SchrodingerSessions

The Schrödinger Sessions II: More Science for More Science Fiction

drorzel — Tue, 01 Mar 2016 09:26:22 +0000

The Schrödinger Sessions II: More Science for More Science Fiction

As you probably already know, last year we ran a workshop at the Joint Quantum Institute for science-fiction writers who would like to learn more about quantum physics. The workshop was a lot of fun from the speaker/oragnizer side, and very well received by last year's writers, so we're doing it again:

The Schrödinger Sessions is a three-day workshop for science fiction writers offering a “crash course” in modern physics, to be held at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), one of the world’s leading research centers for the study of quantum mechanics. We will introduce participants to phenomena like superposition, entanglement, and quantum information through a series of lectures by JQI scientists and tours of JQI laboratories. We hope this will inform and inspire new stories in print, on screen, and in electronic media, that will in turn inspire a broad audience to learn more about the weird and fascinating science of quantum physics and the transformative technologies it enables.

The workshop will be held at JQI from Thursday, July 28 through Saturday, July 30. Participants will be housed locally, with breakfast and lunch provided at the workshop; evenings will be free to allow participants to explore the Washington, DC area.

Participants will be selected on the basis of an application asking about personal background, interest, and publication history. We will work to ensure the greatest possible diversity of race and gender, as well as type of media (print, television, etc.), with an eye toward reaching the broadest audience. Applications will be accepted on-line from March 1 through March 20, 2015, and acceptance decisions will be made around April 15, 2015.

The online application form is now live, so if this is something you'd be interested in, check it out and send us an application. And please share this with anyone else you know who might be interested.

drorzel Tue, 03/01/2016 - 04:26

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Outreach

The Schrödinger Sessions: Science for Science Fiction

drorzel — Thu, 06 Aug 2015 06:36:19 +0000

The Schrödinger Sessions: Science for Science Fiction

Last weekend was our APS-funded outreach workshop The Schrödinger Sessions: Science for Science Fiction, held at the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland. The workshop offered a three-day "crash course" on quantum physics to 17 science fiction writers from a variety of media-- we had novelists, short-story writers, screenwriters, and at least one poet. The goal was to provide a basic grounding in quantum physics and a look at current research in hopes of informing and inspiring new stories that will, in turn, inspire the audience for those stories to look more deeply into the science.

While this involved the usual complement of scrambling around with the planning-- including some locked doors, a canceled tour, and frantic searching for demo equipment-- the workshop came off wonderfully. The speakers were uniformly excellent the writers were actively engaged, and everybody got along swimmingly. One or two demos didn't quite work as intended, but those were handled smoothly enough that I doubt anybody noticed.

Speakers were a mix of faculty from Maryland and JQI (plus me; I split the introductory material with Steve Rolston) and JQI post-docs, and we tried to cover a wide range of topics from the basic theory behind quantum physics to the concrete applications of the technology used to study the cool phenomena. Everybody did a great job, but I was especially impressed by Raman Sundrum, who did a very informal presentation, fielding questions and speaking off the cuff about a variety of theories beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. His presentation spilled over into the lunch hour, and if we hadn't cut him off at the start of the final talk, they might still be at it.

As I said, the talks were excellent across the board. This was in no small part due to the overwhelmingly positive response from folks at Maryland-- my fellow organizers say they've never had that quick an affirmative reply to any request for volunteers before. This is a nice counter to two common myths about science: first, that scientists are poor communicators, and second, that scientists only grudgingly take part in communicating their work more broadly.

(Even though I already knew the basic physics being discussed, I found the talks really useful for illuminating new-to-me ways of getting some of these ideas across. I fully intend to steal a bunch of the metaphors and explanations people used, particularly Trey Porto's Plinko-based explanation of quantum statistics, Andrew Childs's introduction of Deutsch's algorithm with an interferometer, and Mohammad Hafezi's magic-box analogy for quantum measurement.)

Thanks are, of course, due to all our excellent speakers: Mohammad Hafezi, Paul Hess, Elizabeth Goldschmidt, Chris Monroe, Andrew Childs, Steve Eckel, Jim Gates, Jimmy Williams, Raman Sundrum, and Allen Stairs. I'm also very grateful to Steve Rolston for going along with this crazy idea I had. Most of all, though, thanks to Emily Edwards of JQI, who did an amazing job dealing with all the logistics of housing, parking, food, transportation, A/V and demo gear, and all the rest. It very literally could not have happened without her.

We're going to let the dust settle a bit before deciding when we'll do this again, but things went well enough that I'm fairly certain it's "when" not "if." So, watch this space (and several others) for news of the next time.

