What is the quantum internet?

Daniel and Kelly strip away the hype and reveal the actual mind-blowing physics of the quantum internet. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

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• 1:18Daniel Whiteson?

  If you want to talk about your sincere awe and wonder at the incredible physical universe, I'm here for that. If you want to have cold water thrown over your dreams of space colonization, Kelly is at your service. Today, we're going to flip that script a little bit. It's my turn to be a wet blanket about overhyped technology. But along the way, you'll learn just how amazing and weird our universe really is. No hype necessary. That's right, today we are tackling physics buzzwords. Two of my favorites, actually. Quantum, probably the most overused word in popside journalism, and the internet, the classic way to make anything sound more high-tech. Internet of Things was supposed to make your toaster seem like something from the future,

• 2:03Daniel Whiteson?

  right? So today, we'll explore the science and the hype and the actual amazing, beautiful physics behind And a pair of buzzwords that have come together to make a recent splash in the news. The quantum internet. It's not the latest Ant-Man movie. It's today's topic. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary quantum universe.

• 2:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Wiener Smith. I study parasites and space. And when we come up with quantum parasites, you all better be worried.

• 2:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and the only kind of parasite I want is a quantum one. I don't want 2.72 tapeworms. I want zero or one, preferably zero.

• 2:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, but you really don't know until you actually look, you know? Until you put the scope down your digestive system, you don't actually know if there's one in there or not.

• 3:04Daniel Whiteson?

  That's true. Schrodinger's tapeworm.

• 3:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, fantastic.

• 3:07Daniel Whiteson?

  But now I have a real question for you. Can you have a non-integer number of parasites? Can they split in some weird way where you're like, hmm, I'm not really sure if that's another one?

• 3:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, you can have hard to count things. So the way tapeworms work is they've got a head. The head holds on to part of your body and then they form segments called proglottids. And each proglottid makes its own sets of eggs. And sometimes the proglottid dissolves away and the eggs pass with your feces into the environment. Other times a proglottid just pops off and passes with your feces. And sometimes it'll look like pieces of rice walking around in your feces and that's a proglottid. And so you can have, you know, like pieces of the tapeworm that sort of like separate, but are still moving. But we usually count how many tapeworms an organism has based on the number of heads that you find. So that's pretty straightforward.

• 3:53Daniel Whiteson?

  So parasites are quantized.

• 3:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  There you go.

• 3:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Amazing. We went from quantum physics to parasites to poop in record time on the podcast. That's what happens when you have a particle physicist and a parasitologist.

• 4:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, but you're right. We got there pretty fast today. I'm having a good day. We're having a good day.

• 4:08Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. And we are moving at the speed of information, trying to understand how the universe works and sending it to you down the internet tubes.

• 4:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  So there's a lot of misinformation out there about parasites. And there's also a lot of misinformation out there about what the word quantum means. So Daniel, today we're talking about quantum internet.

• 4:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, that's right. The latest word to have quantum slapped in front of it.

• 4:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. And so today we're going to find out if that makes any sense and if it's nearly as exciting as it sounds like it is on social media.

• 4:37Daniel Whiteson?

  And I'm not actually that upset about the misinformation about quantum mechanics, because it gives me an opportunity to clarify how amazing the universe actually is. It's not really a wet blanket moment where you're like, this sounded amazing, but it's really actually boring and nothing. It's like, this sounded amazing, but the reality is even more cool.

• 4:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, I don't know why you gotta sound so down on wet blanket people, but all right, fine. I know you like to keep things upbeat around here.

• 5:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, I see. You thought I was throwing a wet blanket on the wet blanket people?

• 5:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, on me, in particular. I felt seen, but not in a good way.

• 5:09Daniel Whiteson?

  I wasn't talking about you, but I think it says something that you responded that way.

• 5:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, you might be right.

• 5:17Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so let's hear how our listeners responded. I went out there and asked them if they knew anything about the quantum internet. If you would like to contribute your thoughts for future episodes, we would love to hear from you. Please write to us to [email protected] and you can join the choir. In the meantime, think about it for a minute. What is the quantum internet? What does it mean? Here's what our listeners had to say.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  What is the quantum internet? Now you're just making stuff up.

• 5:45Speaker 04

  I have no idea, but I'm willing to learn.

• 5:50Speaker 05

  I assume the quantum internet is the internet that joins together quantum computers.

• 5:56Speaker 06

  Well, it sounds like the interconnected web of subatomic consciousness, or maybe where Ant-Man hangs out.

• 6:04Speaker 07

  The quantum internet is great and all, but every time I check my emails, they're both read and unread at the same time. I would guess that it's internet that can travel the quantum realm to go faster than the speed of light.

• 6:19Speaker 03

  I would assume that it is a network of computers that have all been based on quantum computing infrastructure and quantum computing nodes. Maybe the quantum internet is to do with the internet being both truthful and untruthful at the same time.

• 6:40Speaker 05

  I suspect mostly untruthful. The quantum internet will know what you're searching for before you type it in. If someone asks me what quantum internet is, I would say that that is the current structure of our internet. Either your email sent or not sent at the same time.

• 7:02Speaker 03

  It's probably a place where astrophysicists and people who use quantum data exchange information. I've never heard of the quantum internet before, but perhaps use of quantum computers on the internet?

