Quantum Supremacy
On spending time with thousands of physicists as quantum theory turns 100 years old
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QUANTUM SUPREMACY*
It’s a Saturday night in Anaheim, California and I am at the Quantum Jubilee. The part of town I’m in is currently filled with Disney fans, but in a day or so, it will fill up with about 14,000 researchers who study physics for their largest annual gathering. The Quantum Jubilee is, as one physicist says during the event, part of a birthday party that the global scientific community is throwing for quantum mechanics, which is our most successful theory of physics, our most perplexing, and, now, also a centenarian. The UN recognized 2025 as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology and everyone, from academics to the science media that I work in, is making a big deal out of it.
“If you thought there is nothing that all countries can agree on, here is one thing,” says another physicist from the stage of a dark theater that usually hosts musicians instead of scientists. His remarks will be followed by several circus performances, some dancing, some spoken word pieces and the screening of a short film. Earlier in the day, the theatre gave home to a stage play about adventuring within the quantum realm, a sort of Alice-in-Wonderland story but the mad hatter is the infamous theorist Erwin Schrodinger and the villains are mostly atoms and electrons. I have only been in California for a few hours, but the fervor, excitement and the friendly chaos of the week ahead are all already palpable to me. I am about to scribble so many facts into my little notebook, shake so many hands in the hallway, ask so many questions.
The show ends on another note of unity, and with a piece of physics that quantum theory technically began with. It was a seemingly simple problem of how objects radiate heat.
Typically, the domain of quantum mechanics is a physical realm that is hidden from us, populated by objects that are either incredibly small or incredibly cold. But the radiation problem was one where physicists’ personal experience could tell them that their math was incorrect. Specifically, prior to 1900, all mathematical models of how objects, and especially those that are “black” or can absorb lots of light, radiate implied that they would eventually give off nearly infinite amounts of energy. The theory was predicting that looking at any dark and warm object, like a hot cup of coffee, would confront you with catastrophic, melting amounts of visible light and other radiation. No one was experiencing this. Something was wrong with the theory.
Then, German physicist Max Planck realized that the problem lay in the assumption that radiation was a continuous wave. When he assumed that radiation, and energy, came in discrete chunks instead, equations stopped predicting face-melting disasters. These chunks were “quanta” and Planck had discovered “quantization.” The words would become central for naming a nascent theory of physics and Planck’s work held up to our time. Researchers still use it, for instance, to analyze radiation from the stars.
Quantization is a basic feature of quantum theory, which was fully formulated a few decades after Planck’s work. For instance, the energy of a quantum object only comes in specific packets and all other values are forbidden. This is in stark contrast to what physicists previously thought and how we often think about energy - if you throw a ball it will never refuse to move because you gave it an energy that’s not some special number. Yet, if you consider how human bodies give off heat, Planck’s calculations, and quantization, apply.
This was the message that I heard that night in California, a reminder that as physical objects we all follow the same rules, that our energetic signatures form according to the same equations. I liked this more than the invocation of the UN, which has now turned a blind eye to genocide for over a year, or consensus among various nation states. It is worth noting that quantum technologies are one of the few branches of science marked as worth maintaining in the radically right wing Project 2025. Put in the hands of politicians and other leaders, lessons of quantum theory are not always those of unity to put it mildly. There is a real chasm between the truths of the physical world and what people want to use their access to those truths, or what they think those truths are for. I wanted to celebrate quantum’s big birthday, but not lose my sense of discernment.
***
Over a frothy matcha latte, a former colleague is explaining to me why Moiré materials, which are defined by the intricate pattern arrangements of atoms within them, are interesting. We have already discussed the BEC-BCS crossover, or how a perfect fluid becomes a perfect conductor, and the proper technique for trying to calculate what a sea of electrons may do when exposed to certain kinds of magnetic fields. This is the kind of chatter characteristic for physicists trying to casually grab dinner or a cup of coffee.
