Hello, and welcome to the Physics World Stories
podcast. I'm Andrew Glester, and it's a hundred
years ago in 1925
when one of our favorite origin stories from
the world of physics came to be.
Heisenberg, trying to escape the pollen filled streets
of the city,
voyaged to the island of Helgoland,
where unencumbered by his hay fever, he was
able to give life to the nascent field
of quantum mechanics.
It was, of course, in 1925
that Heisenberg published his work on the matrix
mechanics formulation
of quantum mechanics.
And for a new lateral thoughts piece in
the Physics World magazine, Kevlin Henney
reimagines this story from another angle. We'll hear
from Kevlin on the art of the story
shortly. But first, here he is reading a
snippet of that piece in our magazine.
I am somewhat aggrieved that professor Born did
not grant my request for leave.
Abitantly, the notice was short, but the hay
fever is most wretched.
I am barely able to string two thoughts
together, let alone a theory for electron transition.
The problem of hydrogen spectral lines eludes me,
as does any coherence during much of the
day or night.
The lushness of Gottingen's parks and gardens is
a curse in summer.
If I am to make progress on this
problem of physics, I must first address this
problem of my own biology.
Sixth of June.
Chemistry is today's pursuit. I have secured medication
in a greater dose than before.
June 7.
Empirically, I appear to have determined that a
more generous ingestion of cocaine
is not the solution to my hay fever
problem.
I shall instead switch to increasing my intake
of aspirin.
Eleventh of June.
I am feeling most sorry,
both myself and the state of our discipline.
It is as though my own ills are
entangled with physics as a whole.
There is little certainty or clarity,
only contradictions and incompleteness.
Whether at the scale of the atom or
the galaxy,
our understanding contradicts our intuition and our progress
out of this darkness is pitiful.
Even professor Einstein's magnificent and general theory of
relativity has its difficulties.
Without a fix that lacks any theoretical origin,
it predicts an expanding universe.
Solutions that permit dark stars whose gravity would
be so large that not even light could
escape.
We are mired in questions and nonsense.
All the while, I am little more than
coughs or sneezes and reddened eyes.
What I might generously call my mind is
barely deserving of the name.
I am consoled, at least, that in mathematics,
the story is not the same.
Russell and Whitehead have shown that mathematics is
complete and consistent,
although I know of no one who's managed
to read the whole proof.
This result offers a firm bedrock. I am
sure mathematicians will continue to celebrate a hundred
years from now.
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See you there.
Here's Kevlin Henning.
I'm an independent software consultant, trainer, and writer,
and I am based in Bristol.
So software development. Why why have you written
something about
Heisenberg
and Helgoland
for Physics World? That is that is a
a long and twisted story.
Yes.
It's not an obvious connection.
So we need a couple of other strands
to this story. One of which is that
my,
first degree was in physics.
And I've kind of maintained a a a
a casual and broad interest, in that ever
since.
And there's a number of people in my
cohort and and ended up in software. That
that's relatively unsurprising. I think it was about,
you know, 50% people went into, software, fifty
percent went into accounting, and a negligible amount
actually went into physics.
That that that's what it felt like certainly
back then.
So I was one of the software crowd.
The
so
the story aspect is an interesting one because
it's that's a thing that I accidentally
got back into
in more recent years,
was writing short fiction, very short fiction, what's
what's technically known as a flash fiction,
which is stuff that is, you know, fair
very short, can be read in a few
minutes,
and
and there's not much longer than that. In
other words, it fits a modern attention span.
And, within Bristol, I've run a number of
events on that, and, you know, that's that's
been an area of interest.
And I've written a couple of things for
Physics World in the past, a couple of
fiction related things, both of which did actually
have a software tie in,
in one sense or another. But
this one was an interesting one because, I
was told, well, you know, we'd like we'd
like a story because it's the international year
of, of quantum, you know, quantum computing, quantum
physics, quantum everything. And so perhaps quantum story.
And to do something, around that, and given
that,
2025
marks,
one hundred years since,
Heisenberg formulated
an approach that kind of changed the way
we looked at, quantum mechanics and, and how
things were calculated and perceived,
that was seen as a useful,
event.
And, actually, his formulation and the story behind
it was then seen as the useful event.
We discussed various ideas and,
came up with this,
I came up with this story to to
go against it. Stories are compelling. Right? There's
a reason why this podcast is called the
Physics World Stories podcast because we're interested in
the stories. I'd I'd like to get your
take on this story of Heisenberg and,
going to Helgoland.
It it's it's a very comfortable story. Right?
It's a lovely it's a lovely sort of
narrative that he's got this hayfury where he
needs to
clear his mind and go to the island,
and then he goes to the island. And,
oh, his his mind's clear so he can
cover is it too comfortable? Is it too
easy a story?
That's the funny thing about stories, isn't it?
We we want them to be true regardless
of whether or not that's why they're compelling
because they they make sense of something. And
I think that that's given,
given that we perceive order in the world,
and sometimes feel destabilized by not seeing it,
and this is at any scale,
that's
as as humans, we look for the sense.
We we try and make sense of it.
And so
even where there is a true story, we
are likely to
mentally filter events.
