Plans & Prospects 2023
Plans & Prospects is the annual magazine for alumni and friends of Wolfson College at the University of Oxford. We hope that you enjoy reading about life here at Wolfson, and welcome your feedback or article suggestions for next year's issue. Plans & Prospects is the annual magazine for alumni and friends of Wolfson College at the University of Oxford. We hope that you enjoy reading about life here at Wolfson, and welcome your feedback or article suggestions for next year's issue.
Quantum entanglement and reality You probably already know that, at subatomic scales, we enter the strange world of quantum physics, governed by counterintuitive laws very far from the classical mechanics of the human-scale world. But did you know that quantum physics provides our most complete description of reality, and that we can even observe quantum effects in living creatures? Professor Vlatko Vedral, a Governing Body Fellow, brings us up to speed on his research into the “ultimate logic of everything”. Vlatko Vedral Vlatko Vedral (BSc, PhD, Imperial College) is a Professor of Quantum Information at Oxford. He has published over 400 research papers on various topics in quantum physics and quantum computing and is one of the Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers. He has given numerous invited plenary and public talks during his career. These include a specialised talk at a Solvay meeting (2010) and a popular one at the International Safe Scientifique (2007). He was awarded the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2007, the World Scientific Medal and Prize in 2009, the Marko Jaric Award in 2010 and was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Physics in 2017 and a member of the European Academy of Sciences in 2020. He is a consultant to the World Economic Forum on the Future of Computation. Vlatko is the author of 4 textbooks and 2 popular books (Decoding Reality and From Micro to Macro). He gives regular interviews to the media and is actively engaged in popularisation of physics in pieces for New Scientist, Scientific American and major UK and overseas newspapers. 16 Isaac Newton, who discovered what we now call classical physics, thought that everything is made up of particles. However, various aspects of light could not be explained if light was also made up of particles. Ultimately, James Clerk Maxwell - standing on the shoulders of Huygens, Young, Faraday and many others - proved that light is actually an electromagnetic wave. At that point the world (still classical) was understood to be made up of two kinds of entities, particles (constituents of matter) and waves (things making up the electromagnetic field). Then came Albert Einstein who (seemingly, but not really) reverted back to Newton and said that light is, after all, made up of particles (photons), though he did admit that they can also behave like waves (which is how we can account for the interference of light). This was the beginning of quantum physics. Finally, Louis de Broglie hypothesized that material quantum objects (such as electrons) can also behave like waves. This led to a unification (everything is a wave and a particle) and inspired Bohr to talk about complementarity, namely the fact that all entities can manifest their particle-like or wave-like nature depending on how we “look at” (experiment with) them. This is at the heart of the famous wave-particle duality of quantum systems. So, then, what is the right ontology when it comes to reality? Is the world made of particles or waves or things that sometimes behave like particles or waves? According to quantum physics, everything is actually made up of waves. But these are quantum waves (or q-waves for short), meaning that the entities that are doing the waving are what Paul Dirac called q –numbers (as opposed to the ordinary c-numbers, “c” being classical). This picture emerged through the work of Heisenberg, Mott, Schrödinger and Everett (all standing on the shoulders of William Hamilton). Let me explain why everything is a q-wave and why this presents us with the best picture of reality at present. First there was a problem. If particles are waves, the key phenomenon to explain in the 1920s was the observation of the alpha-particle decay in a cloud chamber. This experiment seemed to present a paradox for quantum physics. An alpha-particle is a Helium nucleus (two protons and two neutrons) and it sometimes gets ejected in a nuclear decay of a larger nucleus. A cloud chamber was a great invention to observe such particles (worthy of several Nobel Prizes), though nowadays you can make one in 15 minutes in your own house with everyday kitchen utensils (there are many YouTube videos on this). The idea, as the name suggests, is to have a particle travel through a gas that can readily be ionized by collisions with the particle. As the particle collides with the gas molecules, it ionizes
Alumni lecture 17 Credit: Freepik
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Alumni lecture<br />
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