• 7:15Speaker 05

  I'm assuming it could do all sorts of neat things that we can't even imagine now. It could just be an entire internet filled with cats in boxes, and I'm OK with that. The quantum internet is a marketing term that's really just BS. I can't say what the quantum internet is, but I can calculate various probabilities of what it might be.

• 7:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  The quantum internet is the name for the observation that any fact you find on the internet is equally likely to be true or untrue. There were some really fantastic answers here, where your emails are both read and unread at the same time. I love that. I wonder if you get out of trouble if you're like, well, I know it was read and it was unread, and so I answered it and didn't answer it, but like, you know, move on.

• 7:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, as usual, people either knew the answer, were widely off, or hilarious. I love this mixture. I always look forward to listening to these. They're so much fun.

• 8:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep, I love y'all.

• 8:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Thanks, everybody.

• 8:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  This, I think, gave a really nice sort of overview of the various thoughts that people have about quantum internet, what it does, or whether or not they have any idea at all what it does. So let's just start from the beginning. Like, what is quantum internet?

• 8:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, quantum internet is actually a real thing. It's not total nonsense. It's the idea that you could take quantum computers, which we'll dig into in a minute, and you could connect them in a quantum mechanical way. Not in the same way that we connect normal classical computers that ship bits back and forth, but you could connect them using a fancy technology called quantum teleportation, which helps you move quantum information between one computer and another. And it makes sort of sense, like, we used to develop computers and then we networked all the computers together because that has obvious advantages, sharing information, working in parallel, et cetera. And now we're developing quantum computers. And so you might think, oh, it could be beneficial to connect quantum

• 9:06Daniel Whiteson?

  computers to each other because maybe they could take over the world and enslave us. No, I mean, calculate our taxes faster, or whatever quantum computers are supposed to do. So the quantum internet really is two different ideas. It's quantum computers connected together with quantum teleportation.

• 9:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, that sounds very Star Trekkie. But so my understanding of quantum computers is that we sort of are getting a handle on it, but this is not something that you use like every day to solve normal problems.

• 9:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Yep.

• 9:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Connecting quantum computers, it feels like you're jumping ahead five or six steps. Like, shouldn't we get the computers to work first?

• 9:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I don't know. I think we should work on all the problems at the same time, right? It's not like we should finish physics before we get started on biology because it's the foundation of everything, right? Right? I'm agreeing with you.

• 9:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, you need to be motivated. And how can you stay motivated if you're just doing physics? You need the good stuff, too.

• 9:55Daniel Whiteson?

  You're right, we can't use the quantum internet without quantum computers. But we also don't want to wait until quantum computers are a full-fledged thing before we start thinking about how to connect them. And, you know, everybody out there is excited about different stuff. So there's a group out there that recently made a splash because of their advance in quantum connection of quantum computers. And we're going to talk about that in a minute. And that's why it's in the news. But I think it's a good idea to push on all fronts simultaneously.

• 10:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, fair enough. There's enough people excited about the question. You can work on more than one front. Can you give us a quick explanation of what a quantum computer is?

• 10:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Right, so the quantum internet is a quantum connected bunch of quantum computers. The core of that is a quantum computer. What is a quantum computer? And so there's so much misunderstanding and misinformation about quantum computers, especially recently because of Microsoft's results and Google's claims and clickbait writing articles. Quantum computers are not computers that do infinite number of computations in parallel. They are not computers that tap into the multiverse. They are computers that use quantum mechanics to do calculations instead of using classical physics or just normal bits, right? So in a classical computer, the one that I'm using right now to record this podcast episode, and the one that's inside your phone or whatever device you're listening on, there's a bunch of bits, there's zeros and ones, and all of computation involves calculating

• 11:14Daniel Whiteson?

  new bits and flipping bits. You know, for example, when you take a picture, it's stored in terms of those bits. When you add two numbers, it expresses those numbers in binary form, where every digit is a bit, a zero or a one, and it adds them in binary form. So the lifeblood of normal computers are these bits that are zero or one. And we use the rules of logic to build up a bunch of stuff that computers can do. But that's just one kind of computer, right? Technically, anything is a computer, like a baseball is a computer. It just calculates only one thing, like what a baseball can do. The cool thing about digital computers, the ones we know and love, is that they're programmable. We figured out a way to take advantage of this

• 11:55Daniel Whiteson?

  very basic operation and map into lots and lots of really interesting problems. Cool, but there's some things that classical computers are slow at. You know, just because you can map them into lots of things doesn't mean that they're very good at things. You know, like counting to a super high number, it can take a while. Anybody who's like, run a piece of code over massive data set knows it can like, take a day or something, even on fast computers. And so quantum computers say, well, what if there's another way to do computation? Instead of starting from something like a zero or a one, let's start from a state that's more ambiguous, like a qubit. A qubit is something that doesn't have to be zero or a one, it can have a probability to be zero and a probability to be one. And so there's like, more fuzz there.

• 12:37Daniel Whiteson?

  And the rules of quantum mechanics are different from the rules of digital logic. And so that maps to a different set of problems that quantum computers can do quickly or do slowly.

• 12:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Maybe this was when we were talking to Scott Aronson the other day. He said something about how quantum computers are better when you want to solve quantumy problems, or things like protein folding. Like, if I have a question about parasites, I wouldn't make a computer out of parasites. Why does using qubits make it easier to solve those kinds of problems?

• 13:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, actually, I disagree with you, Kelly. I think you should build a parasite computer, and let me tell you why.