And here are a few photos, because I have a fancy camera and I'm not afraid to use it:

Prof. Mohammad Hafezi lecturing about quantum measurement at the Schrodinger Sessions.

Tour of a laser cooling lab at the Schrodinger Sessions.

Prof. Raman Sundrum talking about exotic theories at the Schrodinger Sessions.

Attendees and some presenters at the Schrodinger Sessions.

drorzel Thu, 08/06/2015 - 02:36

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Favorite Quantum Physics in Fiction?

drorzel — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 08:34:08 +0000

Favorite Quantum Physics in Fiction?

We'll be accepting applications for The Schrödinger Sessions workshop at JQI through tomorrow. We already have 80-plus applicants for fewer than 20 planned spots, including a couple of authors I really, really like and some folks who have won awards, etc., so we're going to have our work cut out for us picking the attendees...

We're also discussing the program for the workshop-- more details when we have something more final-- which has me thinking about good examples to use of storytelling involving quantum physics. I'd like to be able to give a few shout-outs to already-existing fiction involving the ideas we'll be discussing. And while I know several already, I'm always happy to hear more...

Things on my mental list already:

-- Robert Charles Wilson's "Divided by Infinity", probably the best fictional exploration of Many-Worlds that I've seen. Yes, I'm aware of Larry Niven's "All the Myriad Ways." This is better.

-- Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life," though that's less explicitly quantum. It turns on the idea of the principle of least action, which is essential for Feynman's formulation of quantum physics, but originates in classical physics. It's an amazing story, though.

-- Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief and sequels make heavy use of ideas from quantum technology. He even specifically cites ion traps when talking about quantum computing infrastructure, which is a great fit with the labs at JQI.

-- Charlie Stross mentions quantum communications a lot in his SF. He's really hit or miss for me, and sadly most of what misses for me hits with a lot of other people, so he's evolving toward a less appealing state, but one of his early books-- either Singularity Sky or Iron Sunrise, I forget which-- had what's probably my favorite hand-wave involving this use of quantum entanglement for FTL communications, with the idea that FTL travel via hyperspace breaks entanglement, and thus the entangled qubits used for instantaneous communications are a precious resource shipped through normal space at great expense.

It's hard to think of on-screen examples of quantum technology, though, largely because it's been years since I've had the free time to watch many movies. Interstellar name-checks the need for "quantum data," but it's really about astrophysics, not quantum mechanics. I know the Coen brothers did a movie a few years back where quantum physics plays a metaphorical sort of role, but I haven't seen it. Quantum computing as a way of cracking encryption may have been a McGuffin in a thriller movie or two, but I don't recall specific examples.

Anyway, I would love to have a longer list of stuff to suggest/ cite/ name-drop. Please leave ideas in the comments...

drorzel Thu, 03/19/2015 - 04:34

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Fred Pohl wrote a novel called, IIRC, The Coming of the Quantum Cats, with the premise that scientists in one time line have successfully figured out how to communicate with other time lines. I don't think it holds up that well, though. In one prominent timeline, a world in which oil shortages have given Saudi Arabia enough leverage over the US that a cartoonish version of sharia has been imposed in this country, the central character (who in most of the timelines is one of the key scientists on the project, though in another timeline he's a US Senator who is good friends, via JFK, with a Soviet immigrant known in our timeline as Joseph Stalin) is an investment banker who runs into trouble because of his counterpart from another time line. The resolution to the problems thus created is to exile the various major players (many of whom, as I said, are alternate timeline versions of the central character, and several of the other characters also have alternate timeline counterparts who are major players) to yet another timeline in which New York City has been abandoned sometime after the 1920s (we know this because the George Washington Bridge had been built). It's not a terrible novel, but I don't think it's his best, either.

If we're being generous, then Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves might count. The premise here is that a gateway has been opened between our universe and an alternative universe in which plutonium-186 is a stable isotope (it eventually becomes subject to the physics of our universe and decays, but in the process our universe becomes a little more like theirs). But that's more of a "landscape" premise than a "many worlds" premise.

Terry Pratchett. His take on QT is a superposition of rather satirical and fairly accurate. But a further question: how to write fiction that is compatible with current quantum physics but also steps into post-quantum physics, whatever that might be at galactic dark matter scales and at sub-Planck scales. MWI is an interpretation of the probabilistic element of QT that's equally applicable to classical probability, so for me it doesn't much count.

Greg Egan, especially his first (or at least, first widely distributed) novel, Quarantine, in which the biological cause of wave-function collapse is discovered and exploited.

I read Quarantine back when it was new(ish), and didn't care for it all that much. Egan is one of those writers that in principle I should like more than I do in practice...

