What do you think of this "Mini Manhattan Project" in quantum mechanics?

Introduction: From Planck's concept of quantum, to the final launch of technology giants and the national quantum technology hegemony, quantum mechanics has been with humans for 118 years. How should we view its development? What kind of reflection should there be?

Google Microsoft is "making things", this time is quantum computing. According to foreign media reports, Google and Microsoft will announce a major breakthrough in the field of quantum computing.

What is the "quantum world"?

For the vast majority of people who eat melons, the material world they have seen has surpassed the load of the human brain. But there are always a handful of human beings who are too good to be able to perceive with the senses. The ordinary people can't even recognize the concept, and the complex areas that are hard to imagine are easy to use.

The quantum world is such an area.

The term quantum was originally derived from the Latin quantus, meaning "how many", representing "a considerable amount of a substance", used in the concept of physics was first proposed by the German physicist M. Planck in 1900. Since its introduction, through the perfection of Einstein, Bohr, De Broglie, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac, Born, etc., the complete theoretical system of quantum mechanics was preliminarily established in the first half of the 20th century.

Einstein was the first physicist to realize that Planck’s discovery of quantum would be to rewrite the entire physics. In order to prove his point, in 1905, he proposed that the act of light sometimes resembles particles, calling these particles "light quantum". Now the term is called photon. This hypothesis leads to the simultaneous possession of particles and waves.

Bohr has been one of the strongest opponents of the light quantum hypothesis, and it was not until 1925 that it accepted this view. Since then, the quantum mechanics revolution has been carried out in the direction of Einstein and Bohr.

De Broglie's life experience is quite rich. When he was young, he was a literary youth, loved literature and history, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Sorbonne University in Paris in 1910. However, the plan to become a historian changed after a discussion about issues such as light, radiation, and quantum properties. This discussion sparked his strong interest in physics. Since then, his achievements in quantum mechanics have been affirmed by Einstein, which has expanded the wave-particle duality concept of light, including moving particles.

In 1925, Heisenberg proposed matrix mechanics, completely abolishing the classical elements of Newtonian mechanics. In 1926, Born proposed that quantum mechanics should be understood as the probability of no causal connection. At the end of 1927, Heisenberg and Born announced at the Solvay Conference that the quantum mechanics revolution initiated by Einstein and Bohr ended. So far, quantum mechanics has officially become a discipline.

Schrödinger's main contribution is to establish wave dynamics based on De Broglie's material wave theory. The most well-known is the "Schrodinger's Cat" thought experiment, trying to prove the incompleteness of quantum mechanics under macroscopic conditions. However, this Schrödinger wants to defeat the experiment of quantum mechanics, but it has become a classic metaphor for teaching quantum theory, and further extends the physical issues and philosophical controversies such as the parallel universe.

At the same time as Schrödinger, because he discovered a new form that is useful in atomic theory, the basic equation of quantum mechanics, Dirac shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with Schrödinger.

Group photo of participants of the 5th Solvay Physics Conference in Brussels in 1927 (taken from the Internet)

From the left in the front row: Langmuir, Planck, Madame Curie, Lorentz, Einstein, Lang Zhiwan, Guye, Wilsun, Richardson

Middle row from left: Debye, Nussen, Little Prague, Kramers, Dirac, Compton, De Broglie, Born, Bohr

From the left in the back row: Picard, Onrio, Ellen Fest, Herzen, De Dunde, Schrödinger, Visafite, Pauli

Planck's quantum hypothesis, Einstein's quantum theory of light, Bohr's atomic theory, De Broglie's matter wave concept, Heisenberg's matrix mechanics, Schrödinger's and Dirac's basic equations of quantum mechanics...

What did you finally prove through the efforts of these founders?

Quantum mechanics does not support free will, but there is uncertainty in the micro-world material with probability waves, but it still has a stable objective law, does not transfer from human will, and denies fatalism.

First, on the microscopic scale, there is still an insurmountable distance between the randomness and the macroscopic scale in the usual sense. Secondly, it is difficult to prove whether this randomness is irreducible. Things are the diversity of the whole that is independently evolved. There is a dialectical relationship between contingency and inevitability.