• 13:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 13:12Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, let's say you wanted to know what happens on a certain quantum process, right? Well, one thing you could do is you could try to simulate that process on a classical computer. You could like represent it abstractly using zeros and ones and then encode the rules of quantum physics into that digital logic and run it. It might be kind of slow. Or you could just ask the quantum object itself. You could do the experiment, right? Say, oh, I'm just going to ask the universe. I'm going to put the quantum objects in that situation. I'm going to see what happens. And then behind the scenes, the universe is following those rules of quantum mechanics for you. And the universe's computation is free and infinitely fast. And so in comparison, if you wanted to know, Kelly, like what happens if you

• 13:53Daniel Whiteson?

  drop a tapeworm into a can of Coke, just drop the tapeworm into a can of Coke. That's a parasite computer right there. We think about computing sort of narrowly, like what can be done in Excel. But computing is really just like getting the answer to a question. And sometimes, building the system itself that you have a question about is the most natural way to get the answer.

• 14:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so one, I don't expect that Coke is going to be running any ads on our website for our podcast for the foreseeable future.

• 14:19Daniel Whiteson?

  You don't think tapeworms like Coke? What? You think they prefer something else? Are they Pepsi fans?

• 14:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  I was going to make a joke about Coke being no worse. Once a tapeworm is dropped in there, but I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.

• 14:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Wait, have you done that experiment? Do you know the answer to that calculation?

• 14:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  I would never do something like that to a parasite.

• 14:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Though I have dropped some in ethanol and formalin.

• 14:40Daniel Whiteson?

  So then backing up to Scott's comment, it's natural to calculate quantum things using a quantum computer because it's simpler to express them. It's likely to be fast. Now, in principle, anything you can calculate on a quantum computer, you can also calculate on a normal computer. Why? Because you can simulate a quantum computer on a normal computer, right? Just design one in your symbolic logic and let it run and simulate the laws of quantum mechanics. It's going to be slower, the same way like calculating exactly what happens to a baseball could be slower than just throwing the baseball, right? Let the universe do the computation. So the thing to know about quantum computers is that it's a different way to represent problems. We might want to solve and they're fast or slow at different things than baseballs

• 15:21Daniel Whiteson?

  or tapeworms or normal digital computers. So they're like a radically different way to do computation and potentially they're very powerful at some problems. So you know, there's some problems that we think classical computers are going to be very, very bad at. For example, finding out if a number is prime. If I give you a number, how do you know if it's prime? Like if I ask you 97, is it prime? Well, technically you have to check all the factors that might go into it one at a time. And there's some clever ways to do it to be a little bit more efficient, but it's slow. And as the number gets big, that stays slow. And amazingly, there's a guy who figured out an algorithm to do that on quantum computers much more rapidly than on digital computers. So that's an example of a kind of problem, which for weird reasons,

• 16:04Daniel Whiteson?

  because of the way quantum bits come together and the way we can map that problem to mathematical problems, there are some things that would happen faster on a quantum computer than on digital computers. But there's a very small number of those problems. People think like, oh, quantum computers can solve anything, you know, they can break into anything. And they're often used as like the MacGuffin on these action movies, right? Don't let the terrorists get the quantum computer or they'll get your bank account. In reality, cryptography is better protected than is often described in those movies. And nobody has a quantum computer that's powerful enough really to do anything more quickly than classical computers. So quantum computers are a real thing. They're awesome. In the future, when we have bigger quantum computers with more bits, they can

• 16:45Daniel Whiteson?

  maybe solve really interesting problems that otherwise would be very slow on normal computers. But no, they're not proof that the multiverse exists. They can't do infinite computation in parallel and they're currently not really useful for anything.

• 16:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Couple of questions. All right. First, so you were talking about bits being zero and one, and you're like, so we're going to use something a little fuzzier. That to me doesn't necessarily seem like an easy way to get a better answer. So are quantum computers, you said they're better for some questions. Are they worse for a lot of other questions?

• 17:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so they don't always beat classical computers?

• 17:20Daniel Whiteson?

  No.

• 17:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, all right. And then you said they're not necessarily computing in the multiverse. Do all of the quantum computer people believe you? Because I feel like I've heard some who are like, maybe this does prove the existence of the multiverse. Are you not teaching the controversy here, Daniel?

• 17:40Daniel Whiteson?

  That's a fair question. I don't know anybody who I take seriously in quantum mechanics, who thinks that quantum computers prove that the multiverse exists. I mean, how would you even steel man that argument? I think the argument is that quantum computers require superposition of multiple states. You know, for example, like your baseball can only have one energy, but an electron, maybe it has a probability to have two different energies. It could have this energy or the other energy, or maybe it has two possible spins. It can simultaneously be in two states, or more accurately, you can say it can have the probability to be in two states at the same time. This is something weird that quantum objects can do. Quantum computation relies on this because the law of quantum physics predicts what will happen to each of those probabilities, and we map our problems onto

• 18:23Daniel Whiteson?

  those quantum physics and use the outcomes of those probabilities to get the answer. So it relies on superpositions existing, but we've known superpositions exist for a long, long time. You know, like, we have obvious examples of quantum superposition, all the Bell's experiments about quantum entanglement that we'll talk about, the interferometer experiment, the double slit experiment. Like, we have proof that superposition is a real thing before quantum computers. So like, I don't think because superposition is real, that means there's any strong argument that the multiverse is real. So I'm 99.99% sure that quantum computing folks would say that this is just hype.