It’s been many years since I left the world of academic physics, so I can’t contribute technical insights to the conversation. As a physics reporter, I am familiar with a lot of concepts and experiments, but my companions for the night know the math that undergirds them more intimately. This divide between us is a little deeper every year when we meet at this conference, but I cherish the chatter anyway. We’re gossiping about the inner workings of some of the world's most intriguing pieces of stuff, so how could I not?
A few hours earlier, I was working on a different type of chatter, the kind I’m really here for, trying to get a quotable sentence out of another working researcher. Interviewing is about emotional intelligence as much as it is about facts, which for me means determining whether someone will feel more comfortable if I disclose that I used to be a physicist. Here, I guess “yes,” but my source objects to the past tense. If you become a physicist once, you stay one forever, they say. Instinctually, I bristle at the starkness of an unqualified “forever,” a rigid claim that feels a little suffocating. But at the coffee shop, I suspect that they may have been onto something.
The coffee shop is tucked into a corner of a garish outdoor mall, and it’s interesting to think about how me and my two companions ended up there. There’s a lot of queerness and many foreign passports between us. We are not what a physicist traditionally looks like, but in a past time where liberals cared about the politics of representation, as shallow as this often was in academic spaces, someone may have argued that going forward ‘what a physicist looks like’ should include our table.
We also represent a lineage because we share an academic advisor, a relationship whose shadow is long enough to bind us into a tripartite unit even though we see each other incredibly rarely. The youngest among us enrolled at my alma mater long after I had graduated, but there’s kinship between us anyway. Academics often espouse the values of being like family right before they ask you to do extra work for free, but this is different. We have shared gripes about the work, sure, but we also share a type of curiosity that feels uplifting.
At the moment, we are navigating both. “Isn’t the history of physics that researchers wanted to solve mysteries of nature? I don’t feel like we’re solving mysteries much anymore,” someone says as we rehash what's trendy in academic journals right now. “All the easy problems have been solved,” offers the other working physicist at the table. “People had more time to contemplate mysteries of nature when they didn’t have to publish papers and worry about tenure,” I am more bitter in my assessment. In my work, I see too many disingenuous paper titles and press releases to be able to ignore pressures on scientists that stem from employment and financial precarity.
But once I’m back in my hotel room and trying to confront the long list of lectures I want to attend the next day, I regret not checking my bitterness. I used to attend this conference as a graduate student and the memories of that time start coming back to me. I always wanted to go so badly; I always wanted to learn so badly. It was exciting to be in the process of becoming a physicist and it was exciting to be promised access to a rarefied tier of knowledge that is shared in places like this.
This is really my lineage, I decide. Not just the line from me to my advisor to those that sparked her own curiosity, but the much more far-reaching and winding road to the first physicists who noticed that something odd was up with atoms and light and radiating bodies. At a hundred years old, quantum mechanics has lodged itself in the minds of so many, myself included. Partly, the theory itself just invites a kind of existentialism that has always been simmering right underneath its surface.
Greek philosopher Democritus noted “That atoms and the vacuum were the beginning of the universe; and that everything else existed only in opinion,” in the 400s BC, but it took until the development of quantum mechanics for physicist to come close to grasping what atoms are, what they’re made from and what we can do to both study and control them. And vacuum? Quantum theory revealed that it actually does not exist - any space that is empty is actually filled with perpetual flickers of pairs of particles and their antimatter twins coming to life, annihilating each other, then emerging again, and so on. Remarkably, consequences of this genuine abhorrence of vacuum have been identified and tested in several experiments.
While true vacuum is not something that shows up in our daily life, everything that we are surrounded with is made from atoms, so the bold statements that quantum theory has made about their nature underlie the very foundations of the world we touch, see and otherwise interact with. Yet, those bold statements are rarely definitive.
For instance, because an atom is a quantum entity, it can sometimes behave like a wave and sometimes like a particle even though physicists for centuries held that the two - particles and waves - must be mutually exclusive. What does it mean to sometimes be a particle and sometimes a wave? It’s the sort of question that quantum theory invites and whether it can answer it is a matter of philosophical and interpretational debates.