You know,
that we we we now have a very
well honed narrative of the the hay fever
thing. And by the way, that was also
something that drew me to
making writing a story about this as a
hay fever sufferer. I am right there,
with Heisenberg. You know? We we are connected
across time, I feel. You know? I'm I'm
understanding. It's like, yes. What a perfect idea.
Get out of this this city of greenery
and go to an island with no trees
that is, you know, many kilometers off the
coast. It's just like, that sounds that sounds
like a solution.
So
that's another point. We identify,
with with characters. And so there's a lot
of undoubtedly uncomfortable and awkward bits in the
true story, bits that don't fit and don't
make sense. But those kind of been, you
know, like a like a,
a rock dashed against the shore. They've they've
been rounded off. We leave those bits out.
In telling of the story,
it's not necessarily that we
also reshape facts, it's probably we choose the
ones that fit together the best. They're they're
not necessarily false. So there's a I think
there's a lot of different aspects to a
story. Some stories,
we change the truth. In other stories, we
leave out the bits that don't
fit, that that are a little bit you
know, they don't seem to fit the narrative
and and and make the narrative a little
more linear and compelling.
So in one sense, it is tidy because
we know the story, but we know what
happened behind it, or rather we know some
of the things that are relevant behind it.
And there are probably a lot of other
things that happened, but they don't fit. So
we we forgotten. They're lost to time. Did
you know the story beforehand? Is it is
it a story that sort of,
you know, have you been interested in quantum
physics and these beginnings of it?
I so for me, when I was approached
about this one, I wasn't as aware of
this. I had some vague notion of this
and, you know, and for me,
1925
didn't hold any particular
significance.
And because
for for something like this, again, this is
this is where stories come in, what is
the beginning of,
of the quantum story?
You know, 1925,
in many ways, feels very late.
A lot of stuff was happening,
and, you know, nineteen hundreds onwards, but you
can go back a bit further. But normally,
for a lot of people, it's just like,
oh,
is is the photoelectric effect.
The quantization there seems to be that and
that's an earlier date.
So we should have already had this story
in one sense.
But
so there's a lot of arbitrary beginnings, and
this is as good as any. So I
wasn't as aware of it.
I just had a vague notion of it.
But when I when I dug into it
and read around, it was interesting seeing the
different
versions of it around, and they differ by
one day. I found that very interesting. There's
a lot of a lot of variations
on
what happened, but they mostly fit the same
narrative.
There were a number of other things that
I I thought were
interesting in the sense of,
there's the kind of the notion of the
of of solitude,
and, you know, that kind of
appeals to the lone genius narrative. Although, we
know that that's not often the case.
I like the fact that,
he felt that it was appropriate to go
and see,
go and see, Powley, go and see Wolfgang
Powley. And that kind of connects in. You
know, just to go and check his thinking
on the way back,
before seeing his supervisor,
and saying, hey, I've I've come up with
this approach.
So I think there's a there's a number
of things there. But also,
in in in the sense that the story
is not complete, it was actually not his
initial formulation that that that came to really
change things. But,
Max Born and others were were were took
those ideas and said, No. We we we
see that this is there's a whole load
of stuff here, and there's a whole branch
of mathematics,
that is applicable, matrix,
mathematics, which I I, you know, I found
absolutely fascinating. It's one of these things that
we have a an idea
that whatever it is that we were taught,
school, university, and onwards, there's a sort of
a timeless quality to it. People have always
been learning this.
But the idea that
physics a hundred years ago, of course, in
a state of,
state of change, a state of flux,
and
we kind of assume, yes, the dawn of
a new age. And what were the tools?
What were the mathematical tools that they had
available?
And what it what fascinated me was the
fact
that that matric matrices were not part of
that toolkit, and that is only a kind
of coincidence
that,
that, you know, Bourne had kind of remembered.
Oh, yes. I did something like this in
maths
some time ago. And there's a crossover. This
this accurately describes stuff, and and, Bernard Heisenberg
was working with tables
and multiplying them together in a particular way.
And it's just like, these days, we'd immediately
look at that and go, yeah. I was
taught this for a level.
And it's it's
the idea that the this
toolkit
is changing and and relies on these occasional
coincidences of something going, wait a minute, it's
cross fertilization.
Here's a here's an idea that nobody thought
had direct application in the physical sciences,
and suddenly,
it does. And it's it's more about the
person. And again, this comes back to the
stories being compelling. The the the pollen in
the story is is one person, you know,
one person going from one discipline to another
and cross fertilizing that and going, wait a
minute. This is explained by this.
And I think that's also fascinating, but that's
obviously a bit that doesn't fit in the
story that I wrote. So I kind of
gloss over it.
But the idea is that even within our,
even within a traditional story frame, actually, lots
of the story leaks out,
and we kind of from the perspective of
2025,
the fact that those two events happened months
apart in, in 1925,
you know, they're practically identical from this point
of view. A hundred years is a hundred
years.
But I find that that one was an
interest that was interesting to me, and I
I was not I don't think I really
fully appreciated,
the the difference. People would have been steeped
in, yeah, there would have been a a
lot of hand calculating, but from the actual
mathematical point of view, the toolkit that they
had
was not the one that I was taught.
And I think that is interesting. There there
was obviously a lot more calculus,
but the fact that matrices
were not part of it was I I
just hadn't thought about it. It's just absolutely
fascinating.