• 18:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Have you let the Marvel folks know?

• 19:00Daniel Whiteson?

  There's a universe in which the Marvel folks have reached out to me for physics consulting, but it's not this universe.

• 19:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, bummer, bummer. All right, that might have been the best universe to live in. But, okay, so we've wrapped our heads around quantum computers. So let's take a break, and when we get back, we're going to talk about quantum teleportation.

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• 21:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, and we're back. Daniel, in Star Trek, is quantum teleportation how they move people from one place to another?

• 21:44Daniel Whiteson?

  You're gonna ask me about the physics of something totally fictional? That reminds me of when I used to give presentations at elementary schools. And my favorite part about that was always opening the floor to questions. And I remember one day getting a question that totally stumped me. And the question was just very similar to your question, actually. It was, hey, everyone, just a note. While we were recording this episode, a minor earthquake hit Southern California and my office shook a little bit. We decided to keep that audio in the recording for the sake of transparency about life in California. I just got an earthquake alert. Oh.

• 22:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Do you feel it?

• 22:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I'm like literally shaking.

• 22:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Are you still shaking?

• 22:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Nope, we're done. Wow, that was cool.

• 22:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Do you need to check in with anyone?

• 22:31Daniel Whiteson?

  No, just a run of the mill day in California.

• 22:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Some kindergartner asked me, if lightsabers were real, would they be made of liquid nitrogen?

• 22:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 22:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow, I don't even know how to answer that.

• 22:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, where do you start?

• 22:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, here's a kyber crystal. Like, you want me to walk you through the physics of kyber crystals? Like, I don't know. Anyway, I don't know how they do it in Star Trek, but teleportation is a really interesting question philosophically. And you probably know that because every time we have a science fiction author on, I ask them what they think teleportation means even. Does teleportation mean like your actual bits disappear and appear somewhere else? Like, these atoms are now there? Or is it enough to tear you apart and rebuild you out of different atoms with the same arrangement? Right? Is it like a cut and paste? Is it like an email? What's going on? What is required for teleportation anyway? It's kind of a deep philosophical question. Where do you stand on that, Kelly?

• 23:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, you're dead. Yeah. Yeah, no, you die and you get brought back somewhere else. You couldn't get me one of those.

• 23:32Daniel Whiteson?

  But that's only because I think you're assuming that they get torn apart and rebuilt. What if there was an actual teleportation device that took your actual atoms and appeared them somewhere else? Would you get into that?

• 23:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  I would be the one millionth person in line for that.

• 23:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay. That was a yes. I heard a yes for a pinks. We have it on the air.

• 23:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  If you're in line in front of me, Daniel, then I will give it a shot.

• 23:55Daniel Whiteson?

  I would like my ashes teleported into the center of the sun. How about that?

• 23:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, interesting. All right. Quantum teleportation. Let's step out of Star Trek and into the real world. How does quantum teleportation work?

• 24:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Right. So quantum teleportation is arguably not teleportation. I mean, it depends, again, exactly what you mean by teleportation in that sense. But quantum teleportation is a way to transmit a quantum state. You know, there's a difficulty here, which is like, let's say I have a particle in some quantum state. And by quantum state, I mean like, it has a probability to be this and a probability to be that, right? Take an electron, for example, and say it can just have two states, up or down. So let's say I have an electron and I've done some complicated thing to it so that it has a 70% chance of being up and a 30% chance of being down.

• 24:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Can you actually do that? Like, you can tinker with the probability that it's up or down?

• 24:48Daniel Whiteson?

  You can do lots of different stuff. Yeah, you can construct and experiment so that electrons have whatever probability you want of doing basically whatever. That's what experimentalists do. Yeah, exactly. Force the universe to do something cool. And so, let's say that's like the outcome of your calculation or whatever. Now, maybe you want that information somewhere else, right? Maybe you want this quantum state to exist not here in California, but in some quantum computer in Virginia, right? Where you're gonna use that as the basis of your next calculation, or I don't know, whatever you folks do in Virginia with quantum states.

• 25:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  I know that we don't get earthquake alerts.

• 25:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow, too soon. Too soon, probably.

• 25:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm sorry.

• 25:29Daniel Whiteson?

  No, it's fine. And so if you want to copy a quantum state from here to there, it's a little tricky because if I interact with that electron, if I like, measure it, or if I touch it, or if I put in a box, I risk collapsing its state, right? The universe allows things to stay in superposition till they interact with something that can't be in superposition, like a classical object, like my eyeball, or my detector, whatever. And then the universe picks, okay, spin up, or okay, spin down. And that could be fine, but if what you want to do is preserve the quantum superposition, not to collapse it and to copy that information somewhere else, then you do something called quantum teleportation. So that's really what quantum teleportation is, is it transmits a quantum state from one system to another without collapsing it, which is pretty cool.

• 26:13Daniel Whiteson?

  I don't know if it really qualifies as teleportation.

• 26:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Are you actually moving the electron from one place to another?

• 26:20Daniel Whiteson?

