Hello, and welcome to the physics world stories
podcast. I'm Andrew Glaston. And on physicsworld.com,
you'll be able to find the quantum briefing.
As we will do in this episode of
the podcast,
it explores some of the most amazing stories
from the past, present, and future of quantum
mechanics,
including the link between quantum physics and the
Cheshire cat and possibility that, and stay tuned
for this, we might be able to influence
the past.
That's all to come, but on the front
cover of the physics world quantum briefing was
a wonderful piece of art inspired by quantum
mechanics that I wanted to know more about,
and there's quite a story behind its creation.
So here, to start today's podcast,
is the person behind it.
My name's Felicity Inkpen. I'm an artist. I
used to be a scientist.
Academia was
not for me, and I think that's the
experience of a lot of scientists.
I was heartbroken about it because I I
love science, and I built my world around
it. I built my life around it. But
I guess I felt quite lucky in that
I had always always had this,
twin passion of the art. And I've been
making art my entire life since I was
a tiny little girl. So
when I finally made the heartbreaking decision to
leave academia,
I just wanted to paint. And my plan
was I'll just paint and see how far
I can go. And that was a few
years ago. And that was just over three
years ago. And I've been making a lot
of science inspired art because it turns out
when you leave academia, it doesn't mean you
stop loving science.
So the
is everything you do science inspired? No. No.
Not at all.
You know, as an artist, you're trying to
explore
you know, when I, when I first quit
science to, to do the art, I didn't
know what kind of artist I wanted to
be. There's very many different ways in which
to be an artist. And
I had a period of play, which I
highly recommend. Like people should just take a
little bit of time out and play and
figure out what makes them happy. Really enjoyed
that.
And
I have been making, you know, various different
works, but I kept on finding that I
kept on coming back to the science.
I had one piece. So the first painting
that I painted after I quit, the lab
was a painting called synesthesia counting by numbers.
Would you like me to chat about that
a little bit? And Yes, please. Yes.
So,
I have number color synesthesia.
What that means is I see all numbers
as colors. I didn't know that other people
didn't see numbers as colors.
It was only
a conversation with colleagues that led me to
discover this when we were just talking about
what happens in your head when you multiply
two numbers together. And one person said, oh,
I see,
a square getting larger. And somebody else saw
it said, I saw a line getting longer.
And I was like, what are you talking
about? Don't you just see the colors?
And they went, oh, you're the weird one
in this conversation.
So,
when I sat down in my art studio
to paint my first kind of painting of,
like, I am a full time artist now,
it was just a painting of numbers. So
I painted the numbers, one to a 24
because that's 32 squared. And, you know, 32
is beautiful because it's green and it's pink
and it's yellow and it's got a little
bit of blue in it because it's two
to the power of five as well as
being four times eight and the digits three
and two.
And
that painting definitely,
set me on a particular trajectory
because
it was such an important conduit for conversations.
And that was definitely something in terms of
finding my place as a artist inspired by
science, because I was I I realized this
is what art is for. I can have
conversations
because of this painting existing
that I could never have before.
And they might be kept conversations with somebody
who wants into my studio. It might be
conversations with a neuroscientist who specializes in synesthesia.
All these different ways
of generating
questions
through communicating something visually.
And that feels like
what I'm supposed to be doing right now
is taking the strangest ideas and all of
the kind of benefit and the knowledge and
the love that I have of of my
career in science
and creating it or channeling it into visual
images
that that communicate
those strange ideas and allow people who wouldn't
necessarily feel that science was something accessible to
them to say, oh, I know exactly what
you mean. Because now I've seen that image,
I can describe something that I
experienced or something that I've thought
or something that,
I don't know, I've I've experimented with.
So that painting was very, very key, and
it's,
you know, I loved painting. I loved being
it didn't feel like it was mine. That's
that's another really fun thing about being an
artist. Sometimes you're painting something and you don't
feel like, oh, I'm the creator. You feel
like this painting already existed.
Just the lucky
individual that it gets channeled through, who gets
to be the one to create it and
then talk about it later. And I definitely
felt that about that particular painting.
So I it's central because you've mentioned that,
you know, strange ideas. And the reason we're
talking is because you've done the the front
cover of the quantum briefing for physics world,
which we will get to. But I just
wanna, you know, to pick apart a couple
of things there. Because you've
when you had that initial conversation, then they
were, you know, you're the strange one.
It's a conversation.
Presumably, through your art, you've met more people
who have the same sort of experiences as
you do. Absolutely. And I think,
you know, one thing so I used to
be a neuroscientist,
and,
found out about aphantasia,
which is when people have a lack of
a visual imagination.
And,
I I think if there's a spectrum, I'm
probably more on the other end of it
as, like, a hypofantasia
kind of person. I know that they were
doing research at Exeter University about a sort
of spectrum between aphantasia and hypofantasia.
And that's an example of something where you
realize
through talk through creating images and through talking
about your process of creating images that not
everybody has the same internal,
you know, way of of,
experiencing the world. The but we will take
for granted our,
perception. We will assume that everybody else has
the exact same perception
and that,
you know, if you say imagine an apple,
I
see what I see, and I imagine that
everybody else sees exactly the same thing that
I see. And it's it's not the case
at all.
All of which is to say, like,
I think it's really important to create
things, paintings,
mock sculptures,
performances, whatever,
that allow us to realize that we don't
all have the same experience
and to ask each other questions
and to
grow in empathy because then you're like, oh,
I didn't, I didn't know
that,
that you experienced this world in this different
way. And yeah. It's, oh my gosh. It's
such a privilege because people will come to
me and I'll talk about the synesthesia painting
or other paintings,
and
they'll share things with me that they'll say,
oh, I've I've never shared this with anybody,
but this is how I,
you know,
I think in a monologue or I think
in a dialogue or,
I think in images that look like this.
And it's only because that piece of art
has existed that they have felt able to
find the words.
And
and, you know, like, part of the fun
of being an artist is having license to
be the weirdo in the room, which means
that other people feel very liberated to share
their weirdoness with you, which again is, like,
is a total joy. Right?