How was the quantum computer born?

The 20th century is destined to be full of conflicts. When the West has already opened up modern science and technology and political civilization, many areas in the East are still in the backward system of cold weapons and old institutions. The serious imbalance of power contrasts has led to a constant geopolitical conflict. Coupled with the inherent cycle of capital economy, the uneven distribution of the weak and the strong, and the rise of extreme politics, the world war is on the verge.

Although science has no borders, scientists have their own political ideas. At the beginning of World War II, Heisenberg stayed in Germany for the Nazis and was responsible for leading the technical work of developing atomic bombs. Einstein and Bohr participated in the Manhattan project led by Oppenheimer. The result of this plan, in addition to the well-known two atomic bombs, brings together more than a thousand projects of the world's top scientists, and of course there are more stories. Richard Feynman, as a member of the Manhattan Project Talents team, joined less than 25 Years old, and his proposed Feynman diagram, Feynman rule and renormalization calculation method have become indispensable tools for studying quantum electrodynamics and particle physics.

Based on these theoretical foundations, Richard Feynman first proposed the concept of quantum computers.

In fact, until the 1980s, quantum computers were in a state of theoretical derivation. During this period, Richard Feynman proposed the idea of ​​using quantum systems to implement general-purpose computing in 1982. In 1985, David Duss proposed the quantum Turing machine model.

Until 1994, Peter Sauer proposed a quantum factor decomposition algorithm, which became a hot topic because it could be cracked by the RSA encryption algorithm that was used in banks and networks.

In February 2007, D-Wave Systems of Canada announced the successful development of a 16-bit quantum bit superconducting quantum computer, but its role is limited to solving some optimization problems, and the quantum computer recognized by the scientific community to run various quantum algorithms. There is a big difference. At this time, D-Wave's "Mini Manhattan Project" officially opened.

On November 15, 2009, the world's first programmable general-purpose quantum computer was born in the United States. In the same year, scientists at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom developed quantum computer chips based on quantum optics to run the See algorithm.

Up to now, the superiority of quantum computers compared with classical computers is mainly reflected in: 1. Quantum superposition, which simultaneously represents 0 and 1; 2. Quantum parallel computing, which can perform mathematical operations on 2^n numbers at the same time, equivalent to classical computers. Perform 2^n operations at the same time.

For the amount of computation that quantum computers can achieve, Feynman has a classic description of the application scenario: it is almost impossible to find a capital letter "X" on a page of a book in the Library of Congress within 5 minutes. Because the Library of Congress has 50 million books. But if you are in 50 million parallel realities and each reality can view different books, you can definitely find this "X" in one of the realities.

In this hypothesis, a normal computer is like a "crazy" in the former case, and you need to find as many books as you can in 5 minutes. Quantum computers can replicate 50 million people, each of which only needs to find a book.

What research is "Google" doing?

Even though quantum computers were born in 2009, they are still far from practical applications, and their influence is mainly in academic, scientific research institutions, giant technology companies, and technology research and development competitions in various countries.

In March 2010, the German supercomputer successfully simulated 42-bit quantum computers; in April 2011, the Australian and Japanese research teams made breakthroughs in quantum communication and realized the complete transmission of quantum information; in September of the same year, scientists proved that quantum computers could Implemented with the von Neumann architecture; in February 2012, IBM claimed several breakthroughs in quantum computing for superconducting integrated circuits; in May 2013, D-Wave announced that NASA and Google jointly booked a The station uses a 512 qubit D-WaveTwo quantum computer.

Regarding the cooperation between NASA and Google, NASA hopes that quantum computers can be used to discover new terrestrial planets or to apply to interplanetary navigation. The "inventor king" Google hopes that quantum computers can solve the problem of creativity. As mentioned earlier, classic computers are unsatisfactory in terms of computing properties and computing speed. In addition, quantum computers can make enormous progress in machine learning.

At present, the D-WaveTwo bought by Google and NASA is said to be locked in a huge black box. Because the quantum needs to run at a lower temperature in a lower temperature, the temperature in this black almost reaches absolute zero ( At minus 273.15 degrees Celsius), at the same time, the box is completely dark and quiet.