Because you say you didn't put that in
the story. What how do you choose when
you're writing a sort a story like this
where you've got to get some of the
science in there? Right? That's the thing. So
what what how do you go about that
process? I think, in fact, the way you
you describe it, you gotta get some of
the science in there. It's it's almost like
taking a photograph.
And in a photograph, you have to choose
your frame. And
what makes a good photograph,
good is normally
what you have chosen to include, but also
what you've chosen not to include.
The temptation is to choose try and choose
everything, at which point you end up with
a wide angle shot that is very high
definition and you can't see the subject matter.
You've you've chosen too much. In other words,
by trying to be too faithful, you've included
too much complexity.
And again, this is another feature of of
stories as well as how we look at
things, is there's you gotta have a few
things that stand out. And so sometimes what
you're looking for is a frame, a constraint.
A very simple constraint, for example, is that
I mentioned I write, what I primarily write
is,
flash fiction, which is very short. And depending
on who you speak to,
the the upper limit is either 500 words
or 1,000 words,
but it is fairly short. Now that's a
good example of a frame. There's only so
much you can put in that. So naturally,
you're gonna limit,
how much of the world building or story
you can include. There's a there's a natural
boundary on that. But at the same time,
you're looking for an excuse
to not include certain things as well as
include certain things. And with this story, what
I wrote was based on, a diary.
And so a diary naturally has it it
gives you a constraint to work with. In
other words, there is a starting date and
there is an end date, and everything that
you want to tell must lie between those
two dates. Now I could have chosen a
different format, but because of the way the
story is told,
the diary was the best way to, I
I felt the diary is the best way
to bring out that truth. So therefore, the
events that happen afterwards,
we can hand wave and suggest there might
be more, but that's the limit of it.
So therefore,
what could have happened between this date, getting
the green light to go to Helgoland and
take some time off,
and returning to Gottingen,
with this idea. What what you know, that
gives us our frame, and therefore,
it automatically tells us what we're not going
to tell, as well as what we can
tell. Did you think about different time periods
when you think about it, or is it
like well, that's the obvious point where this
diary segment is gonna come from? I honestly,
in the initial conception when I was,
when I made the suggestion, when the idea
came to me,
actually, it was very clear in my head
that a diary was the right,
was the right structure,
and therefore, a diary based on Helgoland
and that visit. So in that sense, I
didn't explore
alternatives,
because this one seemed to work
very well. In other words, it's in in
from the story point of view, it's just
like, oh, yeah. This this kind of is
is kind of cute. It's kind of attractive.
It it works very well in the context
and for what we want to say. And
so I thought, yeah. Actually, that,
and I think that's that's the thing is
you'll there are many different ways of telling
short stories, and you can have, you know,
narrative styles. You've got a lot of choice,
but the idea of, like, let's tell the
story through,
diary entries is quite an interesting one, and
that one leaped out at me. And I
thought, right. Well, let's go with that. And
so, therefore,
that gave that I didn't really explore. I
I did kind of have a rough think
on the way home. Just like, are there
alternatives?
And there undoubtedly are, but that one started
growing in my mind a lot more, you
know, that took seed. And it was just
like, yep, that one's gonna work.
I just wanna take a slight side step
here because,
if listeners are anything like me, they're wondering
a little bit about flash fiction because it
might be something they didn't know about. So,
flash fiction is is a format that's been
around for a while. Its name only really
came about in the last few decades.
You you find that a lot of,
short story a lot of authors,
who wrote short stories in the past and
in the present often end up sometimes writing
something that is very short, a page or
two pages long. And that that there there
it is. It's self contained,
and and it's quite nice. So you we
find this dotted throughout,
dotted throughout history,
in well respected authors. For those of you
who have, young children,
I I suggest do a quick word count
of of the books. You'll find that every
single chance book is effectively flash fiction,
that it relies on pictures and your own
telling to bring it to life. And it
shows you that you can contain
a story. I I think I actually did
a word count of Where the Wild Things
Are,
and that's only that's about 300 to 350
words. That's not very long,
and yet it contains quite literally a world
in it. And that idea,
every every story kind of has a length
that you can tell because people often tell
me when I say, oh, I I write
flash fiction. I say, oh, how can you
tell a story in that? And that's almost
the wrong way of looking at it. It's
like every story has a a length that
does it justice. And some of those stories
are gonna be a hundred thousand words long,
and we publish those and call them novels.
Some of those stories could be even longer,
and those are series or sagas.
But others, we have other word lengths for.
And we say, yeah, there's some of this
story. A a local science fiction author I
know, he was thinking about writing a sequel
to
a a book, he'd written.
And he was kind of done in about
5,000 words. He suddenly thought, no. That's the
right length. That's it's a short story. It's
not a novel. It's it's not a novella.
It it fits at that length. And so
what you're looking for is a
is a short story that fits the length
that is only a few hundred words. So
you you turn it on its head. In
some senses, I I I draw a parallel
with music.
You know, there are songs that are two
or three minutes long, and they just work
fantastically.
There there's, you know,
I haven't quite so therefore, there's there's a
lot of punk music in that space. I
also quite like, certain prog rock and Pink
Floyd, and there's some magnificent pieces that are
twenty to twenty five minutes long. And you
know what? They work perfectly well. A two
minute a two minute version of that would
not work,
and a twenty five minute version of, of
a of a Clash classic will not work.