And,
yeah, you you you can
just lean into
or, you know, what have you done this
week whilst other people have been in the
office? Well, and this week I've been messing
around with ink and thinking about the sizes
of molecules and how that changes how ink
moves across a piece of paper
and how I can make that into a
piece of art that I like. You said
32 is particular colors. Is it always those
colors? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So,
I mean, everybody who has number color synesthesia
is gonna see something different. And it is
funny because sometimes you come across other people
with number color synesthesia, and they'll you get
into arguments about, like, you know, I was
saying, obviously, four is yellow. And they're like,
what are you talking about? Four is green.
So for me personally,
prime numbers tend to be quite flat and
quite earthy.
And then a number that has lots of
factors tends to be multicolored and very vibrant.
So,
24 would be a very colorful number.
It's got all of the you know, the
the colors of,
it's got yellow and red and orange and
green because it's it's three times eight, and
it's four times six. So the factors of
it
create,
the mixture of colors.
Whereas the number 17
is quite a boring mauve.
And,
but that's, that's my personal, you know, that's
just for me. Yeah. But it is really
interesting then thinking about how we conceptualize numbers
because for me, it's always,
being just like a joy to see the
patterns and the way the numbers relate to
one another. So, like,
multiples of four are always going to have
that bit of yellow. So they're always going
to have that little callback to, don't forget
there's a four in here somewhere.
And,
you know, that's it's a very useful and
and beautiful way of of seeing numbers and
then thinking about mathematics.
And it is a fun thing to explore.
I did a a the the second synesthesia
painting I did was a painting of prime
numbers, and I didn't know what it was
going to look like. I sort of you
know, I I knew what the prime numbers
up to a certain amount looked like roughly
in my head.
But, you know, you get into the larger
prime numbers. And and what came back is
it was yeah, the colors of, like, the
earth kept on coming up. And I was
like, oh, that's interesting.
They're all quite flat, but they're all quite
earthy.
So that was, yeah,
a a joy to discover.
It so it helps with the maths as
well as sort of helping with the art.
Absolutely.
I was one of those nerdy kids in
school that really loved maths. I couldn't get
enough of maths.
I wouldn't you know, I'm I'm definitely not
particularly mathematically talented. I have a great many
friends who are much more mathematically talented than
I would ever be, but,
but I definitely had a a a great
deal of love for maths. And I I
struggle to understand why other people
in my class at school
didn't
see how beautiful it was to that, you
know, they seemed to struggle with it maybe
a bit more than I did. And then
after realizing that not everybody else see sees
colors, I was like, oh, well, maths would
be really boring and really dull if it
wasn't colorful. And I was like,
oh, right. Okay.
That is why, you know, not of all
all of our experiences are the same. And,
yeah, I wish I I I could exploit
the synesthesia a bit more. I possibly should
go back to,
back to some of my undergraduate notes and
and see if I can kind of, you
know, exploit it to
to finally get my head around, certain types
of,
notation. Yeah. I mean, presumably, when you were
learning maths as a as a young person,
that that that's when the colors came. Presumably.
You'd learn. I I can't remember them not
having colors.
So,
and, you know, it is
as you say, presumably, it's not something inherent.
It's a learned thing. Right?
And I
you know, thinking back to to neuroscience and
about how our,
our circuits of sensation
kind of are established so early in life,
but also how plastic our brains are, how
adaptable to change, how we can, you know,
grow
new connections
in everything that we're doing.
It's
you know, I I think probably other people
could lean into choosing different colors for numbers
and seeing if it changes their experience of
mathematics.
And, also, certainly, there's plenty of people who
have other abstract
sensations connected, like,
you know, people who can smell music or
taste people's names and things like that.
I mean, it's fascinating, but
for me, the fascination comes from the realization
that our brains have all adapted
that we all take for granted. And it's
whatever way you have learned something, it's magical.
My one just happens to be able to
allow me to print pretty pictures sometimes.
That's lovely.
Just a very silly question because you just
mentioned names.
How often as an artist do people ask
you whether ink pen is your real name?
About once a week.
I I mean, what's funnier for me is
that,
more than once, I don't know even know
how many times now, friends that I have
known for years
through art
have turned to me and said, what's your
real name?
And
I said And then pointed a breaker to
them like, you've known my real name the
entire time.
Yeah. And it's I it's funny for me
because,
nobody else in my family is an artist,
of any type. And for them, it's just
a name, you know, a name that they're
proud of, but it's only me that gets
the, you know well, of course, you were
born to be an artist, a name like
that. I'm like, well,
scientifically, that doesn't go very far because my
other members of my family were not born
to be artists at all.
The numbers are colors. Do the colors translate
back into numbers if you see?
No. It's a it's it's a sad answer.
It's it it doesn't really go back the
other way. The color is just the color.
It's
the number that has the concept and the
patterns.
It's, you know, the the
a kinda a number like 256,
for example,
that is
beautifully bright and vibrant and colorful because of
the factors that make it. Mhmm. So it
is the the patterns that are drawing all
these colors together.
Whereas a color kind of stands alone as
itself. I mean, I can I can look
at something and be like, oh, well, that
would be,
I don't know,
3,403?
I'm looking at my glasses case right now.
But, you know, it's not like the color
of my glasses case has that intrinsic feeling
of a number. Mhmm. It's the the numbers
and the the beautiful patterns and the elements
and the factors that contribute to how that
number relates to other numbers. It's colorful.
So you were drawn
to maths and physics, and that's where you
sort of studied first of all. Is it
was was the weird world of quantum something
that drew you? Oh, absolutely. And,
I had wonderful quantum physics lecturers. So I
studied my undergrad at, the University of Leeds,
and
they at that time,
they had a I don't know if it's
still there, but they had a really wonderful
quantum computing,
bit lab, whatever you call it.
So it wasn't
just, like, learning about quantum. It was learning
about quantum or people who are really passionate
about it and who were at the the
forefront of science and who were so engaging
and able to really communicate it well.
I
went to study physics. Like, I think, like
many physicists,
I wanted to be an astrophysicist.
I wanted to study nebula. That was my
kind of thought going into it as a
teenager.