@0 "The quantum data" in Interstellar was meant (if I understood it correctly) to be data that would shed light on quantum gravity. So yes, he had to jump into a black hole, but he was looking for an data that would shed light on an ultimate theory---the quantum behavior of spacetime singularities. Astrophysical? Quantum mechanical? Both, I think.
@1 I thought of *The Gods Themselves* too, but it is more of a landscape story.
@2 Interference makes the MWI more than what's possible for classical probability, but I'd rather not derail the discussion.

I always thought of *The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*'s Infinite Improbability Drive as a parody of QM in science fiction. Larry Niven uses a similar construction for his hyperdrive, which relies on going to the "second quantum" of spacetime as a way to avoid relativistic restrictions ( http://larryniven.wikia.com/wiki/Quantum_II_Hyperdrive ). Exactly what is meant isn't clear, but he does indicate that there's a real "world" there, and that sometimes when the quantum hyperdrives fail, it may be because some predator who lives in that quantum attacks a ship, but the idea isn't explored further. Niven is exactly the kind of writer I'd expect to get into the hard science of QM, and he probably deserves an explicit invitation to your workshop. Neal Stephenson's *Anathem* also loosely connects a Platonic mathematical world with QM Many Worlds, but I could be remembering it incorrectly.

A good discussion of fiction and QM is in David Deutsch's *The Beginning of Infinity*. He points out that all stories that obey the laws of physics will occur in some branch of the universal wavefunction. So, stories with magic or unphysical technology are untrue, while stories that are just not how "our world" turned out can be thought of as true stories for somebody else. My little addition in this context is that "Choose Your Own Adventure" books can be thought of as a MWI branching at each choice. Sometimes the storylines reconverge, and sometimes they've decohered too badly, so there are multiple endings.

Chad, you might find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_fiction interesting, too.

Well, my attempt at getting italics failed.

I should also point out that Asimov's robots' brains are positronic, which means they must be relying on something deep and physicsy (because otherwise use electrons and don't risk antimatter weapons walking around in polite society). I don't know if this was ever clarified.

Does The Void series by Peter F Hamilton count? The Void is intended to be a microuniverse, though it does require energy input from our plane. There are also plenty of FTL and wormhole technologies in the entire PFH settings. The Reality Dysfunction series might be one of my favorite series of all time, scifi or no.

Alastair Reynolds covers a ton of really awesome physics, though how much of it is "quantum" is probably up for debate.

(As a Medicinal chemist, i'm much more lax about what i'd call "quantum" since from the POV of my non science friends, pretty much everything i read is too hard and sciency for them.)

Evan @6: Yes, that was the idea behind Asimov calling his robots' brains positronic. The story in which he first used that word was published in either 1940 or 1941, a time when "electronic" circuits were basically LRC circuits with maybe a few diodes (the transistor wasn't invented until 1948), and little or nothing in the way of quantum wizardry. Obviously, you need something more complicated than that to fit a robot's brain into a space roughly the size of a human head.

Evan @5: Yes, Adams is explicit in his parody. In the chapter in which he describes the concept, he explicitly mentions the small but nonzero probability that the party hostess's undergarment will be a foot to her left, and mentions this being a party trick, but at the sort of parties physicists rarely attend. Being able to calculate this small but nonzero probability is a step on the way to creating an Infinite Improbability Drive.

The Cohen brothers movie you are referring to is "A Serious Man", and it is one of my favourites, but you really have to be both jewish and a quantum physicist to fully appreciate the movie.

Neal Stephenson, Anathem!

No, wait, that's one of the worst uses of QM in science fiction...

#10: Care to provide specifics? I actually like that book.

Well, there must be something by Stanislaw Lem. I haven't read it, but I understand that "The Investigation" might be a candidate.

#5: "@2 Interference makes the MWI more than what’s possible for classical probability" As you say, let's not go OT, but AFAICT almost all MWI storylines do not depend on interference. [But then again, to go OT, there can be interference in Hilbert space presentations of stochastic classical field theories.]

The Schrödinger Sessions: Now Accepting Applications

drorzel — Fri, 06 Mar 2015 13:10:08 +0000

The Schrödinger Sessions: Now Accepting Applications

I've updated the detailed blog post describing our summer workshop introducing writers to quantum physics to include a link to the application form. For the benefit of those who read via RSS, though, and don't follow me on Twitter: the application form is now live, and will be for the next few weeks. We expect to make acceptance decisions around April 1.

So, if you make up stories and the idea of spending a few days at the Joint Quantum Institute learning about quantum physics from some of the world's leading experts sounds like fun, well, send us an application.

drorzel Fri, 03/06/2015 - 08:10

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