Is Quantum Science About To Change EVERYTHING? | Unveiled XL Documentary

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Is Quantum Science About to Change Everything?</h4>

Quantum science is exploding in the twenty-first century. Whether it’s researchers redesigning the atom, applying it to a revolution in quantum computing, or even developing real life superpowers via subatomic means… it’s clear that quantum physics and mechanics are now a guiding light to lead humanity into the future.

In this video, we’ll take a closer look at the incredible history that’s taken us to this point. We’ll also explore the mind-bending wider theory of the microverse, and its potential applications - including for time travel - that could really change the world. And finally, we’ll imagine what life might actually be like if we ever move into the quantum realm ourselves.

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; is quantum science about to change everything?

Everything is made of atoms. It’s something that we all know within ourselves, but it perhaps isn’t something that we really stop to think about very often. And it’s certainly a tricky concept to wrap our minds around, that everything everywhere has an atomic structure that we can’t actually see… but that’s also vital and fundamental to that thing’s very existence. How, then, with seemingly nothing to go on, did the first formulators of the atom come to that particular conclusion?

How did we discover atoms?

To watch this video, you’re looking at a screen… but, actually, all you’re really taking in is atoms, arranged in a very particular way. Look away from your screen and you might see a book, an apple, a swimming pool, a rhinoceros, anything, and it’s exactly the same deal. Certain atoms, built and arranged in certain ways, so that on our level we understand them as whatever it is that they’ve amalgamated to be. But, of course, the atomic structure of something - be that the water you drink, the atmosphere you breathe, the cake you bake, and so on - is always key. Underneath it all, even you yourself are only atoms. Human beings are an especially complex mass of atoms, yes, but still that’s all that we really are.

In the old days, stereotypically wise figures might’ve dabbled in alchemy. In short, alchemy was like an attempt to try to control atoms (even before the discovery of them) and mostly to try to turn one thing into something else - usually gold, but that’s beside the point. Because today, broadly, we know that same pursuit, that same attempted mixing up of materials, as chemistry. And, in the modern world we really can break down all (or most) materials into their fundamental parts, and even (in some cases) we can rearrange them. Again, it’s merely a case of having the right atomic knowledge, no alchemy needed. But, still, we’ve only had this level of knowledge for the past century or so. And it’s been a long time coming.

Theories on a base level of matter do date back far earlier, to the times of Ancient Greece, and particularly to the fifth century BCE philosopher, Democritus. He wrestled with an idea; if you have something and cut it in half, and then half again, and then again, and again, and again indefinitely, would you eventually reach a point where what was left could no longer be cut? Would you eventually reach a kind of starting point for matter, a base unit, below which it was impossible to go? This hypothesized unit was then labeled an atom, with the word deriving from the Greek atomos - which means uncuttable or indivisible.

However, from there, this really revolutionary idea was effectively shelved for a couple thousand years. It’s not until the early 1800s that atomic theory properly takes hold again, thanks mostly to one John Dalton. His most famous contribution to science is the Law of Multiple Proportions, otherwise known as Dalton’s Law, first put forward in 1804. Through it, Dalton realized that the masses of simple chemical compounds could always be reduced back down into ratios with small whole numbers. More simply, Dalton was able to show that whenever, say, oxygen were present, it was possible to calculate how many parts (or units) of oxygen there were, based on mass. The structure of a compound, although far too small to be seen, could always be determined. The difference between, for example, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide could now be explained.