And
after
a year's worth of astrophysics modules, I was
like, you know what? Astrophysics,
not for me, not my favorite.
Not to say I didn't love it, and
I still, you know, I still love the
stars, of course. How could you not? But,
I found the the type of physics I
really enjoyed was thermodynamics and statistical mechanics and
the physics of gloop and complex fluids and
and jelly and colloids and things like that,
and eventually biophysics,
which then lent itself towards the transition into
neuroscience, which happened later. There was a kind
of a period of about four years when
I worked in different jobs before I eventually
decided I I wanted to go back to
science.
But,
yeah, the the I was glad to have
a really well rounded,
physics education as an undergrad.
And quantum's amazing,
obviously.
How can you, like, how can you learn
about quantum and not just be fundamentally changed
as a person after after learning about it?
I remember this particular lecture where our first
year physics lecturer brought us the whole way
through a derivation and kept on checking and
being like, we all agree with it. Right?
And you got a 100 students all nodding
being like, yeah, we're all following this. We're
all following this. And then the kind of
conclusion was,
therefore,
many universes.
And you kind of had a 100 people
who've all been following this derivation, following the
maps the whole way through, agreeing with it
with every step, and then being like, yeah.
I can't really argue with that.
I I had a friend, a physicist friend
visit just this weekend.
And,
this physicist friend that I studied with as
an undergraduate
doesn't work in physics anymore, works in data
science.
And she and I were talking about how
you're never not a physicist.
Like, even though it was, you know, our
undergraduate years, we still have that identity
so kind of fundamentally
in ourselves. And I think, you know, quantum
has a a big role to play in
that.
Yeah. So you have,
created the front cover of the quantum briefing
for physics world.
Perhaps we could look at that as a
sort of
example of your creative process. Maybe talk us
through what how that came to you. And
Well, I was delighted to get the commission,
and the commission was, can you paint a
picture of quantum mechanics that's,
beautiful and colorful and original and not something
that we've seen before?
So no cats in boxes or anything like
that.
And,
obviously, that's slightly daunting.
My process when it comes to art is
often it goes back to experimentation and play.
And, actually, I sort of see experimentation and
play as kind of one and the same
thing.
The,
I will go into my studio and I'll
see what art materials I have around, and
I will just start
messing about,
messing about like a kid. And then sort
of thinking what would happen if? What would
happen if?
So I'd already,
started this series of works, which were just
exploring how
how different pigments move, which had all started
when I was just washing my brush. I
was washing my some ink off of my
paintbrush in some water, and I was like,
oh, I like that. I like the way
the ink moves in the water.
And then that led to more and more
elaborate setups,
adding in bigger glasses, different inks, different pigments,
different lighting setups, getting myself a UV torch,
buying a big spaghetti jar because that I
could fill the whole way up with water.
So
I was thinking about, right, how could you
represent quantum mechanics? And I'm I'm sort of,
you know, going back and thinking about everything
I'd loved about quantum mechanics. And
and the a lot of it comes down
to probability,
the idea of many things being true at
once
and,
being able to kind of prove that through
interference.
So I was thinking, how can I create,
a plain full setup
where I can see,
different pigments, different inks interfering and coexisting
in the same space?
Maybe that will lead me to something that
I feel starts to represent something to do
with quantum mechanics.
And
what I,
this is another like weird thing about being
an artist. It's very hard to throw anything
away, very
because you're always like, that might be useful.
So I had a bunch of expired printer
cartridges,
which had been sitting on my table,
in a little dish. And I thought, right,
maybe I can do something with these.
And then,
I thought it'd be really good
if I could
see how the ink flows out of the
printer cartridges.
But,
I I first had tried it in my
big spaghetti jar, and I thought, no. No.
No. No. We need something shallow, wide and
shallow. So I went off to the shop
and bought myself a oven dish, came back,
and I thought, how can I light this?
It's really hard to light this. It'd be
really good if I had a light box.
I didn't have a light box, but what
I did have was a seasonal affective disorder
lamp, you know, one of these sort of
flat lamps that kind of emits incredibly bright
LED lights. So went and got that, put
it underneath the oven dish, and then put
my put some water in the oven dish,
and then put the printer cartridges in. And
then I was like, right. I like how
they're moving, or I like how the ink
is is moving out of that.
But I think we can adapt how the
ink moves a bit more. So then it
was it was
a a couple of days of
intense play.
I mean, like, getting really focused
and experimenting with, like, what happens if I
add a bit of salt? What happens if
I make a really thin layer of water
before I add main cartridges? What happens if
I add this? Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So, eventually,
two printer cartridges
and a very thin layer of, like, 60%
sugar, 40% water
was the golden kind of,
mixture.
And then
I basically, I just sit in my studio,
and I I watch and I observe. And
eventually, I'll go, oh, I like that.
And take a quick photo
or take a video if you're sort of
trying to see the dynamics.
And then from that,
basically, start playing with the images, start playing
with paints because then it's you know,
I'm not a photographer. I'm a painter.
I've created I've captured an image of a
moment that can never be created again of
of this
this diffusion of dyes that I feel is
is able to communicate something about,
about, yeah, probability,
about,
states existing in the same place. But
for me as an artist, that's it's not
enough to stop there. I need
to then have that engagement
with it. So,
yeah, once I have that that photograph, it's
then how can I recreate this? And I
love working with oil paints. Oh my gosh.
Everybody should have a go playing with oil
paints once you have, Unfortunately, you have to
buy a bunch of, like, solvents and
mediums and things like that, and they do
take an absolute age to dry. But oil
paints, oh, they're delicious. They're just so fun
to paint with.
So then it's going about, right, can you
manipulate these oil paints on your on your,
panel,
in such a way that you feel is
is managing to capture this spontaneous moment that
you've captured in this photograph?
So in some ways, it feels like it
feels like a bit of a ruse or
a bit of a luck that
that I've taken a a couple of days
of pure play,
and out of
it have, an image which is on the
cover of the quantum briefing. You know,
it it's what a great job I have.
Okay.