And even if you’re not philosophically inclined, perfectly practical questions, such as why an atom doesn’t fall apart when you sit on it, or when it is floating in space, lead you back to similar conundrums. An atom is made from electrons, protons and neutrons, and those two last particles are actually made from quarks. All the particles on this list can exhibit wave-like behavior and that is integral to how they conspire to make the whole atom not crumble. Conceptual consequences of this are sort of dire: it turns out that the most correct way to think of an atom is as something with fuzzy edges, more of a cloud of possible states than a solid building block of our very clearly solid world.
As I wrote recently, I was trained in the kind of mathematics that undergirds this picture, and in a whole 100 years no experiment has managed to contradict it. But questions remain - for me and for other physicists. How to correctly interpret quantum theory has been a matter of conflict among theorists almost as long as this theory has existed. Some may even say that what the theory is really telling us is that our knowledge of physical reality will forever remain limited, at best a cartoon of a deeper but inaccessible truth.
I was drawn to this wealth of questions when I first read about quantum theory in popular science books as a teenager. When I learned that the common way to speak of quantum theory is to call it counterintuitive, it only became more interesting to me. If the theory that underlies not just our understanding of the world, but also technologies like computers and lasers, was counterintuitive should we not spend some time questioning our intuition?
The problem seemed both mathematical, emotional and philosophical. I was ravenous for it, never feeling like I got enough. Too full of veggie fajitas and coffee, rubbing my eyes, which were decidedly still on New York time, I remind myself not to let cynicism over how science has been professionalized, how its funded, and how me and my colleagues are asked to report on it take that hunger for understanding away from me.
***
On my third day in Anaheim, I get excited about complexity theory.
I did study math in college, but I never practiced it at a level that would have made me a proper mathematician so phrases like ‘complexity theory’ sound attractive to me, like we may be flirting, but I need lots of handholding when it comes to understanding them. Crudely, complexity theory sorts computational problems into classes based on how many resources you’d have to use to solve them. It’s a formal way to differentiate between “this computation could have run on a clunky personal computer you had in your family’s living room in the early 2000s” and “this one requires a supercomputer.”
Most interestingly, researchers can sometimes classify problems that we don’t actually know how to solve, where you cannot argue that a problem is hard simply by quantifying the labor that it took to solve it. It’s a tantalizing level of abstraction where a problem’s difficulty can be argued about separately from its solution. You can take an optimistic view where knowing what complexity class a problem falls into will help us set benchmarks for building future computers. Or you can be a fatalist and decide that some problems are bound to always mock us and our machines, that complexity theory will ultimately humble us out of thinking that we can build a computer with unlimited computational power.
And many physicists not all that different from me have recently entered the computer building business. It’s a match that is in some sense heaven-made: a computer is just a physical system undergoing a bunch of physics processes that we’ve learned to control. In 1991, physicist Rolf Landauer wrote that “information is physical,” underscoring exactly the idea that information processing, like in computers, can never be made fully intangible.
He and his students thought that computers should be built very differently than those we have now, that they should take advantage of the way physics laws push systems to behave instead of trying to control them. Because traditional computers are all about this kind of control, from the standpoint of using energy and producing heat, they are terribly inefficient. “A conventional computer is, essentially, an expensive electric heater that happens to perform a small amount of computation as a side effect,” physicists Michael Frank wrote several years ago. Now, he is part of a start-up that is pursuing an untraditional approach to building computers that stands a good chance of ending up more efficient. However, the most physics-driven computers that exist right now are those that center on harnessing quantum effects.
To be clear, existing quantum computers are nothing like what you may imagine when you picture a computer. They are tiny chips embedded in copper structures that look like steampunk chandeliers but are actually filled with liquid helium which causes radical cooling and keeps the warm, non-quantum world firmly at bay. Some quantum computers are a mess of lasers trained on a small glass chamber filled with barely visible atoms or glowing ions. A physicist I spoke to recently compared a quantum computer that would be big enough to be truly useful to a particle collider, an engineering behemoth.
