rhyme or reason. It has 36 quarks and antiquarks, over 19 free parameters that can be adjusted at will, three generations of identical particles, and a bunch of exotic particles called gluons, W and Z bosons, Higgs bosons, and Yang-Mills particles, among others. Worse, the theory makes no mention of gravity and cannot explain dark matter and dark energy, which make up the vast majority of the known universe. It undeniably describes the low-energy world of subatomic particles like mesons, neutrinos, W bosons, and so on.

• The first inkling of a crack in the Standard Model came from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago in 2021. The huge particle detector there found a slight deviation in the magnetic properties of mu mesons (which are commonly found in cosmic rays).

• There are three criteria that a theory of everything must obey: 1) it must contain Einstein’s theory of gravity; 2) it must contain the entire Standard Model of particles, with all its quarks, gluons, neutrinos, etc; 3) it must be finite and free of anomalies. So far, the only theory that can satisfy these three simple criteria is string theory. 

• String Theory: All elementary particles are nothing but musical notes on tiny vibrating strings. Like a rubber band that can oscillate at different frequencies, string theory says that each vibration of this tiny rubber band corresponds to a particle, so the electron, quark, neutrino, and all the other players in the Standard Model are nothing but different musical notes. Physics then corresponds to the harmonies that one can play on these strings. Chemistry corresponds to the melodies created by vibrating strings. The universe can be compared to a symphony of strings.

• Remarkably, when calculating the nature of these vibrations, one can find gravity, which is the force conspicuously missing in the Standard Model. Thus, string theory gives us a credible reason for believing that it may be the Theory of Everything.

• But string theory is a theory of the entire universe. Thus, you have to specify the initial conditions of the Big Bang. But no one knows the conditions that set off the initial cosmic explosion that created the universe. This is called the landscape problem, that there seems to be an infinite number of solutions to string theory, creating a vast landscape of possibilities. Each point on this landscape corresponds to an entire universe.

• Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD): The theory that best describes the strong nuclear force. It is a theory of subatomic particles that binds the quarks together to create the neutron and the proton.

• Today, physicists have pretty much given up trying to solve QCD by hand, and instead they rely on gigantic supercomputers to solve these equations. This is called Lattice QCD, which divides up space and time into billions of tiny cubes, forming a lattice. One solves the equations for one tiny cube, uses that to solve the equations for the next neighboring cube, and repeats the same process for all that follow.

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17 A DAY IN THE YEAR 2050

• Laboratories will use gene therapy, CRISPR, and quantum computers to fix the errors caused by aging.

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Epilogue QUANTUM PUZZLES

• At a fundamental level, electrons can exhibit unrecognizable behavior, such as being in two places at the same time, tunneling through solid barriers, transmitting information faster than light, and instantly analyzing an infinite number of paths between any two points.

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Misc Quotes

• “God is subtle, but not malicious” -Einstein when stuck on a problem.

• “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” -Arthur C. Clarke.

• “Had I been present at the creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe” -Alfonso the Wise.

• “Whenever I hear Schrödinger’s cat, I reach for my gun” -Stephen Hawking.

• AIDS virus has been traced back to simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), which infects primates. Using genetics, scientists have conjectured that someone in Africa ate the flesh of a primate sometime between 1884 and 1924, which then mixed with the DNA of a human to create HIV, a mutated version of SIV that can attack people.

• Of the 60,000 meteorites that have been discovered so far, at least 125 of them have been conclusively identified as having come from Mars.

• “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it” -Max Planck.

• “The goal of every physicist is to prove yourself wrong as soon as possible.”

• NIST has already announced they expect that by 2029 quantum computers will be able to break 128-bit AES encryption, the code used by many companies.

• The Chinese have spent $10B on their National Laboratory for Quantum Information Sciences.

• The human brain consists of ~80B neurons, each connected to about 10,000 other neurons.

• Lasers beams are polarized, meaning that the waves vibrate in only one plane.

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Terminology

• Abstruse: Difficult to understand; obscure.

• AlphaFold: An AI program that maps the detailed atomic structure of an astounding 350,000 different types of proteins, including the complete set of proteins that make up the human body.

• Alzheimer’s: Possibly caused by prions, a certain amyloid protein that is incorrectly folded in the brain.

• Analog: A person or thing seen as comparable to another.

• Calvin Cycle: The complex chemical process by which CO2 and water turn into carbohydrates.