  You're not at all moving the electron. You're moving the arrangement, the quantum state. And so I have an electron here in California, you have an electron in Virginia. I want to get your electron in Virginia to have the same quantum state as my electron. I'm not like putting it on a UPS truck and driving it across the country. I could do that. That's no big deal. But if I just want to transmit the information, the arrangement, the quantum state, that's what we call quantum teleportation. And some of the folks I know in foundations of quantum mechanics really hate that name. They're like, why they call it teleportation? Okay, I know why, because it sounds cool, but it's not really teleportation. It's misleading. And so it's important to understand like what it actually means, but it kind of makes sense, right? Like if you have a network of quantum computers, one basic thing you're going to want to do is take a quantum state from one and copy it

• 27:03Daniel Whiteson?

  over to another one. So we can like continue the calculation or whatever. So whatever you call it, it's an important part of having networked quantum computers.

• 27:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  I feel like it's one of those darned if you do, darned if you don't situations. You know, like you call it teleportation and now it's awesome and I want to hear more. Or you could be like, oh, Jupiter's rings are A, B, C, and D. And I know I keep using that as an example, but like, that is so boring. You've got to be kidding me. So trying to find the sweet spot for naming these things is tough.

• 27:27Daniel Whiteson?

  What would you call Jupiter's rings, Kelly?

• 27:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I'm gonna need some time to think about that. I don't know.

• 27:32Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm sorry. You've been complaining about the name for weeks and weeks.

• 27:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  You're right. Oh, man. Putting me on the spot.

• 27:38Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm just calling your bluff. That's all.

• 27:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, you are calling my bluff. What's the name of the ring in Lord of the Rings? Precious? That's what Gollum calls it.

• 27:46Daniel Whiteson?

  That's what Gollum calls it. Yeah. The official name is something in Elvish, isn't it?

• 27:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, yeah. Anyway, all right. Focusing again. Okay. Quantum teleportation. We understand what that is now. And you said that we can connect an electron in California to an electron in Virginia. How does that process work?

• 28:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. So to Do that, we're gonna have to use something called quantum entanglement. So we're three layers deep now. Quantum internet requires quantum computers connected by quantum teleportation, which rests on the principle of quantum entanglement. All right, so now we're gonna dig into what is quantum entanglement fundamentally, and then we'll come back and explain how you use quantum entanglement to do quantum teleportation to connect your quantum computers on the quantum internet and play Quantum Doom with your quantum friends.

• 28:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, nice, but that probably would be easier on a classical computer.

• 28:35Daniel Whiteson?

  You can put doom on anything, though, right? The day they pour doom to something, that's how you know it's a real computer.

• 28:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep, amen.

• 28:41Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so what is quantum entanglement? And this is, again, something you hear a lot about on the internet, and I know people are confused about, because I get lots of emails from people saying like, "Why can't you use quantum entanglement to transmit information faster than light?" And you can't, and we'll talk about why that is. But you should also understand that quantum teleportation is not faster than light. It's slower than light transmission of quantum information. But before we get to that, let's understand what is quantum entanglement. Quantum entanglement has to do with the superpositions we talked about earlier, the probabilities for various outcomes. So let's say we have, instead of just one particle that can be spin up or spin down, say we have two electrons in California. Each one can be spin up or spin down. So how many possible states can they be in?

• 29:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, there's four, and there's plus plus, plus minus, minus plus, and minus minus, right? So there's four possible states. Cool, and if you just like scrambled the electrons, they can be in any of those states with equal probability. Cool, but let's say we've done something clever. We're an experimentalist, and we've prepared these electrons in such a way that there's a constraint on them, like they have to have opposite spins. And this isn't so hard to do. If they come from some state that has a total spin zero, the universe conserves angular momentum, and so when you create these two electrons, their spin has to add up to zero. It's not so hard. And so if you do that, it means that only two of the states are possible, the one that is plus minus or minus plus. The plus plus state and the minus minus state, no longer allowed. So we've crossed two of the states off the list.

• 30:09Daniel Whiteson?

  And boom, those two particles are now entangled. Why do we say they're entangled? Because their fates are connected, right? If one is plus, the other one is minus. If one is minus, the other one's plus. And this is not some mystical thing where like you force one particle to be minus and it reaches out through the universe and makes the other one plus. It's just that you have a list of options, and that list is limited. And in every possible outcome, they have the opposite spin.

• 30:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm keeping track of like how complicated all of these steps are. So you said it's pretty easy to get an electron that's entangled so that one is plus and one is minus. What does pretty easy mean? Do you have to like go into the LHC after spending billions of dollars? Or is this something that can like happen in a lab on a UC campus?

• 30:54Daniel Whiteson?

  This happens all the time. Like every time a photon turns into an electron and a positron, those are entangled. Like it's constantly happening all of the time. And it's not actually that hard to do in the lab. The thing that's tricky to do in a lab, and the thing that's important, is separating those two and maintaining their entanglement. You create those particles, they're entangled. And it's a really cool state because it's not yet determined, right? They could be plus minus, or they could be minus plus. But then you could separate the particles. You could say, I'm going to take particle B and I'm going to drive it to Virginia. I'm going to leave particle A in California. They're still entangled, right? And then if I measure particle A when it's in California and I get plus, then I

• 31:36Daniel Whiteson?

  know instantly what particle B in Virginia has to be, because they're entangled. The thing that's hard is keeping them entangled. Because to keep them entangled, you have to avoid them interacting with anything else. Like these electrons, they like to interact with stuff. You put them in a box, they'll interact with the box. You put them on a truck, they'll interact with a truck. So keeping these particles in that state while separating them means isolating them from everything else. Because if they touch or interact with anything else, then they get entangled with that thing. Or they get entangled with you, and now you are part of that quantum entanglement state. To do the things that we want to do in a minute to transmit information, we need them entangled with each other and with nothing else. And that's where the sort of quantum magic comes from, right? These two particles are now really far apart. They can be a kilometer apart, a light year apart.

