Project Type: Science & Technology

Prof. DAVID DEUTSCH, the award-winning British physicist who pioneered the field of quantum computation, laid the foundations of the quantum theory of computation, specified an algorithm designed to run on a quantum computer, formulated the theory of quantum logic gates and quantum computational networks, discovered the first quantum error-correction scheme, and several fundamental quantum universality results. He has set the agenda for worldwide research efforts in this new, interdisciplinary field, made progress in understanding its philosophical implications (via a variant of the many-universes interpretation) and made it comprehensible to the general public, notably in his books The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity.

Prof. DAVID DEUTSCH | TED Talk

SRM: Professor Deutsch, it’s a great pleasure and honour to interview you, thank you very much for your time. You are famous not only for your significant contribution to quantum computation and quantum mechanics but also for your ability to explain rather complex concepts in a clear and simple manner. Your book The Fabric of Reality, already a classic, is a wonderful example of what I have just mentioned. Why do you think it is so hard for the average person to accept or understand the concept of Many Worlds as a distinctive possibility of the true nature of reality?

PROF. DAVID DEUTSCH: Thank you. The reason for the wider public’s skepticism about Hugh Everett’s ‘many-universes’ interpretation of quantum theory is, quite simply, the very slow uptake of that theory among physicists and philosophers. So the public are not at fault, but I consider that reluctance on the part of professionals to be a scandal under the circumstances. I cannot fully explain it. In my opinion there is exactly as much evidence for the existence of the other universes as there is for the existence of dinosaurs or electrons (neither of which we can directly see either). But in The Beginning of Infinity I do point out one circumstance that at least puts this scandal into a context: this was part of a much broader intellectual failure during the twentieth century, namely the rise of “bad philosophy”. That is philosophy which is not merely erroneous but whose effect is actively to impede the growth of knowledge.

SRM: A film written by Ben Ripley and directed by Duncan Jones, titled Source Code (maybe you have heard of it) plays with the concept of multiverse and quantum computation. Do you think that, in the future, we could devise a way to artificially render parallel versions of our reality, as it may happen organically, and thus have some kind of control over the fabric as to experiment with cause-effect scenarios?

PROF. DAVID DEUTSCH: I haven’t seen it (Source Code). Provided that computers continue to become more powerful indefinitely, which there is every reason to expect them to do, they will eventually become powerful enough to simulate, for instance, the whole of present-day Earth, including everyone on it. They would not be powerful enough to simulate everything happening at “their own” time, because by then there will be many other computers of equal power, affecting events, and no one of them could simulate all the others.

However, I don’t think that such simulations will ever be done. There are two main reasons for that, which exacerbate each other. One is that to make the simulation accurate they’d have to know the initial conditions accurately, but they are impossible to measure so they’d have to be estimated by computer — i.e. by doing many more such simulations. The other reason is moral: a simulation of a world containing present-day levels of human suffering would be tremendously immoral.

SRM: Is there a beginning to infinity?

PROF. DAVID DEUTSCH: There can be. Depends on the infinity. I am puzzled by why so many people have a problem with this. The set of all natural numbers 1, 2, 3… and so on, has infinitely many members, but clearly has a first member, namely 1.

SRM: The Beginning of Infinity has indeed been described as original, profound and even provocative by some reviewers. Religious doctrines almost always place higher responsibility on outside forces or intelligence, as oppose to the concept of full responsibility to self-creation. Do we have true free will, do we create our own questions and our own status quos, our solutions, and, with them, any future possibilities or, instead, are we truly insignificant (i.e.: chemical scum) in the grand scale of the cosmos as we perceive it?

PROF. DAVID DEUTSCH: Do we have true free will? Yes. Do we create our own questions? To a large extent, though the logic of our situations drives us to certain questions rather than others.

In The Beginning of Infinity I argue that people (a broad term including humans, extraterrestrial intelligences and artificial intelligences) are the most significant entities in the universe. One reason is that they are the only entities whose behaviour depends on “all” the laws of nature and indeed on all significant explanations in general.

SRM: Are we, nowadays, and thanks to quantum physics, closer to the moment in which a Final Theory or Theory of the Everything may finally be explained experimentally?

PROF. DAVID DEUTSCH: No. A final theory is incompatible with endless progress. I argue for the latter and consequently against the former.

Update by SRM: In hindsight, I can’t help but notice how Prof. Deutsch’s last answer nicely ties up with the ‘Observer Effect‘ phenomena, particularly in the experimentally studied situation named Quantum Zeno effect, in which a quantum state would decay if left alone but does not decay because of its continuous observation. This could, in effect, preclude us from ever finding a Final Theory of the Everything, since that notion of the Everything would have to cease to exist in order to have a limited explanation. Then again, I’m no physicist, so I could very well be going off the rails in my meanderings. I guess I’ll have to make another appointment with the Professor at some point so we can delve into this particular take.

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RELATED LINKS:
Book: The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch >
Book: The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch >

SRM: Dr. Massey, thank you for taking the time to respond to this Q&A, I am thrilled with your participation. What are the current theories on the composition of dark matter?