It's amazing. And what a wonderful job you
have done on that, front cover. Yeah. So
if people want to see that, of course,
you'll have to find the quantum briefing links
to them on physicsworld.com.
I just want to, before I let you
go and play some more,
I'd I will have to kind of out
myself with something of a fan because there
is some of your work on the walls
of my house. Yes. Which
is an illustration rather than a painting. Absolutely.
Yes. Well, I think it's something you might
do for other people as well.
But it comes from from my love of,
Philip Pullman's work. Oh, I really hope we
will talk about this because I also love
Philip Pullman's work. Amazing.
So can you tell me a bit about
what that is that you do for Oh,
absolutely. So
I should probably give a tiny bit of
context, which is to say that when
2020 happened, when there was a lockdowns, I
really struggled. And, unfortunately, that's part of my
reason for leaving academia
was the struggle that I experienced during,
the pandemic.
I have a preexisting phobia of pandemics, which
I don't recommend.
So,
that time was very, very tricky. And,
although I was still fully employed in neuroscience,
I found that art was an amazing
solace for me that when I was creating,
I could switch off the anxiety of my
brain,
in a way that I couldn't really achieve
doing anything else.
So I I desperately needed a project
to keep my brain engaged,
and,
I thought about Philip Pullman and his dark
materials
trilogy, which I loved
since I first read Northern Lights when it
would have been about, I don't know, 10
or 11.
And I wanted I asked people if I
could draw their demons. So in the in
the trilogy of,
His Dark Materials,
every person, their soul has a physical manifestation,
which takes the shape of an animal. And
in this trilogy, it's called a demon.
And
I started off drawing some for close friends
and then,
started asking other people, would you like yours
drawn
And what a joyful thing to do.
Also, like,
I don't know how,
how relevant this is for this chat, but
I I was I was hoping that you
might bring up his dark materials, Andrew, because,
the character of doctor Mary Malone.
I was thinking about it,
in preparation for this conversation
and thinking how
fundamental that character is
for me. Like, that's a character that as
a child I really related to. So this
is a character who she's a a quantum
physicist who's gone into neuroscience
and
then goes off on this
beautiful adventure
to try and understand,
how consciousness works.
And
I think it's so important to have examples
of people like that in art or in
literature or in creativity to
inspire people to to to see to imagine
themselves as different kinds of people.
Like, I don't think
it's,
you know, it's not that much of a
coincidence that I ended up being a physicist
who went into neuroscience after being so inspired
by a character like that. You know?
But, yes, I
really enjoyed
drawing doing illustrations of of different people's
demons, their soul animals.
You know what? I've never actually done my
own. I think mine is a cormorant.
But Okay.
Yeah.
I need to sit down and and draw
my own demon at some point.
I I I don't wanna ask too many
questions about that because that's gonna go really
deep if we start analyzing our demons.
That's not too much. But, the the Mary
Malone thing is quite interesting. I mean, I
absolutely love the character of Mary Malone
and that, as you say, for for many
reasons,
including that
transitional,
career that she's having. Yes. You say you're
inspired by it. I'm sure there's some of
that in there, but I think it's also
that that's
that character enabled you to see who you
were. Yes. And that's the importance
of art is that sometimes you need to
see something on a page in a book
or in a performance or in a hear
it in a song or see it in
a painting before you're able to articulate,
oh, this is how I feel about this
thing, which, you know, going back to beginning
our conversation is why the synesthesia painting has
been so interesting because so many people have
been able to articulate things that they'd never
able to articulate before.
My, I did a a art exhibition back
in 2016,
which was all about,
a phenomenon phenomenon called lapel de vid or
a call of the void, which if you've
ever been
up in some high place and you've had
a little intrusive thought of, like, what would
happen if I lent too far over this
railing?
That's lapel David.
And,
so I created all these paintings, explored this
idea and then presented them. And, oh my
gosh. I had the best conversations with strangers
because people would say, I know exactly what
you mean. It's like when I'm driving really
fast on the motorway and I have a
little voice in my head, that's like, well,
what would happen if, or,
there was some very,
interesting examples that other people gave me. Actually,
maybe I won't share them because maybe that's
a breaking of trust, but,
it's a privilege as an artist that you
get to be
exploring these ideas,
creating
images, and then having the most amazing conversations
with other people as those other people find
value in the images that you've created.
It's it's a complete privilege.
Yeah. I tell you what's really lovely about
the demon
illustration that you did for us is when
people come and stay with us or come
and visit us, and they look at the
picture and then they go Uh-huh. Hang on
a second. Yeah. Is this is this and
you're like, oh, yeah. Now I've got a
proper friend because they recognize what this is.
I I I love that too. I love,
so as I said, I think mine is
a cormorant.
What is absolutely certain is that it's a
bird because whenever I've sort of mentioned it,
the concept of demons from historic materials to
anyone, they've always gone, oh, you're a bird
of some kind. Mhmm.
And then it's just different people. Some people
my I think my mother thinks I'm a
jackdaw.
Okay.
They're very clever. I didn't know that's about
me. They I think I think it means
they're very clever, very useful. You use the
tools to make the world a better place,
so that seems fine.
I like that interpretation.
If people want to know,
more about your work, where would they find
you? Thank you so much for asking.
I'm on Instagram.
I have a website.
Basically, if you search for Felicity ink pen,
it is an unusual name. You're gonna find
me. So you can just
chuck my name into your search engine of
choice,
and you'll be able to find me on
those. I'm also on Blue Sky and Substack
at felicity ink pen. I highly recommend that
you do find your way to looking through
Felicity's work on those various links. But
to dive deeper
into the quantum briefing, here's someone whose voice
and name might well be familiar
to quite a few of you. Hi, Andrew.
I'm Tishna Kumar Sarayat. I am the features
editor for Physics World.
And this year, my special project all year
long is
all our coverage for the international year of
quantum
technology and science twenty twenty five. So it's
all quantum all the time for me. Yeah.
Does that make you feel a bit weird?
I like that part. No. Do you know
what? My my
aim for this year is to make most
people think that quantum is not that weird.
Or if it's weird, it's a fun kind
of weird and not, oh, no idea what's
going on kind of weird.