So you have these ideas that there's natural
lengths, and we we
you're trying to find the length of the
story. So for me,
it's it's a case of, like, what story
can I tell in this frame? And a
little bit of adjustment, and it's quite fun
and creative because you're dropping bits out. You're
working with the reader.
You're basically saying there's no there's no space
for purple prose and paragraphs and paragraphs of
world building. It's I'm gonna rely on you,
the reader,
to,
build this in your head. So I'm going
to so very much the the the word
choice counts,
and can and can change the flavor and
the suggestion in the reader's imagination.
And so you're working with the reader
to do that, and, and that has a
quite different effect. And so reading
a four page story is not like reading
four pages of a 400 page book. It's
a very different pacing, and there's a kind
of a completion that you want to, bring
the reader to at the end.
And so that that idea also lends itself
to, spoken word
events. Poets
poets are normally known for spoken word.
Poetry has the brevity. It also has the
rhythm and the dynamics.
But flash fiction is just about the right
length. It's only normally a few you know,
a couple of minutes long in the reading,
and I've run a number of events,
around this.
And pea people tend to taper off after
about five minutes. So so it fits well
within,
general attention span. So it works well in
a live environment, and that's another aspect to
it.
I I just wanna talk to you about
that attention span thing, right, because I it
it feels to me again like a a
a comfortable story.
I'm not a % convinced that our attention
spans are getting shorter.
There are lots of things that suggest that
there's social media,
etcetera. But there's also Oppenheimer. There's also the
brutalist
to a certain extent. There's adolescence.
There's adolescence
on. Yeah. So, you know, there's an hour
long thing that you can't take your eyes
off because it's one shot and all that
sort of thing. So it it feels to
me like,
yes, there are short forms, but, you know,
as with music, there's long form things as
well. So I I'm I'm not I'm not
I'd convince me, but I'm not convinced that
our attention span is necessarily getting shorter. Oh.
It's just Right. Yes. I'm gonna agree with
you on that because I'm definitely not making
the case that our attention spans are getting
shorter.
It's more a case of there are things
you can do in a particular attention span.
And,
and and so again, it's it's that notion
of
there are and again, the whole attention span
thing.
My kids will quite happily
sit in a cinema for two and a
half hours,
watching something that grabs their attention. That that's
that's not an issue,
at all. But at the same time, we
do have, as it were, different attention spans
for different contexts.
And the if you have so,
for example, if we have somebody reading, if
I'm if anybody's been to
story readings, it's quite it's quite interesting that
people there's a dip. It's a bit like
giving presentations.
There is a dip
in attention around the ten minute mark, if
not before and sometimes after. And that's just
the way that humans we phase in and
out. You know, it's just,
and so therefore,
an animated and anybody who's ever sat in
a lecture and very much experiences this. And
so there is
this notion that we,
we do have attention spans, and it's a
case of what what are you gonna do
with that attention span?
What is it that you're gonna fill it
with? And again, it goes back to what
is the nature of the thing. And it
turns out that there are things that we
would love to read that,
people love talking books, for example, the audiobooks.
So people can consume hours of that. But
I bet if I put you in the
same room as the author reading that, you
would drift off more than a couple of
times. And I don't mean go to sleep,
but your attention would wander.
And
that's just the way that we are. You
know, it it it so it's a case
of understanding,
understanding that, but that's the great thing. Longer
form,
accommodates that. It's got a lot of redundancy
in it. You you well, I'm sure we've
all had the experience. You've you've you've kind
of dozed off reading a chapter, you pick
it up the next day, and it's kinda
like,
maybe you reread the last page or maybe
you just continue. You know what? There's enough
information in the in in the in the
text to make up for that lost context.
But if I'm gonna do this over a
few hundred words, I can't I can't have
that redundancy. I can't there's there's nothing spared.
But the idea is this is this is
more the punk song end. It it it's
all energy. It's all there.
And I don't wanna leave you thinking about
it.
And it turns out that listening to a
a reader in the room, sitting there, just
reading is quite difficult. You know, this is
one of the reasons that a single person
plays. You know, you have an actor on
stage.
Those are those are really hard ask.
It's not they can't be done, but you
really understand how good
the actor and,
the author were to be able to do
that. So thinking about it from a live
context,
there is a difference in terms of reading
short stories and longer forms,
live. But, again, also, how we consume flash
fiction. So you mentioned the sources.
It's
also grown up a little bit and become
popular.
There's a number of, number of places that
will send you a flash fiction a week
or every day in your inbox.
And that idea of just something that pops
into your inbox,
you're not gonna read it if it's a
few thousand words, but if it's a few
hundred, you're gonna read it.
A few thousand words feels like a a
different kind of commitment of time.
But a few hundred words or something I
can fit on my phone screen whilst waiting
for a bus or something,
that feels that. So in other words, it's
not necessarily that our attention spans have got
shorter, but they have been,
there are slots that are being well, quantized
slots that are being offered.
Here is a shape of slot that would,
you know, would fit before the bus comes.