Dalton didn’t quite have it all correct from the beginning, though. At this stage, it was still thought that there was nothing smaller than the atom, but we now know that that’s wrong. We know, for instance, that an atomic nucleus is made up of protons, neutrons and electrons… subatomic objects that further serve to differentiate one element from the next, from the next. But still, Dalton’s work is widely held to be the beginning of atomic theory. He picked up from where the ancient philosophers left off, and built a base from which emerging physicists could work and experiment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Unsurprisingly, and almost exactly one hundred years after Dalton’s Law was introduced, Albert Einstein enters the fray. In fact, Einstein’s explanation of something called Brownian Motion - the seemingly random movement of particles when suspended in water or gas - goes down as one of his first major scientific achievements. Einstein suggested that Brownian Motion was quite simply caused by the movement of countless other (and smaller) particles that surround the larger and more noticeable ones. This, again, was something of a game changer, as it encouraged us to think not just of objects but of reality as a whole as though it were one swirling, connected, interacting mass of atoms - which, ultimately, it is. Visual depictions of Brownian Motion are somewhat headache-inducing, but that’s what makes it all the more incredible that this almost vibrating hum or particles should be happening, all the time, all around us.

From the late 1800s through to the First World War, physicists including J. J. Thomson, Ernest Rutherford, and Niels Bohr worked to incorporate the newly discovered electron (discovered by Thomson) into the then ever-changing model of what an atom actually looked like. By the time of the Second World War, that model had been put to such use that we were now capable of splitting the atom, via nuclear fission. The most infamous result of this being the advent of the nuclear bomb. Around this time, and especially with the war effort on both sides driving research forwards, a number of high profile scientists were involved in the development of nuclear physics - including, still, Albert Einstein, plus Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, and Robbert Oppenheimer. 

Unsurprisingly, and mostly due to the bomb, experimentation with atoms became something that some people feared, post World War Two. One of the difficulties was that, although high ranking physicists now understood the atom better than ever before, it remained something of a mysterious commodity for everyone else watching on. As we move through the twenty-first century, much of that fear factor has disappeared, perhaps simply because subatomic study is such a standard backdrop to contemporary life. Although, that said, we do still see various examples of rising panic, such as when the Large Hadron Collider was first switched on at CERN, and many worried that it would instantly create a black hole on Earth and spaghettify us all into an early death. Thankfully, that didn’t happen, and atomic science has now fully made its latest jump into quantum mechanics.

If the atom is hard to visualize, then the quarks and leptons of the subatomic quantum realm are even harder. But, thanks to the Standard Model of Elementary Particles, we do at least have a structure to refer back to. The model is being continually updated, as researchers make more and more breakthroughs as a result of work at facilities like the LHC - with one of the most famous achievements in modern times being the successful detection of the Higgs Boson, the so-called God Particle, in 2012. It makes you wonder, what would John Dalton make of today’s advancements?

No matter how much more we achieve, however, perhaps nothing will eclipse the scale of the shift uncovered by the likes of Dalton, from the early eighteenth century onwards. Before atomic theory, we didn’t yet know quite how much of a mystery the physical world really was to us. We were largely ignorant to its inner workings. 

There had, of course, been countless methods and tricks discovered wherein the chemical makeup of our surrounding materials was already being manipulated. We see it in the cooking of meals, the making of drinks, the building of houses, towns, and cities… whenever anything - any object, material, liquid, or gas - is altered on a macro, visual level, there’s some kind of atomic restructuring taking place down below. But those early scientists were the first to truly grasp this… and their realization forced us all to view reality itself completely differently. 

Now, we’re busy fleshing out even lower levels via the Standard Model, but still the atom itself was the original and greatest watershed moment. A before and after point in time, from which we launched into an all new age for science and technology. 

As with astronomy, where we can see and understand more of the universe thanks to bigger and better telescopes, our microscopes are now improving at such a rate that whole new worlds are appearing to us inside of atoms. With the discovery of the quantum level, we’ve even had to develop a new set of physics to make sense of it all. But, how small can we really go? And does the journey ever end? 

Could the microverse be a reality? 

Simply put, the microverse is the idea that there are other plains, other universes existing at the micro-level within our own universe. If we zoom in on a particular molecule, we can go close enough to see the atoms that make it up… with scientists once believing that “that was it” - atoms were the smallest possible parts of nature. We now know that if we go further, we see the nucleus of that atom. Further still for the neutrons and protons that make up that nucleus. Here, again, was one time accepted as “the end”, the smallest we could possibly get. But we’re now well aware that those neutrons and protons are also formed by other smaller pieces; quarks held together by gluons. Thanks to relatively recent experiments, we also know that if you try to separate two quarks from one another, the energy it takes to do so can birth completely new quarks in the process - leading some to see the quantum level as limitless. 