Okay. But does because I find when I'm
doing these podcasts about quantum that it makes
me it makes me kind of think about
what's going on around me in a slightly
different way. If you're doing it all the
time, does it not do that a little
bit?
It does. It does. It makes you have
this amazing
appreciation
for how
strange and wonderful,
the world is around us and and the
fact that there's still so much to be
learned. There's so much that we don't understand
about what is essentially a really fundamental aspect
of our existence.
So you have a quantum briefing. We we
were we were developing this briefing in the
early half of the year,
and, you know, we were saying, well, we've
got so much excellent content in it. We
want something really exciting on the cover.
And here's the thing. Right? Quantum mechanics, very
popular subject,
very hard to have interesting pretty pictures of
it because it's not something you can photograph.
You know? It's not like astronomy. You can't
stick a pretty picture of a galaxy or
a nebula on. It's really hard to visualize.
And I realized that all the magazines and
things that are out right now, everyone's using
the same 40 or 50 pictures from, you
know, Shutterstock and iStock and Science Photos. So
it's either a picture of a so called
quantum computer, which is mostly the dilution refrigeration
part of it because the actual computer is
really tiny and boring looking,
or it's something, you know, some sort of
bushy lines that look vaguely like an atom
or something like that. And I wanted something
really different and visually exciting on the cover.
And so I thought I wanted an artist
who really understands quantum mechanics to represent,
their idea of key quantum concepts on the
cover. And so I thought of, Felicity, Fliss,
who used to work at IOP publishing many
years ago, and she has a big background
in science.
And so I sort of reached out to
her and I said, hey. Would you like
to paint something about quantum? And she absolutely
loved it,
and so, you know, I'm sure you've heard
her talk about how she came up with
the the dyes and the imaging and then
her stunning painting, cubit's duality, which I love,
which I think is just amazing on the
cover.
I think it really gives you this
amazing sense of
the ideas of entanglement and superposition,
but in a beautiful way that is quite
rare to
associate with quantum mechanics. So yeah.
It's quite a lovely thing, isn't it? Because
I've done some things in the past where
you've been kinda working on something, and then
as a result of what you're working on,
something else has come out of it. Some
sort of art or creation or something's come
out of it. It's just a lovely thing
to happen, isn't it? Absolutely. And I'm so
happy to say that this painting is being
displayed all over The UK at different events.
So two weeks ago, it was displayed as
part of the Great Exhibition Road Festival in
London,
and it was part of Imperial's,
quantum art,
quantum jungle where they had all these amazing,
pieces of quantum art, some of them interactive.
And there were so many people there, so
many young children. It was amazing having them
all look at this and go, oh, pretty,
you know, which is quite rare for quantum.
Hopefully, the painting is going to also be
displayed at the,
Royal
Society Summer Festival. And later on in the
year, the Science Gallery in London is having
a special quantum exhibition, and,
Qubit's Duality will be seen there too. So
if you're anywhere in The UK, keep your
eyes peeled for our stunning quantum art.
Amazing. Yeah. I've I didn't know that. That's
a delightful thing. I'll be finding my way
to one of those. Because the other place
I can see is on the front cover
of the Quantum Briefing, and I would like
to just sort of open the pages
of that and look inside. What's sort of
drawn you as you've been looking into it
and, putting this this briefing together? You know,
sometimes you you come up with what you
want
to go exactly, what you wanna cover in
this kind of thing,
in the special collection.
And other times, you sort of look at
we we have so much exciting quantum content
that we pull together,
this massive spreadsheet, and then we actually had
to cut things down. Because if we we
printed it all and put it all in,
it would have been 200 pages. It would
have been a book.
So we had to sort of choose the
best of the best of the best, the
most interesting things. And as we pulled,
content together, we realized that naturally,
all the content divided up into three sections
that with a little bit of whimsy, we
decided to call quantum history,
quantum mystery, and quantum industry. And then, of
course, there's a bit of science and culture
because we like science and culture, and we
think that's a key part of,
the scientific process.
So that that's sort of the sections,
that it covers. Obviously, history
looks back at,
some key people,
who were pivotal in the discovery of quantum
mechanics.
Quite a fun feature that starts out on
the island of Helgoland, which is sort of
where it all began a hundred years ago,
the island on which Heisenberg
sort of went to recover from his blistering
hay fever and
sort of wrote down the mathematical
matrix equations of of quantum mechanics.
What's really fun is that Helgoland was
the site for,
the hundred year anniversary conference,
the Helgoland conference.
A week ago, and Nitin Drani, who is
editor,
of Physics World, editor in chief, He managed
to go along to this conference,
and, I would definitely
recommend reading his blogs on sort of all
the things that they discussed that look back
at a hundred years of quantum mechanics and
look forward at the next one hundred years.
Is that was that a big argument in
the physics world office as who was going
to get to go to that one?
Well, it's funny you say that, but do
you know what? This this island is really
a tiny island off the coast of Germany.
It's really not built
for, you know, a huge amount of physicists
to land up. And so very quickly, what
happened with the Helgoland conference was that every
possible location where you could stay on the
island
sold out. So they were asking people to
pair up and share rooms. And the final
option,
which I heard a couple of people did
succumb to, was to camp on the island.
And from Mateen's reporting, it was fairly cold
and windy, so not exactly
the dream,
holiday or anything. But
as Mazin says in his final blog, he
felt that he could really understand why Helgoland
was such a good place for thinking
and coming up with amazing new ideas. So
if you're
if you're looking for a place for inspiration
and some bracing sea air,
perhaps Helgoland should be on your list now
that all the quantum physicists have on hand.
I've I've I've got maybe I'll take get
that painting somehow and take it with me.
I'll tell you what. I'll just take the
briefing. It's on the front cover of that.
Oh, well, there you go. So There you
go. Back at the history of it, if
we can do that first of all,
the other people in this story I asked
that question knowing the answer to it. But
other people in the history of the story
whose story hasn't been told and maybe should
have been?
Yes. Absolutely.
You know, obviously, everyone everyone knows of Heisenberg.