At the Ignite conference held in September last year, Microsoft demonstrated advances in topological qubits and hardware and software ecosystem development, and released a new programming language optimized for mastering large-scale quantum computers, enabling developers to write quantum The program, debugged on the current quantum simulator, and able to run on real topological quantum computers in the future.

Although no operational qubits have been developed, Microsoft's Quantum team director Holmdar said recently that Microsoft is now "very close" to announce the breakthrough.

For D-Wave's co-founder and chief scientist Eric Ledisinsky, he has to build a quantum computer in 10 years instead of 50 years, which is a "mini" for him. Manhattan Project."

However, the voice of doubt has not stopped. Some experts have so far believed that it will take decades to come to a computer that truly applies the principles of quantum mechanics. Some computer experts have warned that perhaps the so-called quantum computer processor is really fast, but it still uses traditional technology under the demonstration of the blind method. More like MIT quantum physicist Scott Aaronson claims to be the chief critic of D-Wave, his public comments have always stressed that there is no direct evidence that D-Wave's quantum processor operates in a quantum mechanical manner. Even with Google and NASA endorsements.

No way, the "Mini Manhattan Plan" seems to have great prospects. Don't forget that D-Wave was originally invested by Amazon's Bezos and the CIA.

"Quantum hegemony" is fiercely competitive. Who will win in the end? Is the 21st century "inventor king" Google? The old "software empire" Microsoft? E-commerce crossover Amazon, IBM, Intel, or D-Wave?

Or there are other possibilities.

After the cum break bit manipulation record, Pan Jianwei team completed the first TDA algorithm verification demonstration

In May last year, Academician Pan Jianwei of the University of Science and Technology of China announced in Shanghai that China's scientific research team successfully built a photo-quantum computer, demonstrating for the first time the quantum computing capabilities beyond the early classic computers.

The breakthrough was mainly reflected in the superconducting system. The research team broke the 9 qubit manipulation records maintained by the United States and independently developed a 10-bit superconducting quantum line sample to achieve the largest number of superconducting qubits in the world. The multi-body pure entanglement, and the 10-bit quantum state is completely depicted by the tomographic measurement method.

Recently, Pan Jianwei completed the first verification demonstration of Topological Data Analysis (TDA) algorithm on optical quantum computer, which indicates that data analysis may be an important application of quantum computing in the future.

It is understood that TDA can resist certain noise interference and extract useful information from the data, and the quantum version of TDA can achieve exponential acceleration of the classical optimal TDA algorithm. The quantum TDA algorithm is also available to humans on quantum computers after the Sauer algorithm (the above is used for cryptanalysis for large-scale factorization), the Grover algorithm (for search problems), and the HHL algorithm (for solving linear equations). A new algorithm.

The algorithm opens the way for the exploration of high-dimensional data processing and even artificial intelligence algorithms on quantum computers.

postscript

From Planck's concept of quantum to the quantum mechanics revolution of Einstein and Bohr, Heisenberg and Bonn jointly announced the establishment of quantum mechanics, Schrödinger's cat "negation of negation", and then Auburn with quantum mechanical penetration. Hemer's "Manhattan Project", Feynman proposed the concept of quantum computer, D-Wave boldly tried the "Mini Manhattan Plan", and finally set off the technology giants and the national quantum technology hegemony, quantum mechanics has been with humans for 118 years. For 118 years, top human intelligence has finally discovered the quantum world and attempted to turn it into a real-world application.

However, no matter how far the technology develops, its essence is to serve humanity. But why should humanity, truth, and science be related? This is a philosophical reflection that science needs not only to change human life, but also to change the potential of human attributes.

From the perspective of historical development, in the first half of the twentieth century, human beings experienced geopolitical changes and the catastrophe brought about by the extremes of emerging political thoughts. Although science and technology are meaningful in nature and neutral in nature, just as Einstein rumors that the president had created an atomic bomb before the Nazis, the ecstasy of the scientists after the first atomic bomb exploded. The real disaster happened after a fleeting moment, and then fell into a huge panic.

Science can determine its own sustainable development, but it cannot guarantee the destiny of mankind.

This, perhaps, should be our priority.

Editor in charge: Song Jun