Which brings us to the microverse theory - a kind of mirror image to the regular multiverse theory - which says that if you were to somehow reduce your own size infinitely, you’d eventually find yourself inside of an entire universe inside of an atom. The rule could hold true for every atom, too, meaning there are near-infinite universes thriving at the micro-level. Nowadays it’s a go-to theme for modern sci-fi and pop culture - featuring in the Marvel comics and on shows like “Rick and Morty” - where whole galaxies, planets and perhaps even living beings could all exist within a particle. Thinking the other way, there’s even the possibility that we ourselves exist inside what’s little more than a single particle inside someone else’s much larger universe. The microverse works two-fold; you can either go up and up, expanding outwards… or down and down, reverting inwards. 

For some, it’s absurd, and the idea definitely is hypothetical... But, while it may seem impossible that so much matter could fit inside such a small point, consider that the universe isn’t what it seems. All of the visible matter we can see only accounts for around 4% of our total universe. Atoms have a similar make-up; they’re 99.9 % “empty” space! Electrons exist in a cloud around the nucleus - which is around 100,000 times smaller than the atom itself - but in the space in between there seems to be complete nothingness. To look at it another way, if we were able to push the matter that makes up your body so close together so as to eliminate that empty space, we’d each be compressed down into the size of a tiny speck of dust. So, what if we did something similar for an entire universe? Everything condensed to the size of a single atom.

Well, conventional physics says that we’d probably get a black hole, as the smallest possible thing in the universe is thought to be the singularity at the center of a black hole - a place so dense that it bends spacetime infinitely to a smaller and smaller point. According to the microverse theory, though, such inconceivable processes could be happening all over the place, all of the time. And, given that it’s also theorized that when black holes collapse, they’re able to birth whole new universes - this too is theoretically happening all across reality at any available second. In one relatively traditional (though still totally hypothetical) idea, it’s argued that our own “big bang creation of the universe” could have been the result of a higher-dimensional star collapsing into a black hole. That’s one theory for how everything we’ve ever known came into being; but the microverse says that similar, spectacular creations might be happening all of the time, just on a much smaller scale. At the very least, they could be happening inside of other black holes that we know about. 

Of course, none of this is proven. And if we ever did prove it, then it’d signal a major shift in how we think of and appreciate the experience of life. As we’ve already found at the quantum level, widely accepted laws of physics can be completely thrown out. There’s no saying that any microverse universe should look or behave even comparatively close to our own. But if there are infinite variations, then there are also microverse set-ups that we would recognise. A strange aspect of modern science is that classical mechanics perfectly explains everything we can see about the world - as long as we don’t go too large or too small. When you go too big, you need general relativity to work things out. When you go too small, you need quantum mechanics. The rules of the game can change in either direction, and maybe continue to change the further out or in you go. While we could well be part of something much larger, we could also be part of something much smaller. 

Clearly there are some major question marks surrounding the microverse theory. For one, wouldn’t we just know about it? If everything we knew was made up of endless other clumps of endless matter, wouldn’t we be able to detect the mass or see the black holes? Maybe not when we consider the Higgs Boson, or what some term the “God Particle…” The Higgs Boson shocked the scientific community when it was discovered, because it proves the Higgs field, a fundamental concept which is somehow able to give particles mass when they pass through it. It’s even been suggested that a Higgs field is what ultimately gave our own universe its mass - but before it passed through the field, it was nothing. On a micro level, waiting for an incredibly far-out moment of revelation, other universes - or potential universes - could exist inside of the atoms of our own, but with no detectable mass from our perspective because they don’t interact with anything like the Higgs Boson or Higgs field. This variation pitches the microverse as though it’s an untapped source, laying dormant because that’s the way reality panned out. 