Quantum computing companies have become better at packing these devices into slick boxes, or at least those that fit into server racks, and that PR professionals tell me are sized like pizza boxes. But none of these computers can even remotely compare to a thin gray rectangle that you can just slip into your work bag or balance on a tiny table at a coffee shop. And depending on what the future, and complexity theorists, shows us they can practically do, quantum computers might never get that ubiquitous anyway. Yet, building, marketing and, increasingly, selling them has become a billion dollar industry, an incredible feat when you consider that existing quantum computers are currently not good for much.
They make lots of errors because their special quantum properties are easily destroyed by any incursion from the non-quantum world around them, from temperature fluctuations in the room to static between wires that connect them to input and output devices. But a perfect quantum computer, I learned in Anaheim, could not only quickly complete calculations that may take billions of years on even the best contemporary supercomputers but also upend our most abstract, most idealized understanding of what a computer is.
It all goes back to the work of Alonzo Church and Alan Turing in the 1930s when they formulated what is now known as the Church-Turing hypothesis. It’s an argument that aims to formulate what a computer is in a way completely removed from hardware. In the 1930s computers were mechanical, large, and still more machines than what we call devices today, but the “Turing machine” is described fairly abstractly. It is nothing more specific than a machine that manipulates a set of symbols according to some preset rules and prints them on infinite amounts of memory tape. the generality, and therefore the vagueness, of this description is a feature not a bug - it allows researchers to make sweeping statements.
The Church-Turing hypothesis is one such statement. It defines what it means for a function to be “computable” on any machine by referencing whether it could be computed on a Turing machine. Researchers later extended the hypothesis by adding the idea of efficiency so the version I heard discussed in Anaheim, the “extended Church-Turing hypothesis,” dealt not only with what can be computed, but also what can be computed in a practical amount of time.
But there is a blind spot here: Church and Turing didn’t account for quantum physics. Could their highly idealized machine really be a metric for what is efficiently computable if it didn’t have the option of going quantum? Maybe quantum computers can beat the extended Church-Turing hypothesis and the Turing machine can be unseated in its roles as the ultimate computing reference, I learned during one researcher’s presentation.
As a reporter, most information about quantum computers comes to me in the form of press releases. Most are trying to convince me that such-and-such company has made the best quantum computer yet, but the sense of ‘best’ morphs often and quickly, often seeming to be in tenuous tension with the objective facts of the device more than reflecting them exactly. There’s an ecosystem being built here and my position in it is precarious.
It’s not my job to offer free hype to anyone, but if a genuine science breakthrough happens I can’t degrade it’s value just because it was corporate resources and policy that made it happen. I understand that writing a superlative headline can eventually be leveraged to get more money from a venture capitalist; I have been told before that tech CEOs read my reporting. But making quantum computers better, or making them at all, is essentially a problem of quantum physics, of being a literal quantum mechanic. I can’t ignore that. Yet, every corporate quantum computing breakthrough gives me a kind of uncomfortable pause that, in an ideal world, science wouldn’t ever elicit in someone who is already enthralled by it.
But talk to me about whether a quantum computer is a paradigm shift even when no money is involved, even if no papers are published and no one’s tenure committee involved, just as an abstract idea, just as something the human mind conjured upon looking at nature, and I will get excited. Tell me that we have expanded the space of our imagination, and the space where our conjectures and theories and maybe some hunches and daydreams can live, and I’ll tell you science is the best thing we’ve ever stumbled upon. I know this is romantic. I know this is idealistic. I know the real world is out there with its carrots and sticks of prestige, paychecks, journal papers, h-indices and traffic numbers. But I want to believe that that is not the only way in which the world can be “real.”
A week later, back in New York, I get several other physicists on the phone and find out that there isn’t necessarily consensus on what quantum computers mean for the extended Church-Turing hypothesis. The more abstract we get the less my sources agree. I am perplexed, I am annoyed, I love science an awful lot in the moment. Then, I call my editor and we workshop a headline for a possible magazine piece about the whole thing. This is all so wooly, they say. Can we really package this is an exciting piece of news for a regular person, they worry. We go back-and-forth on the word count and the format. The story morphs and ultimately runs without a single mention of Church, Turing, or their hypothesis.