• 32:20Daniel Whiteson?

  And they both maintain the uncertainty of being in plus minus or minus plus. Then you measure one of them, you get a minus, boom, the other one is a plus. You know it. It's gone from uncertain to certain. That's the incredible thing about quantum entanglement, is that you can maintain the connection across distances. That's the non-local part of quantum mechanics.

• 32:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Can we dig in a little bit more about how you make them not interact with? Anything? Do you use like electric fields to hold them in the center of a box?

• 32:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Electric fields are an interaction.

• 32:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, man.

• 32:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 32:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  What do you do?

• 32:55Daniel Whiteson?

  It's very hard. I mean, the simplest way you can think about it is a thought experiment. It's like you're out in space, you have a photon, it turns into an electron and a positron, and they're going in opposite directions already naturally, right? Like, if it had a lot of energy, then that energy is going to get transmitted to those particles. They're just going to fly apart. And so along the way, they're not going to interact with anything if it's really empty. And so they'll get further and further apart and still stay entangled. So on Earth, of course, it's much more complicated, and people have all sorts of tricks for keeping these things separated and keeping them isolated. It's not easy. It depends a lot on the details of the quantum system, exactly the particles. We can dig into that in a future episode. I think that's a cool idea. But it's not easy, right? The particles like to interact with everything else,

• 33:39Daniel Whiteson?

  and to decohere, this quantum state is very, very fragile.

• 33:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so that is really awesome. You mentioned that this can't be used for faster-than-light communication. Could you dig into that a little bit more?

• 33:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it sounds like you should be able to use it for faster-than-light communication, because there is something non-local and instantaneous happening. Particle A is in California, particle B is in Virginia. Both of them are maintaining their superposition. Both of them could still be plus or still be minus. The entanglement just says they have to be opposite. Both of them could still be plus or minus, right? I make a measurement in California, I get plus. I instantly know that you would get a minus if you measured yours in Virginia. So there is some sort of instantaneous across-space-and-time thing happening there, which is very, very cool. And it sounds like you should be able to use that for faster-than-light communication. A lot of people write in and say, "Well, what if Daniel measures his and Kelly is watching, and so she knows, and you have a series of these things,

• 34:36Daniel Whiteson?

  and Daniel measures them at a certain time, and Kelly is watching the pattern or something." It feels like you should be able to maybe use that for faster-than-light communication. The problem is, if I measure mine in California and I get plus, I know that you're going to get a minus, but you don't know that. The only thing you can do is look at your particle and measure it. And you don't know if it's collapsed or not. You can't tell that it's collapsed. I know that it's collapsed, but there's nothing about the particle itself that shows you that it's collapsed. You can measure it and get a minus, cool, but you don't know if you got a minus because I already collapsed it or because it was not collapsed and you collapsed it. There's no like your particle has been collapsed light that goes on. So there's no way to manipulate these things. And I also can't change it. It's not like I can say, oh, I have a plus. I'm going to flip it to a minus to make Kelly's go the opposite.

• 35:21Daniel Whiteson?

  And as soon as I've measured mine, I break the entanglement, right? It's over. It's interactive with something. That was a one time deal. So in science fiction novels where they have like entangled particles and they put one on a ship and they take them to Alpha Centauri and then they can use it as the basis of some answerable technology where they do FTL communication. Yeah, that's pure nonsense. It's fun. I'd love it, but it doesn't work.

• 35:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. So it can't be used for helpful communication, but does the bit flip at a rate that's faster than light? So you bring them to opposite sides of the universe. Do they communicate faster than light?

• 35:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Great question. Yes, but I wouldn't say bit flip. So the collapse is instantaneous, right? If I measure mine in California, then instantaneously yours collapses faster than light.

• 36:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. Wow.

• 36:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. And that's weird and that's cool. And that's the thing about quantum mechanics that we call non-local, right? There's something global that's happening there. And people have heard of Bell's experiment. Bell's experiment proves to us that it's not like one particle was always plus and the other one was always minus. We just don't know it. It means that this uncertainty is real, that they really do maintain the possibility of both outcomes until you do measure it. Bell's experiment proved that there's no like hidden information there that determines the outcome. It really is uncertain, or at least, and this is important bit, it proved that there's no local hidden information. Quantum mechanics has to be non-local in some way. Either it really is probabilistic and it maintains these probabilities and collapses instantaneously across spacetime when one of them is measured.

• 36:49Daniel Whiteson?

  So you should really think of it as like not two particles, but one big quantum state. You collapse it anywhere, the whole thing collapses. Or there are some other crazy theories about global quantum information, you know, like super determinism or whatever that we We can get into another time, but you know, the way most people think about it is that it does collapse instantaneously across space and time, which is crazy. But you can't use it to transmit information because you can't control it. Right. You can ask it, you can query it, you can collapse it. I can't even tell whether you've collapsed it or not, and you can't tell whether I've collapsed it or not.