But, regardless of how it’s structured, there is a totally different world “down there” at the subatomic level. A place wholly unknowable to human eyes, with completely different rules but also some striking similarities with the universe as we know it. More than that, though, if you stretch the theory far enough, then everything that we know could also be a subatomic speck of nothingness on the fingertips of another, higher power. It’s all a matter of perspective.

What do you hope technology will achieve in the future? There are so many challenges and possibilities that lay ahead for humankind, but of all the sci-fi-style superpowers that we could develop… time travel surely ranks high in terms of its potential to change the world forever. So, are we almost ready to finally make that breakthrough?

Will quantum computers make time travel possible?

The debate surrounding time travel is as old as, well, time. For decades, even centuries, humanity has been considering whether it could ever be possible to move not only through our spatial plane, but also through a temporal one, as well - more so than just into the future, one second at a time. Rather, we’re after true, four dimensional living, where the past is never truly over… and the future is always worth a visit. The flux capacitors of Hollywood films have certainly inspired imaginations over the years… with the quest for time travel almost inevitably bleeding over into the race to achieve faster-than-light movement. But now, with arguably a new age of technological exploration only just beginning, have we finally found the key to open this particular door.

Theories surrounding quantum physics are hardly new news in themselves. For much of the twentieth century, scientists were busily getting to grips with the subatomic realm, describing atoms, splitting atoms, and discovering all of the even smaller parts that make even the atoms themselves look like vast and complicated structures. Today, the quanta - the tiniest packets of reality - are reasonably well known. And, though the standard model remains an incomplete and ever-evolving concept… we are now putting it to practical use in the here-and-now macro world, with quantum computing.

This is something we’ve covered in previous videos, but to recap briefly… because, actually, it could be crucial to the question of time travel, specifically. While traditional computers carry standard, binary bits of information - understood as ones and zeroes - the quantum bits (or qubits) in quantum computers can be either a one or a zero. This freedom dramatically expands the processing power they offer. And it’s here where the genuine possibility for time travel comes in, because some believe that quantum computing will actually be powerful enough to bend and break the rules of time.

We already know that, at the quantum level, the laws of physics somewhat fall apart. Quantum entanglement enables apparent speed-of-light travel; quantum data can easily move between wave and particle states; quantum superposition enables chunks of subatomic information to apparently be in two places at once. We know that all of that’s already true… so, next stop, traveling back into the past. And multiple experiments seemingly have already shown that it is possible.

Perhaps the first murmurings of quantum time travel came in March 2019, when details emerged of a multi-authored paper from an international team based in Russia, the US, and Switzerland. According to a report from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (or MIPT), physicists were able to “reverse time using a quantum computer”. 

To set the scene, the MIPT explains how an isolated electron in the vacuum of interstellar space (i.e., how the tiniest bit of reality in the least chaotic conditions in the universe) could, theoretically, be “smeared” between the present and the past, for a tiny fraction of a second. It’s suggested that a random fluctuation in the cosmic microwave background radiation (or CMB) might achieve this, although the chances of it happening are extremely, extremely low. As the MIPT puts it, even if you spent the entire lifetime of the universe again, watching ten billion-plus electrons for every second of that existence… then you’d only see an electron smear back in time once, and only for much less than a second when it did so.

Scientists are patient people, but they’re not that patient… so the team set about applying what they knew to a quantum computing exercise, hoping to crunch those incredible odds all the way down so that they could eventually reverse time “on demand”. And, to some extent, they succeeded. Using a relatively simple two-qubit setup, they were able to set those qubits into life before effectively pausing them and sending them back to where they came from. Back in time, all the information within effectively untouched, and order seemingly restored out of growing chaos. With the two-qubit computer, the team was successful eighty-five percent of the time; when they added a third qubit, that rate dropped to fifty percent of the time; and, were they to have added more, the rate would likely have continued to fall with every added complexity. But, nevertheless, on some level, this could be described as real, true, observable and possible backwards time travel.