***
The next day is also marked by quantum computing, but in the exact opposite way. A company that is already a giant in traditional computing, but hasn’t yet broken into the quantum business as much as they’d like is presenting details of a new quantum computing chip. It has already been deemed controversial. The company previously published a paper and the paper was met with criticism. Then they published another, building off the first and trying to strengthen the claim that their technology will be an absolute game changer. That paper was also met with criticism. Regardless, the company launched an audacious press campaign. Some very prestigious newspapers printed some really odd, misleading sentences about the physics of the chip in the aftermath. My physics journalists group chat lit up with grumbling and disappointed messages.
Covering controversial papers and ambitious media campaigns is part of my job, so I called many physicists about the second paper, the one that would be followed by a presentation in Anaheim. They told me that there wasn’t enough data to replicate the results, that they were unconvinced, and they pointed me to reports written by peer reviewers and notes that the journal’s editors attached to the publication. Some physicists dragged the company online, but Ted Cruz showed their new chip off on the Senate floor. Everyone said it was all such a mess yet here I was now, in California, an hour early for an 8 am presentation, sitting in a packed room where everyone was waiting with baited breath to see new data. Behind me, someone joked about how this is Woodstock for physicists. They must know little to nothing about Woodstock, a petty thought cut thought through my anxiety.
The rest of the day is a blur. Presentation, Q&A, frantic note taking, approaching people in the hallway, some banter, some tension, “are you really writing this down” and “I don’t mean to bash anyone but” and “our results speak for themselves.” Then, my dedicated interview time with the company’s chief scientists for the project, but they are running late and I end up splitting my time, now not so dedicated, with two other journalists. Fine. One of them files their story a few hours before me and it runs on their publication’s website while mine is still being edited and going through a check with my magazine’s legal department. My publication is not the first to have an article up about this controversial chip updated. Less fine, but I get away with it.
I’ve done eight hours of work, but the day is not yet over. To soothe myself I duck into a session about the physics of how centipedes navigate mazes. Apparently they hit their head a lot but their legs twirl in incredible ways. This is not a story, my editor says. I’m still really like the whole thing. Eventually, we could have multi-legged robots that navigate terrains full of obstacles very well because of this research, I try, but “eventually” is rarely strong enough for a headline.
The next day the story about the chip, and how everyone is criticizing it and the company that made it, is everywhere. It’s so soapy and frothy that every outlet wants their own version. Quantum physicists on social media have taken to making memes about it. It’s a mess and I am part of it. My reporting has contributed to the messiness. I know that many readers clicked on the story that I furiously pulled together in the surprisingly loud press room in Anaheim.
Have you noticed I’ve told you nothing about the physics of this controversial chip? It’s supposed to be based on a beautiful idea from condensed matter physics, the kind that I found tremendously exciting when I learnt about it in graduate school. The company claims to have taken something that looked like textbook curio - an elusive particles that only shows up under the most specific circumstances - made it real and put it to work of running computations. Me from ten years ago would have been so excited to hear that they even tried.
But the beautiful physics idea long stopped being the story here; it’s, at best, become half a paragraph in an endless scroll of business and marketing grievances. That night, I snag the last portion of vegan dumplings from a restaurant in my hotel and the feeling that I am actively part of the problem here makes them curdle in my stomach.
In Arizona there is a telescope with 5000 eyes. They look backwards in time, cataloguing the universe’s youth.
This is the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI, and its eyes are made from fiber optic cables. They gather light from a preselected set of galaxies then decompose it into different colors. Researchers use that split to reverse engineer the galaxies’ distance from Earth and how much those distances, the space that light traversed between each galaxy and DESI’s eyes, stretched out during that travel time. The universe is getting bigger as light is traveling through it, which changes that light's color. So far, DESI has observed nearly 15 million bright celestial objects in our sky.