• Chaos Theory: Although air molecules may obey Newtonian laws, the combined effect of trillions of air molecules are chaotic and unpredictable. 

• Coherence: Atoms arranged precisely so that they vibrate in unison.

• Decoherence Theory: Interactions with the external environment cause the wave to collapse, i.e., the wave collapses all by itself once it touches the environment, because the environment has already decohered.

• Determinism: The idea the future is determined ahead of time.

• Duality: Light energy has a dual nature; light can act like a particle, the photon, or a wave, as in optics.

• Entanglement: The idea that when two objects are coherent with each other (vibrating in the same way), then they remain coherent, even if separated by vast distances.

• H (‘Hamiltonian’): The total energy of a system being studied.

• Haber-Bosch: Requires a vast amount of energy- an astounding 2% of the entire energy production of the world goes into this process.

• Human Genome Project: Lists all of the 3B base pairs and 20,000 genes that form a blueprint for the human body.

• Plasma: A gas so hot that some of its electrons have been ripped off. It is the most common form of matter in the universe, making up stars, interstellar gas, and even lightning bolts. 

• Quantum Key Distribution (QKD): Transfers encryption keys using entangled qubits, so that one can detect immediately if someone is hacking into your network.

• Solipsism: The idea that objects do not really exist unless you observe them.

• Superposition: At the atomic level, objects can exist simultaneously in multiple states.