• 37:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so it's not useful for faster than light communication, but it is useful for quantum teleportation. So after the break, let's jump back up a level to quantum teleportation and try to understand that.

• 37:45Speaker 06

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• 38:29Speaker 06

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• 40:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, we're back. So we now have a firm understanding of quantum entanglement. Maybe we have a firm understanding. And then we have two quantum computers, and we want them to be able to communicate with quantum teleportation.

• 40:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes.

• 40:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Tell us some more about how that works.

• 40:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Right, so remember, the problem we want to solve is I have my electron. It's in some state. Maybe it's like 70, 30 plus or minus or whatever. And you have an electron in Virginia, and I want to put your electron in the same state as my electron, and I don't want to collapse it. And I also don't want to put it in a truck and drive it across the country. How do I get that quantum information without collapsing it and make your electron have it? Right, and so the way we do that is through quantum entanglement. Because I can interact with my electron without collapsing it if I use another quantum particle. So if I touch the electron, or if I poke it with something classical that can't be in a superposition, it will collapse the electron. But if I let that electron interact with some other quantum thing that can be in a superposition, it'll get entangled with that quantum thing. So I have my electron, it's in this special state.

• 41:04Daniel Whiteson?

  I bring in another particle, and I have those two interact somehow, and now they're entangled. You have the particle we want to copy and some other particle entangled with it. Now, if I planned ahead and had entangled this other particle with a third particle that we then sent to Virginia, we'd be ready to do quantum teleportation. So here's the setup. I have the original source particle I want to copy and a pair of particles that are entangled with each other but separated, one in California and one in Virginia. I entangle my California particle with the source particle without breaking the entanglement because it's a quantum particle. And so the entanglement just spreads. It doesn't break like it would if it interacted with a classical object or with the whole

• 41:46Daniel Whiteson?

  environment. So I have my California end of our entangled particle pair. And now I've entangled that with the source particle I want to copy. And I can see what happens to the California end of the entangled pair. I can use the information in that new special particle. I can read that off and send you some information. I can email it to you, or I can send it to you via carrier pigeon, or whatever, some slower than light process because everything is slower than light. I send you that information. And there's a recipe for using that information to copy the state of my particle onto your electron. I'm telling you what you have to do to your end of the California-Virginia entangled pair to make it a quantum copy of my original source particle. So to summarize, we entangle

• 42:30Daniel Whiteson?

  two particles, separate them while keeping them entangled, entangle my California end of it with the source particle, read off some information about that and send it to you. So you know how to manipulate your Virginia end to make it a copy of my source particle.

• 42:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so you have something going on in your computer where you've got entangled qubits.

• 42:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes.

• 42:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  And you send me an email with instructions for how to do that on my computer.

• 42:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, exactly.

• 42:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  And now my computer has the same entanglement stuff going on as your computer.

• 43:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, exactly. There's a lot of little bits that we've skipped over because the math is a little complicated. But the crucial thing to understand is that I've avoided collapsing my qubit by interacting with a quantum particle, which now stores the information from it. And I can extract that information from my quantum particle and send it to you. So you can reverse the process. If we have kept our entangled pair nicely entangled. You can prepare some quantum particle in that state, have it interact with your electron, and then your electron will be in the same state as my original one was. And so this is what quantum teleportation is. It's a way to interact with the quantum objects, extract their information without collapsing it, encode it into something that we can transmit across the world or whatever, and then reverse the process.

• 43:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  But when your quantum particle entangles with an electron in your computer, and then you look at what the quantum particle is doing so that you can tell my computer what to do, when you look at your quantum particle, because it was entangled, doesn't it mess up the system?

• 43:59Daniel Whiteson?

  It does actually mess up the system. And so when you copy the state, it destroys the original state. So the electron that I had in California is no longer going to be in that state that we both wanted. So I extract that information, I send it to you, you use that to create the quantum state over there in Virginia. But there's a no cloning theorem that says that you can't extract that information without also destroying it. But here we are extracting it in such a way that we can recreate the state in Virginia. But yes, we've destroyed the state of the California electron. So I'm not like just emailing you a PDF where like, I also still have it. I have to like shred that PDF somehow and send it to you so you can recreate it.

• 44:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  So the teleportation, and maybe this is where we discovered that teleportation actually wasn't a great term for this. But okay, so the teleportation is actually just that you've used entanglement to figure out what's happening with another electron. You're sending me that information and you are like teleporting it by email, quote unquote. And that's where the teleportation is happening.

• 44:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it's very equivalent to saying like, hey Kelly, I built a really cool Lego house over here, and I'm going to send you the recipe. To do so, I need to like tear apart my Lego house so I can keep track of exactly how you're going to build it. Then I'm going to email you the recipe and you guys are going to build the same Lego house over there. I had to destroy my Lego house to develop the recipe and I just emailed it to you, or I sent it to you via mail or whatever, but now you have the recipe to create exactly the same thing. And this is tricky only because these are quantum particles. And it's not easy to read them off and to create these states. But this essentially is quantum teleportation. And I would kind of argue the teleportation is not a terrible name for it. I mean, if the Star Trek teleporter is scanning you and reading the quantum state of all your particles, and then beaming that information to another machine that can reverse that process,

• 45:42Daniel Whiteson?

  then yeah, that's kind of what we're talking about here.

• 45:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  So everything we've just talked about sounds pretty complicated. Can you give me some situations where you would want to go through that process? Like, why would you create something in one computer, destroy it just so you can create it on another computer? Couldn't you just create it in the second computer from scratch without making it on the other one first?