On March 19th, I woke up thinking about it. “DESI shakes up the dark Universe - an overview,” read one of the entries on my calendar, but I already knew what the shake up would be. I had been lucky enough to have been shown some data early, to have written about it even before I left my New York newsroom. The second someone in Anaheim made the result public, my story would go live online.
While I was reporting it, a researcher had told me he never thought we’d learn what DESI seems to be learning about the cosmos in his lifetime. I later saw him in the ballroom where one of his colleagues meticulously presented all the details of the finding to an increasingly excited audience. I wondered whether his heart was pounding too. Because I had written my piece in advance I had the talking point at my fingertips - DESI has shown tantalizing signs that all we think we know about how the universe is expanding, and what its fate may be, is incorrect - but who can actually process a statement like that in mere days?
“We’re seeing something amazing with the whole universe,” another physicist told me a few days earlier and I instantly felt my body tense in an effort to make sense of a phrase as gigantic as “the whole universe.” And DESI hasn’t even seen all the galaxies it has been built to look at yet!
The expansion of the universe is thought to be driven by “dark energy,” a force as mysterious as its name suggests. There is no consensus on what exactly it is or what about the way our universe formed brought it into existence, but since the late 1990s all observational evidence we have about the cosmos has indicated that it does exist. In fact, if you tried to use observational data to tally up how mass and energy are distributed across the universe, and Einstein’s theory of special relativity reveals that mass and energy are interconvertible, you’d find that dark energy accounts for more than two thirds of that tally.
But dark energy is not just ubiquitous, it is also directly tied to the fate of the universe. Specifically, it is the reason why the universe is expanding, and expanding at an accelerating rate, with distances between celestial objects growing larger more and more quickly. As far as the future of our planet goes, this means that all other planets and stars around us will eventually be carried out of sight by this quickening spread of spacetime, like adjacent dots on a balloon that move away from each other as it is inflated. The cosmic fate of our planet is dark and cold, all because of dark energy.
Over the course of a well-prepared hour of slides at that ballroom in March, a DESI physicist alerted everyone that this may not be the right picture. Slide after slide, he showed the instrument’s data combined with observations of other telescopes and fitted to different mathematical models of what we know about our physical reality. By itself, data from DESI is not revolutionary, but when what its many eyes saw over the last three years gets combined with everything else we can measure about the sky, such as remnant radiation from the Big Bang or details of exploding stars, a picture of dark energy that is becoming weaker starts to emerge. The mysterious force powerful enough to keep stretching and stretching and stretching spacetime seems to be losing steam.
Does this mean that the cold and dark fate of the universe is now off the table? The result is not yet at the golden standard of statistical significance, but it is close and even the most careful of researchers that I discussed this data analysis with admitted that they would be surprised if it all turned out to be just a glitch or a fluke in the end. It helps that DESI already saw hints of this colossal change in dark energy last year, and the new data only made the case stronger. So, yes, it seems likely that we have been wrong about what the universe will look like in a few billion years.
Maybe it will simply expand less quickly than we thought. Maybe, if dark energy keeps changing, the universe will eventually stop expanding. A researcher shocked me by bringing up the possibility of the “Big Crunch,” or a grand cosmic contraction, as well. Even as a physicist, I had always thought of that particular option as more akin to science fiction than science fact.
In one of the talks that I attended about this finding while I was in Anaheim, a physicist speculated on what the new consensus on dark energy may become then immediately stopped herself. “I shouldn’t have said that. The future is unpredictable,” she said. I kept thinking about those competing instincts to both make highly informed guesses about what will happen next and to leave space for the universe to surprise us. The idea of unpredictability may sound opposite to the mission of science, but in many ways it is where science thrives the most, and where scientists are most engaged and inspired.
Unpredictability invites some of our best “detective” work with sensors, detectors and data analysis, some of our most creative mathematical imaginings, and the creation of remarkable instruments like DESI. Science aims to chip away at the unpredictability of it all as it is a project of knowledge gathering and meaning making, a project of uncovering a few steady supports that we can hold onto as we hurtle forward. To do that well, however, you have to be open to the whole universe sometimes showing you something that will really shake up your sense of certainty - especially if you have enough eyes to really look.