Everyone knows of
of Niels Bohr. By the way, there's a
great feature about Niels Bohr and something that
he got really wrong, which I really enjoy.
I really like it. Very clever people
come up with what they think were fantastic
ideas and then are very quickly proven wrong
because it's always amazing to me how happy
they are about that. They're always like, oh,
well, try that,
but this is more exciting that I'm wrong.
And so there's a great feature called when
Bohr got it wrong.
And I'll I'll leave you to read that
to find out what exactly it was that
he proposed in the very early days of
quantum mechanics that was quickly proven wrong. But
the person you referred to, the sort of
missing person,
was this amazing German physicist and philosopher
by the name of Greta Hermann.
Now she was someone who was a true
contemporary
of of Heisenberg
and even John von Neumann.
And so she was sort of very active
in those early days. And she
because she was a philosopher and not just
a physicist,
she had some very certain interesting ideas
about
quantum fundamentals
at a time when they were really discussing,
you know, whether you you were in Boer's
camp or or Einstein's camp, etcetera.
And she sort of proposed some of the
things that we later attribute
completely
to von Neumann was actually things that
she had suggested or talked about or even
proved much earlier than he had. But, you
know, because she was a very, highly trained
mathematician.
So she actually
used her skills and training to point out
some early flaws in von Neumann's
early proofs that there were these no hidden
variable theories,
etcetera. And so she came up with some
great responses to that, but no one you
know, she sparred with von Neumann, but no
one really knows about her today.
After the the war, she sort of went
off and did some quite different things because
she was interested. She was a free thinker.
She was, you know, working with the unions
and things like that.
But she had these really great ideas about
quantum
causality,
and things like that. And so her legacy
is something that we really wanted to highlight
in our history.
Can I ask you a very silly question?
Why is she not more well known? Why
was the
Oh, I mean,
oh, Andrew.
I feel
like I feel like, unfortunately,
there is this you know, it's it's almost
a term that we now know called hidden
figures, and and you almost consistently,
those figures
are women
or or people from other minority backgrounds
who sort of played such key roles
in so much of
the fundamental
development of science over eons, and they just
got written out because they were the wrong
kind of people to be in those stories
and or they just didn't shout loud enough
or they just didn't have a platform for
it. And, unfortunately,
you know, it's sort of it's almost sort
of happening again now while we haven't even
got all of those hidden figures out and
and women are being written out of the
story again,
unfortunately,
in The US right now. But
so, yeah, I mean, it's quite sad that
we're still
finding these amazing people.
But, hopefully, all these stories will be told
and appreciated.
Yes.
Absolutely.
I can't quite believe it's happening again. But,
that's the history.
Can we turn now to the mystery, not
just the mystery of why the the people
I've talked about more who were so instrumental
in it, but the mystery of the science.
Absolutely. Yeah.
So quite often, when we talk about quantum
mechanics, people refer to things like
quantum and, you know, entanglement,
this idea that you you can have quantum
particles that are inherently linked to one another
even if they're nowhere in the same
space and, you know, this can be across
the universe,
or or superposition
where different quantum states are all at the
same sort of happening at the same time.
And these are these quantum effects that are
deemed so weird and strange,
but, actually,
there are a number those concepts have been
around now for a hundred years, and they're
pretty well understood. We test them in the
lab. We do experiments with them. We use
them all the time.
But there's these other quantum effects that have
maybe been discovered a bit later that are
even stranger. They're even weirder. And the way
we see it is that they're so odd
that they make superposition and entanglement seem almost
ordinary.
So that's what we kind of wanted to
highlight through this,
International Year of Quantum.
And we've got the first three of these
effects,
in the guide. The first one is the
quantum
Zeno effect.
Then we have quantum Cheshire cats, and then
we have the quantum eraser delayed choice effect,
which are all
pretty mysterious.
Yeah. Yes. They are. But but to a
certain extent, I wonder if some of these
things do require a bit of time with
reading in order to, you know, really grasp
them Yes. Rather than just hearing about them
on a podcast, I think. Yeah. I think
these are what we kind of what we
think of as lean forward articles. You have
to pay a little bit of attention and
stay with us to learn something truly mind
boggling.
Okay. So I'm gonna pick one of them.
And you could just shout at me if
it's the wrong one to pick, but I'll
just pick one of them.
And I'm gonna pick this one, but largely
because I was born in Cheshire.
The Quantum Cheshire Cat.
Absolutely. One of my favorites.
And it also happens to me the same
feature is also in the Jude issue of
Physics World, and it's on the cover. So
you have all these lovely cats on the
cover. It's a very exciting cover.
Just a quick aside here because there are
some wonderful illustrations,
not only on the front cover of Physics
World magazine, but in the quantum briefing to
go alongside
some of these wonderful
stories of quantum physics. So I do recommend
if you're interested in that kind of cross
section between science and art we've been talking
about to delve into both the magazine
and the Quantum Briefing.
Back to Tushnet.
Quantum Cheshire cats. Truly, truly mind boggling stuff.
So
for those of you who've read Alice in
Wonderland, you'll be familiar with the Cheshire cat,
that has does this amazing thing where it
slowly disappears, leaving behind its grin.
The grin is the last thing that disappears,
and Alice sort of says that I've often
seen a cat without a grin, but a
grin without a cat, that is the most
curious thing I ever saw in my life.
And so I'm
in in the eighties, there were a bunch
of physicists who who perhaps thought very deeply
about grinning cats.
And so they put forward this really crazy
proposition
in the early nineteen eighties. This was,
Yakir Aronov,
Sandu Provasku,
and,
colleagues.
And they
came up with this suggestion that they said
that because of the way quantum properties
are of of a certain particle. So if
you look at
a particle such as a photon, now photons,
particles of light,
they have polarization. We all know what polarization
is. Right?
So
they found that you could have a quantum
particle, a photon's
polarization
in a completely different physical location
from the actual particle itself.
So like the Cheshire cat,
the grin is separate from the cat, and
so the photons' polarization
is actually
in a physically separate location from the photon
itself. What?
Yeah. I know. I know.
And the crazy thing is that they came
up with this almost like a sort of
thought experiment
in the early eighties.