Just over a year later, in July 2020, news broke of a joint research project out of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Here, in a study involving another quantum simulator - in a similar, although not identical setup to the MIPT experiment - researchers were able to show that the fabled butterfly effect didn’t take hold at the quantum level. The butterfly effect is the theory that even small changes in the past can massively alter the present, and the same for the present into the future… but, when the Los Alamos team ran qubits through their quantum processor, again as though back into the past, but then altered them ever so slightly… it was found that very little effect was still noticeable when those qubits were brought back to the present. They hadn’t carried the altered information through, in any meaningful way. Could this, then, be a sign that quantum time travel is not only possible, but potentially safe, as well?

Finally, in late 2022, reports were that there had been two independent studies, published within days of each other, both achieving a quantum time flip specifically with photons, the subatomic particles of light. This time, it wasn’t a quantum computer at the heart of the experiment, but a specially structured crystal… although it’s claimed that there could be major implications for quantum computing in the future. In short, the studies passed split photons through the crystal - making use of quantum superposition - and upon measuring them afterwards (when they’d recombined) they found that while one split had continued along the expected arrow of time… the other had turned against it.

At its heart, this could be seen as in direct defiance of the second law of thermodynamics and entropy - probably the trickiest barrier between us and time travel, in general. Ordinarily, entropy says that everything is always moving from order towards disorder, or chaos. It never goes the other way, which is essentially why we have the concept of time moving forwards in the first place. But, here, with photons shot through a crystal… it would appear that, actually, to some degree, physical matter and energy can move in the opposite direction, in an anti-direction, although the fact that the photons are split is important. Ultimately, this isn’t time travel just yet, and certainly not in any practical sense. It’s more a parting of the ways at the quantum level, and yet another subatomic mystery for science to add to its growing list.

Utilize those (or similar) crystals within quantum computers, though, and the already boundless states of a qubit potentially increase even further. The possible processing power soars again. For now, with all three of these studies, we can’t truly claim that time travel has been discovered via quantum computers. But could these projects yet prove to be the seeds for even greater ideas and breakthroughs? 

Today, we’re smearing qubits back into their own past… recording how changes do (and don’t register)... and sending split particles into a seemingly impossible realm. There’s still a long way to go, and a major scaling up operation that needs to happen… but, still, that’s why quantum computers might one day, perhaps, make time travel possible. 

It’s a popular theme in film and TV sci-fi, usually painted as some sort of psychedelic world. But is that how it really works? What’s actually going on at the quantum level? 

What if you entered the quantum realm? 

To understand the general strangeness of quantum mechanics we first need to think about light. Scientists were long baffled by light, unable to decide whether it was made up of waves or particles. Isaac Newton was one of the earliest to claim that light was made of particles, but countless others sought to prove that light had wave-like properties too… until Albert Einstein finally laid the matter to rest in the early 1900s, showing that light was both a wave (spreading in all directions) and a particle (moving in one). That light was measured in tiny pockets of energy called Quanta or, today, photons. But it only became stranger from there. 

Despite Einstein himself reportedly remaining skeptical about the theory, quantum mechanics - analyzing subatomic particles - was born out of these new schools of thought. Einstein’s issue with quantum theory was that he believed the world should be objective and, in some way, predictable and observable. But, when we zoom into the quantum realm, it’s full of crazy, strange phenomena that look as if they have no place in science at all. Here, all of our preconceived notions of what’s real and possible, the known laws of regular, classical mechanics, fall apart. In quantum mechanics everything exists in a cloud of probabilities, operating as though within a constant “what if?” hypothetical. Particles spin in two directions at the same time. Matter passes through solid barriers like a ghost. Two particles become entangled and their fates are then entwined. They could theoretically wind up on opposite sides of the universe, but they’d still somehow communicate instantly. Even temperature behaves in different ways, leaving cold spots where standard thermodynamics says there should be heat. One thing is certain; you would have to be incredibly small to enter such a place. 