***
On the day of the DESI announcement, walking back to my hotel a young blonde in a hoodie stopped me on the street. “You probably don’t remember me,” she started to say, but I did. She explained that I had been her high school physics teacher and I explained that I remembered what university she had gone on to after acing my modern physics class. It was an oddly breathy encounter underneath a row of palm trees, both of us sort of bewildered in the jarring light of the hotel CVS, or maybe it was a Walgreens, reddish but not exactly warm. “You really marked me,” my former student said after we exchanged some pleasantries about the conference. My own personal universe shot up in size a thousand-fold, its temperature and brightness increasing instantly.
***
On day six of my stay at the conference, I am really tired, but I track down a room in the lowest level of the convention center where physicists are having a very microscopic discussion about the nature of physical reality. Coffee in hand, I plop into the back row and pull my terribly inefficient work computer into my lap. It makes my knees warm as I hit “record” and open a fresh word document for notes. Throughout the session, several speakers joke about how the kind of questions they study, the so-called fundamentals of quantum theory, never bring in funding so they have to find a way to connect them to something that sounds more applied, such as quantum computing. I cringe every time because I know they are correct and I worry about whether the situation they are in will soon become even more dire. As I am writing this, for instance, all new research grants at the US National Science Foundation have been frozen at the urging of the Department of Government Efficiency. Many researchers are anticipating a wave of cancellations as well.
Of course, all of the talks in this session are wildly fascinating. Many discuss just exactly how our world, which we do not experience as quantum, emerges from its distinctly quantum building blocks. You’ve never gone out and seen some weird quantum thing with your eyes, a researcher later tells me and I have to agree. I know the world is made of atoms and light is made from particles called photons, and under some circumstances they all have the option of being very different, like not being able to decide whether they’re a particle or a wave, but somehow physics has censored those instances from observers like me.
This crossover from quantum to non-quantum, or classical, is a key question for researchers who spend their days trying to demystify quantum theory and push it beyond ideas that its founders left us with a century ago. Last year, I spoke to a physicist whose work in this area led him to proposing that we simply must redefine what “physical reality” means except, of course, nothing about that was simple. He spoke in this session too, and I was delighted to hear it all again, a somewhat familiar entry in the torrent of ideas about why everything is just the way it is and not any more normal or anymore strange, a flood of meaning that I am always looking to be carried away by.
Eventually, my computer gives out, so I take notes in a tiny notebook, in a scrawl that seems to have only gotten worse since my days as a graduate student. Briefly, I worry about whether I’ll be able to read my notes later, but overwhelmingly it just feels good to be there, alert and with a pen at the ready. I understand why “deep feeling of satisfaction concerning efforts to unravel the basic meaning of the world being real,” is not an ideal entry into a budget of most institutions that shape our lives today, but I am never not imagining a different reality. This is one of the gift I have received through my life-long engagement with science. I am deeply grateful for it.
Many hours later, I am at dinner, sharing perfectly crispy mushrooms, fried rice, noodles and something called “vegan pork,” with friends I had not seen in years. They were all senior to me in graduate school, and they all helped me become involved with student organizing, advocacy and peer mentoring. It is so good to see them again. It is even better to laugh with them. We realize it’s been exactly ten years since some of us co-founded a student organization that ended up really shifting the culture of our old department. Immediately, we start imaging where we might be in ten more, what world we hope to cross over into.
A lot of us are not organizers, or teachers, anymore. Like me, some of us now work in places that court creativity, but are at the end of the day still business and have the kind of goals, for success, for growth, for revenue, that business have. But our ten year fantasies are still similar to what they were a decade ago when we were in graduate school. We are all imagining a reality whose bones are those of community, of sharing, of taking care of each other.
