Schrödinger's Rabbits The Many Worlds of Quantum (2004) / Chapter Skim
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15 The New Age Warrior: Anton Zeilinger
15 The New Age Warrior: Anton Zeilinger
Pages 211-227
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From page 211... ...
For example, it was he who first upgraded He two-slit experiment—which caused such excitement when it was first performed with electrons rather than photons—to work with buckyballs, giant molecular cages comprising 60 carbon atoms. Even these football-like structures, each with a definite rigid shape and containing hundreds of fundamental particles, can be demonstrated to be 211
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From page 212... ...
He was determined to overcome several potential criticisms of Me original Aspect setup. His main goal was to ensure that the Choice of polarization measurement for earth photon was truly random, because in Aspect's experiments Me measurement direction was selected using acousticaLLy driven optica switches that dipped at reguLar (albeit very fast)
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From page 213... ...
They predicted that it would not, on He basis that the infrared photons striking He waLLs of He experiment wouLd constitute "measurement"—an irreversible interaction with the environment that wouLd destroy interference. But ZeiLinger predicted that he wouLd get an interference pattern after aLL, because the wavelength of the infrared light emitted by the budkybaLLs was so long that it did not convey sufficiently accurate information about their position to ted the environment which slit they were going through.
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From page 214... ...
Gardner was jesting, of course, because glass rods and other physical objects are made up of the quantized units we call atoms. The rod would be about 108 atoms wide by 109 atoms long, and so its length/ width ratio could encode some eight or nine decimal digits of information at most.
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From page 215... ...
Our world might therefore be indistinguishable from a digital computer simulation of itself, just as hypothesized in countdess science fiction stories. This contrasts completely with a classical, continuous universe for whidh Me simulating computer would have to record an infinite number of digits just to specify the exact position, velocity, and spin of a single fundamental particle.
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From page 216... ...
But Me same set of digits couLd aLso be denoting a letter in the standard aLphabet used to display text characters, or the color of a pixel to be displayed on Me screen, or Me timbre of a musicaL note to be played, or many cut c- things. As far as Me computer is concerned, a bit is just a bit, a switch that is on or off.
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From page 217... ...
This is very like Me way that computer models of physical systems like the weather work The difference is that whereas weather simulations on present-day computers have to divide the atmosphere into imaginary cubes measuring kiLometers on each side, a true universe-simulation would hold information at a vastly finer scale, of the order of a Planck length.2 ZeiLinger's approach is radically different. He prefers to think that a given bit of information heldbythe universe-computer can be interpreted, not as information about what is going on at a specific point of We space-time continuum, but as the logical value (true or false)
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From page 218... ...
You want to send a message to your king telling him how many days you can hold out before you win have to surrender if help does not arrive. You have a number of brave volunteers prepared to sneak out at night and try to make it through We enemy lines, whidh is fortunate because radio has not been invented yet.
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From page 219... ...
"We will simply send out two messengers, each bearing an 8-digit binary number, and each bearing the magic word "XOR" in the corner. That will teL my colleague Merlin exactLy what to do when We messages arrive at We king's castLe.
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From page 220... ...
Yet their relationship contains a message.4 To fully understand the ways a quantum system can contain information, we need to take one further step. The nonlocal correlations we have seen so far earth required some information to be held locally, as pixel patterns in Me first case and binary numbers in Me second.
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From page 221... ...
The idea of a system whose parts appear individually quite random, yet exhibit curious correlations when taken together is no doubt reminding you of something, namely He photons in the Bell-Aspect experiment. Of course He coin correlations are not really spooky, because they occur between objects that are not widely separated, but interacting via well-understood forces.
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From page 222... ...
The first few hundred bits give only a blurry view, which becomes gradually sharper as more bits are transmitted, as shown in Figure 15-4. But if any attempt is made to measure which of the two slits earth particle passes through, however delicate or indirect We means employed, the interference pattern is destroyed, as in Figure 15-5.
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From page 223... ...
r ·':'..The New Age Wamor Anton Ze~l~nger / 223 .~
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From page 224... ...
Each bit can be used only once; trying to obtain both trajectory information and interferencepicture information from a limited number of bits is much like trying to use the same area of computer memory for both numerical and picture data—something inevitably gets corrupted. Zeilinger's view seems to imply that much (or perhaps even all)
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From page 225... ...
There is no information capacity left to store He states of the individual photons. Zeilinger finds that from these assumptions, he can recreate He spooky correlations of He Bet inequality.
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From page 226... ...
Zeilinger has certainly found an interesting new way to look at entanglement. His success in explaining nonlocal behavior from straightforward assumptions is solid Occam's-razor justification for his hypothesis that, at We most basic level, We universe might contain information about individual quantum systems ram c- than individual localities.
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From page 227... ...
, we would still need the equivalent of a magic square to translate his informationa universe into one we can readily visualize.
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