Scientists distinguish something as quantum when it’s at it’s very smallest part, with distances in the quantum realm typically measuring less than 100 nanometers - with a nanometer equalling one billionth of a meter. Beyond that, it’s almost impossible to predict what the quantum realm would specifically look like. At this size, all objects lose any sense of shape. You’d exist amongst blurry, blobbish atoms and particles, drifting through infinitely vast expanses of apparent emptiness - so, in some ways, it’d feel as though you’d been abandoned in an exceptionally weird stretch of outer space. 

Crucially, the particles that do cross your path would seem to flash in and out of existence. They’d solidify only when you looked at them and exist like a shadow in the corner of your eye whenever you glanced away. In this way, quantum physics feeds into philosophical debate, seeming to redefine the relationship between matter and people. Schrodinger’s cat is a famous thought experiment by Erwin Schrodinger about Quantum theory. It posits that there’s a cat in a sealed box, with a vial of poison that’s set to randomly release at any time, killing the cat when it does. From our position outside the box, we can’t know whether the poison has been released yet, and so don’t know the cat’s fate. But, quantum mechanics says the cat is both alive and dead, much as a quantum particle is real and isn’t, and it’s only when we look inside the box that the reality will be confirmed. 

Another study proved something similar with light itself; the Double-slit experiment. Using a screen with two vertical slits cut into it, and shining light onto a canvas behind, scientists found an expected wave-like pattern with bright and dim strips. But, when they isolated the particles so that just a single photon passed through the slits at any one time, impossibly it still produced wave-like behavior. But then, right when testers set up a detector to actually see how this was happening, the screen changed again, and the light started acting like a particle. More broadly speaking, the universe acts in one way, but right when we observe it, it somehow changes - so what we see could seriously be considered “an illusion”. And this would be happening all the time could we view the universe at quantum level. 

If the quantum realm somehow leaked into our everyday life, it clearly wouldn’t follow the traditional laws of nature or even basic logic. Your very presence and perspective would constantly influence the behavior of everything you could comprehend. It’d be as though you had a piece of pizza with every topping imaginable all at the same time, but right when you decide you want pepperoni, it becomes pepperoni. Or as though you’d forgotten where you parked your car; the car would then exist as a cloud of probability, simultaneously being in every space that you could think of, and only choosing where it actually was when you began looking. 

So, in the quantum realm, everything would be constantly shifting, only settling into place when you actually observe it. In fact, even your own body would effectively scatter across all of existence until you actually looked down to view it - despite that being impossible in our own reality. Say you yourself were a quantum particle, though. There’s a high - even inevitable - chance that you’d get yourself entangled with someone else by merely bumping into each other, just as particles do. Actions then performed by that other “particle person” would affect your own experience, and decisions would suddenly be split between the both of you. In effect, if you decided to bike to work, your entangled partner would choose to drive. If you went to bed early, they’d stay up all night. If you span clockwise, they’d spin counter-clockwise. 

Were you to enter the quantum realm but retain knowledge of your past life as a full-size person, life would undoubtedly be tricky - if not impossible - to get used to. You could never be certain about anything, but could also be certain about everything, safe in the knowledge that nature responds to your own observations. Convince yourself you adopted a puppy, and you might just find one pawing at your feet. Believe you can walk through a wall, and you will. Hey, you might even be able to teleport. You, like all the particles around you, now exist in all possible places at once… So, if you close your eyes and picture yourself on a desert island, you’d feasibly end up there. It’d be a unique, colorful and endless chaos crammed with apparently impossible phenomena, to the point where you’d be asking yourself what’s real, or if real even exists anymore.

So, what do you think? How do you envisage quantum science changing humankind and the future? Let us know your ideas in the comments!

For now, there are some major potential breakthroughs that are only just coming into view on this particular horizon. The near future is set to be an extremely exciting time, as it becomes clear just how far the theories and research will take us. And that’s why quantum science might be about to change everything.