Two of the people in our group are still teaching physics every day and I am so grateful for the mark that I know they are making by bringing this spirit, even in the smallest of quantities, into their classrooms. These are the things that feel worth every penny to me, and that feel so unambiguously real.
***
By the time Friday, my last day in California, finally comes, my schedule is too full to think about anything other than getting through my to-do list before boarding an overnight flight to New York. In the increasingly empty press room, I conduct three interviews. One gets briefly interrupted by a “goodbye” from a journalist friend who has been spending lots of time abroad so we never hang out anymore. One is preceded by a long discussion of New York style pizza sauce and my lukewarm take that carrots never belong in tomato sauce, for no reason other than it’s been a long week and everyone in the press room is a little loopy - or just loopy enough to talk sauce before talking black holes.
The third interview is on Zoom and I am devastated when I realize I had not brought my good headset with me. A lingering older journalist definitely overhears the tinny voice of my source who is being a great sport about my technological challenges. I do my best to fill the rest of my day with more talks, to summarize them in a neat pitch email to my editors, to keep busy until the convention center switches into a completely different mode. The physics conference is over, and a dance conference is next. New banners are going up as I search for a seat near an outlet in one of the sunny second floor lounges.
When I go to pick up my luggage from the designated conference storage room, the man who works there notices the “I-heart-physics” pin on my blazer and tells me that he is relieved that “someone still believes in science.” I try to say something about how many, many physicists who really, really do believe in science were here all week, but the man has a short monologue about the decline of the world at the ready and he has already started delivering it. I nod, I smile. I get it - we’re all worried for the future, and we do have good reasons to be - but I am still annoyed.
At the airport, I eat a very leafy but ultimately unsatisfying burrito bowl from Qdoba and drink half of the worst matcha latte I have ever tried. I will only touch down at JFK airport early the next morning and the thought of spending the night in the airplane mixes with the bad food and the man’s doomy demeanor to make my body taut and heavy. I promise myself that I will write something reflective about it all on the plane, but then I really don’t. I don’t even crack the book of poetry I brought with me to feed my soul something that has not been tainted by work.
The next day, after navigating JFK taxis at 6 in the morning and falling right into bed for more hours than I am willing to put on record, I talk myself into going outside to explore a grocery store that opened on our block while I was away. I’m always buying the same things: fruit, beans, ajvar, a bar of chocolate or two, maybe the good vegan yogurt when it’s in stock. The array of Eastern European products, some from my home country of Croatia, excites me, but what I am really shopping for is comfort. I grab a jar of pickled hot peppers that I know will disappoint me by being nothing like my grandfather’s. Shoveling oranges into my bag at the checkout counter while trying to smile at the clerk, I realize that I am feeling unexpectedly raw, like the perfectly mid fruit might just make me cry then and there. I tell myself that I just need to sleep some more. But that’s almost certainly not all there is to it.
It’s being back at the coffee shop with my research family, it’s being back on the street with my former student, it’s being back at dinner with my graduate school friends, it’s being back in that talk about DESI urging us to reimagine the future of the cosmos, it’s talking complexity theory and black holes and quantum reality, it’s feeling the shadow of the physicists that I once was, echoes of how much I wanted to learn clashing with the sheer deafening sound of information that I did end up taking in.
I am raw because so much has gotten under my skin that week, so much that some of my conception of the world has peeled off of me and now a new layer of meaning is forming. Certainly, some of it is cynical and disillusioned, but some of it is also cosmic and quantum and all the other words that sounded like invocations of magic to me as a child. Walking home from the grocery store, I sift through my feelings knowing that what hides in that mess is gratitude. For me, the quantum jubilee may never end.
Best,
Karmela
*Quantum supremacy is a term used by quantum computing researchers to denote computational feats that a classical computer could never complete, but a quantum machine can. To establish their dominance on the market, or to claim a scientific breakthrough, academic and commercial research teams devise special calculations that they hope will confirm that their quantum computer can achieve supremacy. Except for two recent cases, most claims of quantum supremacy have been refuted by other researchers finding more clever ways to use traditional computers. Because of this, the term is somewhat controversial.