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Chronology

• Apr, 2029: Apophis, an asteroid ~1000’ across skims the Earth’s atmosphere (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• Dec, 2022: The USA’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) uses high-powered lasers to strike a pea-sized pellet of Li-Deuteride, attaining Q > 1 (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• Feb, 2022: A giant burst of solar radiation hits the earth’s atmosphere and wipes out 40 of 49 communications satellites sent into orbit by Elon Musk’s SpaceX; the largest solar disaster in modern history (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• Nov, 2021: The Omicron variant of Covid-19 emerges. Its genome was sequenced and it has 50 mutations, making it more transmissible than the Delta virus (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 2021: NASA deploys the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) probe into outer space to intercept an asteroid. For the first time in history, it succeeds in physically altering the asteroids trajectory (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 2021: IonQ becomes the first major quantum computing company to go public, raising $600M in its IPO (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 2021: IBM unveils its quantum computer, the Eagle, which has more computing power than all previous models (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 2021: The USG announces an investment of $625M in quantum technologies, to be supervised by the DoE. Giant corporations like Microsoft, IBM, and Lockheed Martin also contributed an additional $340M to this project (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• Dec, 2018: POTUS Trump signs the National Quantum Initiative Act into law, which provides seed money to help spark new research in Quantum computing. It mandates the formation of 2-5 new National Quantum Information Science Research Centers, to be funded with $80M annually (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 2012: physicist John Preskill of the California Institute of Technology first coins the term “quantum supremacy” (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 2001: The largest solar flare in recent history occurs after a huge coronal mass ejection (CME) was sent hurtling 4.5M mph into space. Fortunately, the flare missed the Earth (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 1989: Francis Collins uncovers the gene mutation responsible for cystic fibrosis, finding that is caused by the deletion of just three base pairs in your DNA (from ATCTTT to ATT) (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 1986: Chernobyl nuclear meltdown; after overheating during a test run, a steam and hydrogen gas explosion blows the roof off the Chernobyl reactor, releasing ~25% of the radioactive materials in the core into the atmosphere and over Europe (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 1982: UCLA San Francisco scientist Stanley Prusiner discovers and isolates the prion- a protein that has folded the wrong way. For his work, he receives the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physiology (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 1972: Akira Fujishima and Kenichi Honda show that light can be used to split water into H and O, using one electrode made of TiO2 and another made of Platinum. Although it was only .1% efficient, this proof-of-principle showed that it was possible to create an artificial leaf (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 1971: POTUS Nixon announces the War on Cancer (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 1967: The Vela satellite, launched by the US to detect unauthorized detonations of nuclear bombs, picks up strange radiation from a huge burst of gamma rays that comes from an unknown source. The bursts lasted only a few seconds, but released more radiation than an entire galaxy. In fact, it released more energy than the sun will generate in its entire 10B-year history. They were the biggest explosions in the entire universe, second only to the Big Bang itself. The leading theory is that they are either collisions between neutron stars and black holes, or stars collapsing into black holes (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 1957: Scientists John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and John Schrieffer create a quantum theory of superconductivity, finding that, under certain conditions, electrons can form “Cooper Pairs” and then coast on the surface of a superconductor without any resistance. The theory predicted that the maximum temperature for a superconductor was 40 degrees K (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 1956: Bell laboratories scientists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley share the Nobel prize for the creation of the transistor (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 1956: The Dartmouth Conference gives birth to an entirely new field of science, dubbed “artificial intelligence.” It started with a bold proposal that read: “An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans and improve themselves.” They predicted that “significant advance can be made…if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer” (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 1952: The home of Alan Turing is burglarized. When the police came to investigate, they found evidence that Turing was gay. For this, he was arrested and sentenced under the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. He was given a choice of going to prison or undergoing a hormonal procedure. When he chose the latter, he was given stilboestrol, a synthetic form of the female sex hormone estrogen, which caused him to grow breasts and become impotent. The controversial treatments lasted for one year. Then one day, he was found dead in his home. He died from a fatal dose of cyanide poison. It was reported that next to him there was a half-eaten poison apple, which some speculated was how he committed suicide (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 1952: Stanley Miller, working as a graduate student under Harold Urey at the University of Chicago, did a simple experiment. He began with a flask of water and then added a toxic brew of chemicals including methane, ammonia, water, hydrogen, and other substances, which he thought mimicked the harsh atmosphere of the early earth. In order to add energy to the system (perhaps mimicking lightning bolts or UV radiation from the sun), he added a small electrical spark. And then walked away from the experiment for a week. When he came back, he found a red liquid inside the flask. Upon careful examination, he realized that the coloration was caused by amino acids, which are the basic constituents of the proteins of our body. In other words, the basic ingredients of life formed without any outside interference (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 1944: Erwin Schrödinger, already famous for his wave equation, publishes “What Is Life?” In it, he made the astonishing claim that life itself is a by-product of quantum mechanics, and that the blueprint of life is encoded in an unknown molecule. In an era when many scientists still believed that a mysterious “life force” animated all living matter, he made the assertion that life can be explained by an application of quantum physics. By examining solutions of his wave equation, he conjectured, life could arise from pure mathematics, in the form of a code handed down through this mystery molecule (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 1936: Alan Turing introduces the Turing machine, written in binary language (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 1928: Alexander Fleming inadvertently observes that particles of bread mold could kill bacteria growing in a Petri dish (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 1918: German chemist Fritz Haber receives the Nobel prize for his discovery of the Haber-Bosch process; how to split N2 molecules and combine them with H to form ammonia (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 1911: Superconductivity is discovered when Hg is cooled down to 4.2 K (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 1901: Divers salvage the Antikythera device near the island of Antikythera (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 1884: Lord Kelvin first theorizes dark matter after noticing that the amount of mass necessary to account for the spin of a galaxy was much larger than the actual mass of the stars. He concluded that most stars were actually dark, that they were not luminous (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 1859: The Carrington Event occurs as the largest solar flare in recorded history, causing telegraph wires to catch on fire over much of Europe and North America. It creates atmospheric disturbances all over the planet, with the aurora borealis blanketing the night sky over Cuba, Mexico, Hawaii, Japan, and China. You could read the newspaper at night in the Caribbean by the light of the aurora (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 1843: Ada Lovelace publishes her notes with Babbage as the first account of a computer program (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 1799: Italian Alessandro Volta builds the first battery (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 1798: Thomas Robert Malthus predicts that one day the population of the human race might exceed the food supply, resulting in mass starvation and death (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 1796: Physician Edward Jenner takes pus from milkmaids who recovered from cowpox, which resembles smallpox. He then injected the pus into healthy individuals, who developed immunity against smallpox (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 1786: Italian physicist Luigi Galvani rubs a piece of metal against the severed legs of a frog. He notices, much to his surprise, that the legs twitched by themselves (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• ~150-100 BCE: The Antikythera device is crafted as the world’s oldest computer. It has at least 37 bronze gears. In one set of gears, the motion of the moon and sun were calculated. Another set of gears could predict the coming of the next eclipse of the sun. It was so sensitive it could even calculate small irregularities in the orbit of the moon. Translations of the inscriptions on the device chronicle the motion of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter, the planets known to the ancients, but it is believed that yet another portion of the device, which is missing, could actually plot out the planets as they move in the heavens (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 200 BCE: Emperor Qin Shi Huang units all of China (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 3000 BCE: The first medical reference to cancer is made in Egypt (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

• 3.7 Ga: DNA first originates on Earth (Quantum Supremacy by Kaku).

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