Here is something to fit while you're having
a cup of coffee, and it's not the
same as a chapter book, and it's not
the same, as something else. I'm sure we
do it when we read,
when we read magazines. I know I do
it, when I when I read magazines,
physical or online. Because I kinda look at
that and go, yeah, I I'll read a
couple of that. That's a good break from
whatever else I'm doing. But if you told
me, oh, it's a feature article, and maybe
I won't do that. Maybe I'll read something
else instead. So it's more a case of
us trying to fit
into into that and realizing that there is
a different kind of scale and shape.
And although these days, there is a bias
towards the shorter end,
that has kind of been missing in the
story space, in some senses. We've had this
bias towards
novels and long forms,
for quite a for quite a while, and
it's kind of but I'm I'm sure that
most people who've I I I grew up
reading compared to classic science fiction. That was
all in the short story space.
What we think of as the modern novel
is actually a very recent idea.
And, you know, when we we will cite
things like Dickens actually, Dickens was serialized.
He didn't write novels. He wrote series, and
they were then collected as novels.
The modern novel
at around the hundred thousand word mark is
a very recent creation in many ways, and
stories used to exist at a lot of
different scales.
So for me, flash fiction is kind of,
kind of reclaiming and kind of saying there's
a bit of ownership here. There's a there's
a a formal name for it, and, it's
a it's a first class citizen of the
story space. Lovely. Do all of your stories
have science in them? No. No. I I
it's interesting. I if this is in fact,
this is one of the joys of flash
fiction. It's just very easy to experiment with
different forms. You know, if you if you
commit to, you know, I'm gonna write crime
fiction, and therefore, I'm gonna be writing 80,000
plus words of this, maybe, that's a very
different thing.
I'm I don't really read, crime fiction, but
I've certainly written flash fiction that's of that
of that form, and that's quite fun. You
can experiment very easily. So I find
my stories
I'd probably say half of them fit in
the
the SF and fantasy space, and the other
half are kind of like
they're either situational comedy or something slightly darker.
They
are
and and they vary. And sometimes I will
take,
science as a starting point or as a
springboard. So I've written a few,
that are based on that. In fact, the
one of the first,
that I wrote that was quite successful was,
I'm allowed to I'm allowed to mention new
scientists here. Right? I think so. Yeah. I
think yeah. We can get away with that.
They ran a number of years ago. They
ran, a flash fiction competition. They ran it
for a couple of years.
I've run it 02/2010,
'2 thousand '11,
02/2012.
They they ran a competition, and I, and
I was
placed in the top three for one of
them in the top 10 for another.
And that was quite fun, particularly the first
one, which is basically
take,
take a a theory of take a theory
that's since been dis disproven,
and make it the basis of the story.
What if it were true? So I chose,
what about a,
an earth centered cosmos?
Yeah. So, like, what if that were true?
What can we do with that?
And so therefore, that that's quite fun. So
it's it's it's the idea of, like, let's
take that and then work against it. What
would be the science in that space, and
what story could you tell against it?
In other cases, I've taken
an an inspiration, and then a number of
years ago, I
wrote one for Physics World, which was based
on,
an idea
that somebody had observed, and this was a
soft interesting. This was a software crossover.
What somebody had looked at the structure,
of e coli and basically the genetic structure
and noted, oh, it has a hierarchical structure
and then compared it to,
software,
specifically,
the Linux kernel, which is artificial. It's created
by humans. And the in each case, they
teased out a three tier structure,
so a hierarchy of control, if you like.
And they'd they'd drawn this one up. And
so I can't remember what, journalist was published
in, but they did a side by side
comparison. Here's here's what E. Coli looks like,
the architecture, if you like, genetic architecture of
E. Coli. And here is genetic architect or
the structural architecture of of Linux.
And it's fascinating looking at something that was
artificially
constructed
and intentionally constructed versus something accidental.
And, visually, you could see the difference between
the two of them. The the artificial construction,
you have,
you have the idea that, we,
in our disciplines, we can see it in
the way we formulate mathematics, but we can
see it in engineering. We can see it
in software.
We have a number of primitive ideas,
and then we build on those, you know,
you know, whether they are truly axiomatic or
just convenient primitives, building blocks, and then we
build out of that. We we build the
complex things out of the simple things, Lego
brick style.
And that is exactly what the Linux kernel
looks like. It looks like, ah, yeah. Here
are system functions that then fan out to
be,
realized and expressed in a number of different
ways, and then they fan into a number
of system primitives that are found to be,
at the core of your operating system. And
guess what? E coli looks nothing like that.
It's a big old mess, or rather, it
looks more like a rather than, being,
I guess the Linux system looks like a
spinning top.
The E coli structure,
looks like a cone with a broad base.
In other words, nature is messy. It doesn't
specialize a function as a primitive,
with one task.
This is what we do in engineering. We
we we we say, yeah, here is a
thing. It has one target. It have one
job, and it does it well, and we've
tested it to tolerance, and we can build
other things out of it.
Nature tends to be a lot messier,
and so therefore
functions have a certain redundancy. You can in
fact, you can actually see almost physically. You
could knock things knock things out of it,
and it would still keep on working, which
is we we know that this is how
life works. You can actually knock out remarkable
chunks and it still keeps on working.
So
structurally, they look really different. So, again, that
was a springboard for that story. So sometimes
my stories are very, very strongly grounded in
something I have read or come across.
But then that's not itself a story. That's
that's an idea. In fact, some of the
worst worst science fiction stories you can find
are the ones where here's an idea, and
that's kind of where it stops.