This this it was an idea, a concept
that they said that, you know, if if
you make, a measurement on a quantum system,
it collapses the system. You know, it's when
you have a certain
entanglement
or a certain position.
You make a measurement. You sort of poke
the system, and it causes the system to
change immediately because quantum systems don't like being
watched.
And so you, you know, then you find
out it's like open the box and you
find out the cat is dead or alive.
I was Schrodinger. Right?
But there's this there's this amazing idea. So
so that's what you call a very definitive
measurement, but there's this phenomenal concept in quantum
mechanics called weak measurements.
So that's like not fully opening the box,
not opening it all the way and letting
all the, you know, light out to see
if there's definitely a dead cat. But what
if you did something like just a teeny
tiny little peak, sort of look from the
corner of your eye without really looking?
So
that's what physicists called weak measurements. So that's
where you do sort of a series of
very gentle pokes on a system,
and you keep measuring those. You you make
these tiny, tiny, tiny measurements,
and then you add up the sum of
this measurement to get a sort of coherent
answer by doing these tiny, tiny, gentle pokes.
So
this this concept of weak measurements was sort
of a radical idea in quantum mechanics when
it happened. And so so they realized that
if you set up you do a certain
series
of sort of what they call preselection
criteria
to set up a photon, and then you
put it through a beam splitter,
send it, you know, do do the standard
sort of interferometry that we do with photons,
you know, to check, then you get a
system where the photon ends up in one
arm of the beam splitter and the polarization
is in the other arm. And then you
can put the two bits back together and
do some really crazy things.
Is
this actually been tested then, is it? It
has indeed, and we do these experiments all
the time, which is just crazy. They've they've
so from when it was proposed and it's
been done in different systems even. That's the
that's the amazing part.
And now
what people
are actually studying and looking at is the
interpretation.
So what does this mean? What does it
mean if you can do these weak measurements?
What does it mean if you can separate
these these things? How does it impact things
like, you know, the this concept of hidden
variables? Is there some hidden information
within these systems,
or is there something you know, how does
it all work? And what I really like,
I'll say this. So this feature was written
for us by, Julia Georgescu, who is one
of my colleagues at the IOP in London.
And she came up with this really
sort of
fun idea of,
cats at a pachinko parlor in Japan. So
I don't know if you ever heard of
pachinko. It's, you know, like a slot machine,
a jackpot thing that they have. And the
reason why pachinko works really well is that
in pachinko,
you have this
preselection so that the balls that drop from
the top are in a certain
spaces, and there is a criteria that determines
how they will fall through the machine. So
she has this idea of cats are in
this pachinko machine, and
as they go through, you know, you have
the beam splitter and the the sort of
the cat is on on one end and
the the the chair that you sit on
to play these slots
has the grin. So the cat is on
the machine and the grin is on the
chair. And so it's an interesting way of
thinking of this very curious phenomenon. And and,
you know, I mentioned photons,
but
same thing happens with any quantum particle, really.
So with an electron, you can do the
same thing with its charge. With a neutron,
it's it's magnetic moment. And with an atom,
it's the,
inertial energy of the atom. So we've tested
it across all these platforms.
So, yeah,
crazy stuff. I don't know if this is
a silly question. Right? But
it
feels to me like we're sort of peeping
into this world. You know, you peep there's
that kind of peep but we're peeping into
this world. And is it is it possible
that the reason why these things are happening
is just purely because we're peeping into it
and there are connections
that would make total sense if you were
in it, but because we're sort of peeping
at it.
I mean, that is that is a big
question. That is this
fundamental, you know, one of those that's that's
also something else that's really interesting that hopefully,
we'll get some answers to words. They say
now physics world live,
that will be published by the time you
listen to this podcast.
This idea that there are these inherent quantum
fundamental questions that a hundred years later, we
really have no answers to. But what's interesting
is that we now technologically
advance so much. The fact that we can
have entangled states between,
an atom in the lab and an atom,
up in space. Right? We've done it. We're
seeing it. We're still not quite sure what's
how and what. So these interpretations
of it is what physicists are still trying
to figure out. But there's
this really, we're in a great position where
we can use the technology that we have
today to probe
these fundamental
questions and try and figure out. So there
is a big question about the act of
measurement itself
in quantum mechanics, the act of observation
itself in quantum mechanics and
the role that plays. And that's sort of
what Bohr and Einstein were arguing about from
the start. And we still don't have
a very definitive answer. We do all these
experiments, but we still can't quite
explain how and why.
And that actually I won't go into it
in too much detail because it is really
mind boggling and I recommend you read the
article. But it brings us quite nicely to
the third effect in the feature in the
in the briefing, which is the quantum
eraser or the quantum eraser and the delayed
choice experiment
as it is called. And that's this crazy
thing of, you know, most of us
when you're at university,
you learn about the double slit experiments. If
you have a single light source, you send
a photon
towards a double slit that is really quite
tiny.
Even though it's a single photon because
light occasionally acts like a wave,
it's sort of that single photon passes through
both of the slits. And if you have
a screen at the other side of it,
you see this amazing interference pattern. So the
photon has interfered with itself.
But the crazy thing is that if you
have that very same setup, but now
you put some kind of detector
on each individual slit so you can measure
which
slit that atom goes through. The minute you
measure, you record that information,
the interference pattern disappears.
The the the yeah. The light refuses to
let you know what it's gone. It goes,
no. No. If if you do that, I'm
not doing it. I'm going through one or
the other. And so it just turns into
that Those dark and light bands disappear. And
this is something you do in the lab
and it's it's crazy. It's like how does
it know? So that that in itself is
this the role of the observer,
right, and and what
this information
that is how how crucial information is in
quantum systems.
But then to make things really, really mind
boggling, the point of the quantum eraser
is that
once again,
if you sort of
delay the choice so what if you don't
measure
at the slit
which slit it goes through, but you somehow
have something
past the slit
that measures the interference.
And then it kind of tries and looks
at
what's coming from the left hand side slit
versus the right hand slide. So and, again,
brings us to these weak measurements. So you
look at it weekly and you add it
up,
then you get that interference pattern back up.