• 46:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, maybe, but perhaps it's the outcome of a very complicated, very expensive quantum computation, you know? And like, let's say I have a quantum supercomputer and you ask me to do some calculation about your tapeworm simulation, I don't know.

• 46:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  You have my attention.

• 46:18Daniel Whiteson?

  I do it for you and I want to send you the result, right? I want to use the quantum internet to send you this quantum answer to your quantum computer from my quantum computer. And yeah, you could recreate it, but it might be really, really slow. And so might as well just copy the answer in the same way that your computer can calculate your taxes much, much faster than you can. And you might think, well, why do I need that? I can just do it myself. Yeah, but you might as well skip ahead and get the answer. So in that way, the quantum information here represents the results of a quantum computation, which could be extraordinarily valuable, right? And so you might want to save that. And people have thought about ways to build super powerful quantum computers by tying together quantum bits across the quantum cloud, right? The way like we make very powerful computers by spreading information and computation

• 47:03Daniel Whiteson?

  across them. You ask Amazon to do a complicated calculation, it doesn't just run on one computer, it runs on 10, 50, 100, so that you get the answer faster. In the same way, maybe you take a big quantum problem, you break it into pieces, each quantum computer does a piece of it, and then they want to send the answer back to some central node, which puts it together to get the final answer. That requires a quantum internet of quantum computers that can send quantum states back and forth to each other. And so that's why this is a stepping stone to some future awesome globally linked quantum computer.

• 47:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so where are we now? Has somebody recently done this quantum teleportation thing?

• 47:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so people have been working on this for a while. And the bit that we talked about, the quantum entanglement and sending information usually requires really specialized hardware. Keeping our two particles entangled is hard because we have to keep them isolated from any classical object. And what happened recently is a lab at Northwestern in northern Chicago managed to do quantum teleportation over normal fiber optics, right? So usually like keeping that information pristine and clean is very, very hard, right? You have specialized hardware to transmit this information, it has to be just right. But they were able to use fiber optic cables that were 30 kilometers long. That already also had normal internet traffic. So like people randomly emailing and texting pictures of their cats and whatever. And they were able to send this information to do

• 48:22Daniel Whiteson?

  quantum teleportation across this noisy, totally standard fiber optic cable. And so that was the excitement recently about the quantum internet is that we went from like, you need specialized dedicated hardware to do it for a single electron to like, oh no, we can do it over long distances using standard equipment that already exists.

• 48:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  But you're not sending entangled electrons through fiber optics. You're just sending instructions through fiber optics that then set up the next computer on the other side. Is that right?

• 48:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, that's exactly right.

• 48:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, still totally awesome. I just wanted to make sure I was understanding. All right, awesome.

• 48:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. And so this is the first demonstration of quantum teleportation of entangled photons through busy optical fibers that were also carrying conventional telecommunications traffic. So, you know, it brings us a step closer. It's not like we have the quantum internet. It's not like you can log on right now to the quantum internet and do your quantum taxes or anything like that. But, you know, this is an important step forward in making this realistic, because if we want to build a bunch of quantum computers and connect them, it'd be nice if we could use standard equipment to do so and not have to build a whole separate quantum internet. So it's cool. It's like very experimentally awesome.

• 49:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Taxes are so complicated, it wouldn't surprise me if next year we need to be doing our taxes on quantum computers, but I hope we're not getting there.

• 49:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, well, you should think about whether you want to pay your taxes or not pay them or both.

• 49:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Whoa. I know which one I'd rather do. But on the other hand, I really like my government services. So I feel complicated.

• 49:52Daniel Whiteson?

  And I like not being in jail.

• 49:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, me too. Me too. There's a lot of things that would be hard to do from jail, like this podcast.

• 50:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Actually, that might be possible. We'll find out maybe. So the quantum internet is a real thing, right? Quantum computers are real and they're awesome. Not always in the way people say they are. They're not the multiverse, but they are a new way to do computation. And quantum teleportation is a real thing. It's not faster than light. It's not Star Trek, but it is a way to transmit quantum states across vast distances, which is very cool. Bring them together. And you get the quantum internet. Quantum computers connected through quantum teleportation to do massive quantum problem solving. I think it's pretty cool.

• 50:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  The future is now.

• 50:33Daniel Whiteson?

  And so I hope I didn't throw too much of a wet blanket on the quantum internet. There is really a lot of awesome physics happening there. And if one day we do have very powerful quantum computers, they may be able to solve problems that do stump us today. So I look forward to the first time an episode of this podcast is released on the quantum internet.

• 50:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, you are now a member of the Wet Blanket Club, but it's going to be a while before you're president. But I enjoyed spending this time with you.

• 50:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Are you dictator for life? Is that how it works?

• 51:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah. That's right. And Zach is first husband of the dictator.

• 51:07Daniel Whiteson?

  I'll start as secretary, work my way up.

• 51:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. Good luck.

• 51:10Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Thanks, everybody for listening. I hope we didn't entangle your minds, at least not too much.

• 51:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you.

• 51:27Daniel Whiteson?

  We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.

• 51:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.

• 51:40Daniel Whiteson?

  We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at questions at danielandkelly.org.

• 51:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D and K Universe.

• 51:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

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• 52:57Daniel Whiteson?

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