You know, and,
it it it's it's known in the traders
here's an idea at the end.
But the idea is like, okay, what can
what can I do with that? What story
could be played out against this? And and
then looking for that possibility.
So so I'd say a number of my
stories
do do that. There's sometimes I can get
a little bit too caught up in that,
I will say. And and by that, I
mean that there is a story that I
didn't write where I was that I never
completed because I got too wrapped up in
what happens to a human body in a
vacuum.
You know, I'll leave everybody else to do
their own research.
You can really go down quite a rabbit
hole with that one.
But, you know, it's a case of that
and that, I think, also tells us that,
also tells us that sometimes that
the the danger,
of knowing something,
or knowing too much about something is that
you want to know everything, and you also
want the reader to know everything, which goes
back to that idea of the frame. It's
useful to have a construct,
like a word limit,
or a page constraint
to prevent you from doing an info dump.
Your your desire is sometimes I've done all
this research. I would like the reader to
know it as well,
but that's not a story. I I want
I wonder what the downsides are to,
this form
and and sort of an extension of that.
Our propensity
to to want the story and that, you
know, you've mentioned it already. The,
the lone genius is is is quite a
compelling story, but it isn't really the way
things are. And it also feels to me
like that that's probably not doing the world
an awful lot of favors to think of
this idea of a known genius.
Yeah. I think and that and that is
there is a limitation there in terms of
because you can't show everything,
you don't show everything, and you pick on
a few things. And that is the nature
of of stories at any length.
But certain qualities, it's a little bit like
it's it's like turning the volume down on
something. You know? Our our voice you know?
As as you turn the volume down, certain
frequencies drop faster than others from our perception.
And so certain features in a story will
also drop, and sometimes you get that with
with flash fiction.
If you are trying to tell,
a true and accurate accounting, and
in other words, this this heads into journalism,
then you
then you're going to be
potentially disappointed,
or potentially frustrate people. And you have the
dane you have the danger. And as I
said, this idea
of the strength is you're trying to work
with the reader's imagination.
The danger is that you draw on stereotypes.
The danger is that and and, you you
know, a very the the the prototypical and
stereotypical lone genius idea could be very easily
reinforced if we're telling a story from that
point of view.
And so you have that idea. You have
the foe the fact that
you do end up with,
making many back characters if you you can't
put too many characters
in,
simply because you can't get close to them.
You don't have enough time for character development.
So the story that I wrote is very
much about Heisenberg. We we we we see
other people featured and mentioned,
but you,
you can't get everybody in there because there
simply isn't the space.
And that's that also, I think, gives way
let's go back to
go go back to that notion of of
music.
It's the idea of there is, there are
many stories that could be told against this,
and you kind of have to hope that
somebody else is out there doing a a
different version, particularly if it's about real events.
But even if it's about,
shorter things, the idea is that you can
give a number of different people
different prompts, and they will each produce a
different story. The idea is there that perhaps
there's a little bit of joy to be
had in recognizing this is a story, not
the story.
But, yeah, there are definite you know, we
could call them disadvantages, but I'll always call
I I tend to think of it as
limits because there's both a positive and a
negative aspect to them. And I think that
you get that with with any form, but
particularly if you are looking for,
you know, I guess my my half qualifies,
at least the first half, as as an
attempt at doing a historical story.
But historical fiction
is normally, when people think of historical fiction,
they tend to think of
much longer form works,
backed by a certain amount of research, and
there's a lot of detail and that actually
in that sense, it's much like,
the world building we associate with speculative fiction.
But what somebody's trying to do is recreate
a world that is foreign to us. Okay?
That it could be a story about, Victorian
England. That's foreign to us. None of us
were alive then. So we don't really know
what it's like. So somebody has
to bring to life those things that would
be ordinary then. But they will they will
also do it through a lens, and they
will bias that. And sometimes you can't see
the author's bias.
It's just just a little bit more obvious
that that that there is a lens in
the in,
involved when we look at the shorter forms.
Can I come back to your story? Because,
I'm interested in this physicists going into software.
Is that something that you that you I
I want to go into software development, so
I'm going to do a physics degree, or
was it something that you No. No. No.
That was more that was a really kind
of,
series
a series of, accidents and coincidences,
really.
It was a case of, I think, because
I I think I I wanted to do
physics at university because I was very interested
in astronomy and space flight.
And,
but I was also,
this was the year of home computers. I
spent a lot of time messing about with
home computers, and that was just something that
I could do. I never thought about it
as a profession.
And
what I discovered as well as at university
is that, actually, that was the bit that
I kind of enjoyed quite a lot. I
didn't really enjoy studying physics, I'm gonna have
to say. I was I was more a
little distracted,
but,
which is, you know,
it doesn't mean I'm not I'm not interested
in it, but that just didn't didn't click
for me.
But I also got wrapped up in,
discussions with people about things like AI, philosophy
of mind, and things like that. And
a girlfriend's father,
before I went to university, recommended,
Douglas Hofstadter's,
which is an absolute classic
of the late seventies,
in terms of how it brings together
these questions of how do we think, what
is it, what does intelligence mean,
and actually presents a view of philosophy and
AI
and mathematics,
and,
art that balanced the other. And that was
an amazing magnum opus that really kind of
grabbed my attention. And while so I started
thinking, yeah, maybe I wanna study AI. Maybe
I maybe this is where I wanna go,
something in computing.