So it's this idea of what if you
delay
the choice of measuring it.
And what's truly mind boggling with that, the
sort of why we're talking about, does it
rewrite the past?
Because this very same concept of this so
so John Wheeler,
the very famous
quantum physicist and and thinker, I would say,
he said that
so what if you take starlight from a
star that's millions of light years away and
you do this double slit experiment with it,
but then you you measure which slit is
going through? Are you are we saying that
we can control the starlight and what it
does? Are we making it change what it
did
in the past by measuring it
in the present? That's just
crazy. So so that was his big question.
He's like, what does that mean?
And
so I think what most scientists believe today
is that
it isn't really this there is it isn't
that you're actually having a path and influence
in the past or that you are rewriting
the past.
It's just that there is this truly quantum
inherently
quantum effect
or quantum correlation
that happens because of entanglement that we still
don't understand, but we just have to appreciate
that it is not something that we can
put
as simply in classical terms as rewriting the
past.
And, again, that even that, there there's experiments
on this that people are doing and trying
to make more sense of
this
link between information,
observers,
and quantum competing even. So it's not all
just very esoteric thinking. It starts out that
way, but it always has quite practical implications.
Yeah. That's an interesting thing, isn't it? Because
I really recommend people do lean into that
and and read fully the article and really,
you know, get into it because Mhmm. I
don't know about you, but I find myself
looking at the news and the newspapers and
things, and I just I just find the
world a very odd place at the moment.
And it's much more fun to look into
something like this with my spare time than
it is to look into to the news.
But is there
a kind of,
application of this stuff?
The applications of this in society, what
what other possible
apart from just making me happier Yes. When
I go to bed. Absolutely. So like I
said, there there are hopefully I mean, from
what
scientists and governments across the world are hoping
is that the sort of quantum renaissance will
have such a deep impact on our lives,
in the long term because, really, what you
can do
with quantum
computing, quantum sensors, and other quantum
technologies,
is is hopefully going to be wide ranging
and and truly amazing once we achieve it.
We could talk a bit about quantum computing,
but perhaps that's still something that's in the
making. We don't have
a definitive quantum computer, and that can do
something really useful as of now
that we can't do with classical computing. Our
sort of massive
you know, the bigger supercomputers that we have
still outperform what the best quantum computer can
do today. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't
be building towards it. And that's something
that we're gonna hopefully dig into in a
big way in our second volume of the
quantum briefing that's gonna come later in the
year. That's a little teaser for you. But
one of the things that I love to
talk about is the area of quantum sensors.
So we talked a little bit about how,
you know, quantum systems, you set it up
and then you measure it and it quickly
sort of collapses. You have this decoherence.
So they're extremely sensitive
to the environment.
And someone ages ago thought, wait a minute.
They're really, really sensitive to everything going on
around them. That could be a feature. It's
something that we've been taking as a as
a pain in the ass for all our
experiments.
But actually,
it's gonna be something that could be quite
useful. What if I try and use these
very sensitive things as a sensor?
And so that scenario of physics that, you
know, quantum sensors
are
way ahead in terms of they're being used
in real life already. They're out of
the labs and and and being tested in
many spaces. And,
Catherine Skipper, who was features editor,
with us for last year, she's written this
brilliant feature in the guide about quantum based
gravity sensors.
And that's really interesting because
really often, we need to look at things,
that are buried under ground. And this is
really important for construction
or anyone who's doing anything
that is underground and that's, you know, under
a road, in a residential area, under a
mountain, under the sea.
There's many options of that. And
we can use,
cold atom interferometry, which is this idea of
falling atoms
to to
test what's going on under the ground. And
you might say, well, there's plenty of ways
to test that. You know, you have radar
and this and that, and we have so
many things.
But the thing is whether whether you're doing
something for the government or you're a construction
firm trying to figure out what's going on
on a road.
Measurements for these kind of things can take
weeks and months sometimes.
They take really long. They're not as accurate
as you like them. And, you know, the
last thing you want is a road closed
for a month because they're just trying to
figure out where the water mains are. Or
worse, they've got it wrong and there's a
hole in your water pipe, and now your
road's closed and you have no water.
So that's some of the stuff that some
of these quantum sensors are looking at, these
gravity based quantum sensors. The University of Birmingham
has a huge,
team, a collaboration working on many different aspects
of this kind of stuff,
with quantum gravimeters.
I think it's some really fascinating stuff.
They've they've been testing it in exciting places
like an underground
cavern in the Peak District
and out at sea in the in out
at sea in the North Sea,
with the navy.
They've been testing, and that's all part of
The UK's quantum technology hub for sensors and
timing.
So it's
some amazing stuff that's already out there. The
the quantum is already being
used in the real world.
It's lovely, lovely stuff. I think,
we should probably allow people to stop listening
to this podcast and start reading the quantum
briefing. How do they do that if they
would like to find it?
So it's the quantum briefing is free to
read and access to everyone online on physicsworld.com.
If you just click through to our magazines
tab and you look at all of the
magazines lined up for this year, you will
see
you you can read it online in a
nice flip book. You can download it in
a PDF,
all the options, and it's free to read
and access.
And it also includes little bits of audio
and podcasts and so you can hear people
talking about it. You can find out what
author Ursula Caleb Gwynn had to do with
Schrodinger's cat. Amazing.
You can look at that beautiful quantum artwork.
You can look at an absolutely
fascinating little bit of science fiction
on on what happened if,
Heisenberg never made it to Helgoland
and what happens when he did a little
a little sort of,
parallel situation.
And finally, you can also go and test
your quantum acumen with our quantum quiz on
the back page for a little bit of
fun. And there are no prizes for that
apart from feeling extremely clever.
I'd like to thank Felicity and Tushna for
talking to me for this episode of the
Physics World Stories podcast. And don't forget that
you can delve much deeper into the world
of quantum physics on the Physics World's website,
physicsworld.com,
where you will, of course, also find
those blogs from Mateen Jurani from Helgoland.
We'll be back next month with something else
from this wonderful world of physics, and thank
you very much for listening.