They I finished my degree. I had no
idea what I wanted to do. And somebody
said, oh, you know, they're advertising for a
a programmer at an a company nearby. And,
I said, okay. I'll go on for that.
And I got the job. But at that
point, I started becoming even more interested and
really giving myself,
learning a lot more about software development. But
at that point, it was around the
time, that the world was changing from what
we would call classic symbolic AI,
to what is the beginnings of the modern
paradigm, neural networks.
And I was I was working during that
period, and although I started looking at master's
degrees
in this space, I started thinking, you know
what? I think something's changing here.
And that,
that had me interested, and I I changed
intentionally decided, you know, I won't do AI
because, actually, all the degrees are really they're
they're they're backward looking. They're very nineteen seventies.
And so I wanted something that really focused
on neural networks, and that was that was
what was then the Bristol Polytechnic,
now UE.
And there was something on parallel computer systems,
and I did that because it did neural
networks. The fact that
the fact that I then decided I would
go into regular software engineering after that was
a complete tangent,
surprising myself.
But that was that story. So,
but my tutor, he he was the reason
that, I I I did that. He he
was an astrophysicist
and had brought the neural networks in because
of image processing work that he had done.
And then he joined, joined the faculty and
introduced this whole chunk of stuff in there,
that was,
so all yeah. The the so for me,
it's ultimately a physicist that got me involved,
in that, but I took a different direction
and remained in software, but with perhaps
a a a deeper appreciation than I'd had
before.
Okay. So what what kind of software development
have you been doing then? What what's Oh,
a variety. Well, the the joy the joy
of being a consultant and,
and,
you know, a trainer is that I end
up doing all kinds of bits and pieces.
I I I love
I
love language, and so programming languages,
hold a fascination for me. But
also being, again, the constraints thing. I used
to work in,
real time and embedded systems, which, you know,
we we define a system as real time
when it has a when time is one
of the things you really care about, like,
not as a matter of convenience, but as
a matter of correctness.
A late answer is wrong is one way
of putting it.
And so therefore, you've got a nice constraint
there, but often we also associate these things
and embedded systems with being,
memory constraint,
or they are constrained because they're not connected
to a network. In other words,
in modern software development, a lot of people
are used to an environment where, you know,
we assume everything is connected.
You're working on the web and that somewhere
there is a server with a semi infinite
amount of storage,
and that,
effectively, the only limit you're ever really worried
about is the speed of light over the
network,
and that's it. But my background was very
much more in these other, environments. Probably, I
would just I would only describe them as
being closer to the metal.
And so, therefore, that that always held a
fascination to me. But
I do also deal I mean, I've worked
for banks and,
directly and indirectly.
And so I don't think I you know,
I guess it's like writing. I I didn't
get stuck in one genre. Although I have
favorite genres,
I've seen a lot of different kinds of
things,
from high performance computing.
In fact, a lot of through to data
analysis, it seems to be a very common
trend at the moment. I'm getting a lot
of people
who are who've grown up through STEM subjects
that are not computing.
They've ended up being,
highly numerate and,
yeah, pretty computer literate
and crunching numbers, and they've ended up as
data scientists, data engineers, and so on. And
they're going like, well, yeah, but maybe we
need maybe what we're doing is software development,
and maybe we need to know how to
do that rather than just,
stumbling across numbers in Python.
And that so so I found I've ended
up with a little more work in that
space and teaching software engineering techniques
to people who've come from outside software,
but have have
a a a pretty high degree of literacy
and are very comfortable,
with a number of the ideas. But their
background and their demands are very, very different
to somebody developing an application for a bank,
for example.
How does quantum computing come into your your
your work? No.
Interesting enough, the it it kind of
so
it it's one of those things that is
I don't think it's like I don't think
it's like fusion power
in the sense of it's always ten years
away.
But
I have been
I'm trying to think when I first encountered
the idea of quantum computing. There's a Feynman
lecture on it, one of his books.
It there there's a whole load of stuff,
and I encountered that. So that feels like
nineteen nineties from my point of view. And
then,
I think Deutsch started talking about stuff in
the nineties about this. And it kind of
you know, it's been floating around. In the
February, I first saw my what I would
regard as my first proper
article on quantum computing. I was a a
magazine that I was reading, somebody actually wrote
about it from the software perspective. That's great.
That was over twenty years ago.
And although we are getting closer and closer
to it from the mainstream perspective, it's still
quite remote. It's very much the territory.
There's
in the r and d space, there's still
a lot of r to go.
Then, actually, there's quite a lot of d
to go before we get the commercial products.
And what people are mostly worried about,
and I and so I would say it's
a concern. What people are most worried about
is the implications for security.
I don't see many people,
in the domains in which,
I work
actually sort of saying, you know, quantum quantum
computing is something we need to care about.
Quantum computing is something, we need to have
a strategy for. It's not yet there. We're
we're still seeing,
it's early days.
Companies are not making direct profits.
They are, you know, they are there to
be,
started up and bought up,
primarily.
And there's still a lot of work to
be done there. But
the security threat is the one that people
are mostly worried about. The computational aspect
for the majority of people in the software
space doesn't really make much of an impact,
and I think that's gonna remain the case
for quite a while. And I think what
we're gonna see is that when we talk
about that notion of, the computational benefit,
of using qubits rather than bits,
that's still gonna be a relative minority
of what an application does.
You know, a software application is the majority
of it is still gonna be
we need to open a file. We need
to look at a database. We we need
to present this to the,
to the user on screen. None of that
needs or fits comfortably within the quantum,
space in that sense, whereas quantum computing is
very much about efficiency.
And that's the high performance computing space. That's
the cryptography space. In other words, people are
looking at that going like, oh, we could
reduce we could reduce
by
many orders of magnitude the computational
cost of that. But for most of it,
it's it's it's kind of most of it
honestly is, is kind of housekeeping,
and and it doesn't benefit from,
the performance benefits you would get. So I
don't see
I haven't seen anybody really talking about it,
as interesting outside of those spaces.
That's interesting. So
is there a danger then that sort of
the most interesting thing about quantum physics is
is is the story of Helgoland?
I don't I don't so,
I don't although, I mean, that's a that's
a good start. Anything that gets anybody interested
in it,
I think is is a good thing because
I think that,
you know, the
the what's the the popular perception of quantum
mechanics is either it's,
it's kinda like a hand wavy thing. It's
it's kind of it's a plot device.
And,
or, you know, and and we had this
a few decades ago, and I'm I'm sure
it still continues. It's like it it's a
it's an excuse for mysticism or whatever because,
oh, here's a thing that can't be explained.
Let's try and say that it's like this
other thing that we don't want to explain
and
false false parallels. So anything that gets people
interested in it,
I think it's, I think it's no bad
thing because we
because
I think then people will realize that a
lot of the things, you know, it's it's
one of these things where people just say,
yeah, but what's that got to do with
everyday life? And I think there's a lot
of,
a lot of
the physics of the last century or so.
I'm gonna put the also in there. It's
been quite important,
because I wanna take in relativity here. But
the last
century or so
that is not as
obvious to people,
because it's not packaged that way. So,
LCD displays, one of my favorite examples. That
that doesn't make that doesn't make sense or
couldn't be a thing without quantum mechanics. A
quant quantum mechanical explanation is the only one
you're gonna get for how LCDs work.
The fact that your GPS,
relies on general relativity,
because otherwise,
the the it turns out the difference in
time between us and the satellites is enough
to cause a drift of a few hundred
meters every day.
You have to correct for,
for g r effects.
So the here is here's the kind of
the big physics that people think of as
being like, oh, yeah. These are big names,
but it doesn't affect my daily life. That's
all very Newtonian.
It's like, no. Actually, it's there. It's just
woven into the fabric of the the technology
that you're using, but it's very discreetly hidden.
And the stuff that we deal with in
terms of,
miniaturization,
you know, you pick up a phone, and
that's got this ridiculous amount of technology inside
it, including a chip that is very much
at the limits of miniaturization
because you make it much smaller and
you quantum effects start getting in the way
rather than helping.
Transistors, they don't make sense without quantum all
of this kind of stuff. Basically,
it's it's the stuff that's not visible to
us, the stuff that we can't kick or
can't drop. You know? You know, if I
drop if I drop a drop a cup
on the floor,
then that's, you know, yep. This is good
old fashioned,
Newton. Yep. There we go. There's g. There's
and there there's an impact. What was the
force of the impact? What was you know,
all the kind of questions that you might,
deal with.
But all of this other stuff,
that,
we've we've kind of stumbled across over the
last hundred years or so is very much
there. It's just perhaps better hidden. It's and
as I say, woven into what we use,
but it's not it's not,
I don't know. People don't shout about it
enough.
I think that's another way of putting it.
So going back to that, whatever draws people's
attention to how weird and how cool all
this stuff really is at every scale, the
very act of just
looking you know, picking up your phone,
to find out where you are and use
Google Maps involves an amazing amount of technology
that has not come into existence,
or has only been in existence since 1900.
And it's not just, oh, this is cool
technology. It's like, no. No. This is the
it's not just the engineering. It's the science.
We simply could if we'd given somebody
the technology, they wouldn't have had an explanation
for it.
That that I think is absolutely fascinating. We
said, yeah, you can miniaturize it. You can
do all of this and all the rest
of it.
They would not have been able to do
it because they wouldn't have had the science
to back it up. And I think that
itself is is fascinating.
Let's return briefly to that story again.
I was on route to the department this
morning when I must have taken a wrong
turn from my usual route.
Imagine
knowing where I was going but not knowing
where I
was. Just last week, I had the opposite
experience.
My landlady accosted me just in front of
the Friedhofskapelle
Stadfriedhof.
I was as surprised to see her as
she was to see me.
Good day, professor Heisenberg.
I, long ago, stopped reminding her that I
was no professor.
She means well. Where are you heading?
And you know, I had no idea.
The full version will be published in our
free to read quantum briefing, which comes out
in May. That will be available on the
physics world website
and will be packed full of coverage from
the international year of quantum science and technology,
the history,
mystery, and applications
of quantum mechanics.
I'd like to thank Kevlin Henney not only
for writing this wonderful story, but for joining
me here for this episode of the Physics
World Stories podcast. We'll be back next month
with something else from this wonderful world of
physics.
And until then, thank you very much for
listening.