DR. RICHARD MASSEY: We still don’t know what dark matter is (“dark matter” is a placeholder name while we figure that out), but the odds-on favourite amongst scientists are the supersymmetric particles. Supersymmetric particles are a mirror image of everyday particles like electrons, photons and quarks. If they do exist in addition to our familiar world, they would be all around us but ignoring us completely – billions of supersymmetric particles would whizz through your outstretched hand every second. They don’t do any harm, except in frustrating particle physicists that we can’t catch them!

An aspect of supersymmetry that I find particularly exciting is that there would be a complete set of particles. Peer pressure in the supersymmetric world is expected to be very strong, so most of them would end up looking similar. But don’t be fooled – every familiar particle would have a partner, so finding one supersymmetric mirror image would be the first glimpse of an entire, parallel world that is going on all around us.

What we know for sure is that there is more gravity in the Universe than we expected. Let’s start small (but this is astronomy, so not that small). Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is spinning so fast that it ought to fling itself apart. Fortunately for us, an extra gravitational pull is holding it together. Zoom out a bit, and we see galaxies orbiting around each other. The individual galaxies move even faster, and are only pulled towards each other by even more gravity. Zoom out all the way, and we see the whole Universe still expanding after the big bang. It should have expanded so fast and spread out so far that there would never have been enough material in one place to build the Earth. We owe our existence to extra gravity slowing the expansion and holding the Universe together.

In all of these pictures, we can count, measure and calculate the amount of ordinary matter. There just isn’t enough for its gravity to save us – so we deduce that, however improbable, there must be extra, invisible mass. The presence of dark matter then explains every detail of the subsequent motion of galaxies; so we are confident it does exist, and supersymmetry theory provides suitable candidate particles.

Having said that, it is a subtle but important point that nothing is ever proved by science – it just hasn’t yet been disproved. Since all the current evidence for dark matter comes from its gravitational pull on things like stars and galaxies that we can see, if we had misunderstand gravity, we could have misinterpreted that pull. Competing theories (about theories) are beginning to be suggested, where gravity acts differently and no dark matter is required.

This may never be possible – Albert Einstein was a clever guy, and his theory of gravity has explained everything else in the Universe perfectly well until now, so improving it without destroying that agreement would be pretty contrived. But there are no sacred cows in science.

SRM: That’s right. What existing processes or devices help determine the difference between dark matter and dark energy? How do we differentiate one invisible thing from another?

DR. RICHARD MASSEY: While dark matter seems pretty exotic, at least it has the decency to act in a vaguely familiar way. Lumps of dark matter fall towards other lumps of dark matter in the same way that apples fall towards the Earth. Throughout the history of the Universe, the additional gravity from dark matter has helped pull things together: it tugged on the first clouds of gas to combine them into stars, holds them together inside galaxies, and is the scaffolding in which ordinary matter gets concentrated.

On the other hand, dark energy appears to be something completely unfamiliar to us in our everyday lives. It has the opposite effect of gravity on ordinary or dark matter. If you threw an apple into the air, and dark energy had its way, the apple would not come back down, but accelerate upwards, racing off into space. Fortunately for our lunch, there is a lot more matter and dark matter around the orchard, so gravity wins the battle.

The reason that there is more dark matter on Earth is that that it clumps together. Dark energy seems uniformly spread throughout the universe (we’re not really sure, but it might be an intrinsic property of space itself). In the vast regions of empty space between galaxies, there is less dark matter, so dark energy has the upper hand. On these cosmic scales, a 13 billion year long tug of war is underway between dark matter, which is holding the Universe together, and dark energy, which is pulling it apart. Even after all this time, they are finely matched and the outcome is finely balanced.

SRM: That moment when you completed the first ever 3D map of the distribution of dark matter must have been one of the most satisfying moments of your career… Would you be so kind as to walk us through this exciting process, from how you came about this particular project within your research to its fantastic results? What extent of the visible universe does your 3D map cover?

Over two years, we gradually built up the largest photograph ever seen from orbit. Even so, this covers an area only about 9 times the size of the full moon – but with Hubble’s resolution, it contains more than 2 million galaxies. I patiently watched the map grow bigger, but the best moment came at the end, when overlaying it on a map of the ordinary matter. It was plenty big enough to see that that all those galaxies live inside a cocoon of dark matter. Sure enough, there are vast tracts of empty space between them, where presumably dark energy is at large.

Both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are working on successors to the Hubble Space Telescope. They are called WFIRST and Euclid respectively, and come fitted with a wide angle lens, so we can map out the dark matter everywhere in the sky. I can’t wait to get my next fix, looking at a map that unveils the entire Universe of dark matter.

SRM: From your knowledge, what kind of experiments are being conducted with the help of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) and what are they being conducted for?

Specifically, it does this via Einstein’s famous equation E = mc2. This says that mass m can be converted into a lot of energy E (as in a nuclear bomb), or a lot of energy E can be converted into mass m (to create new particles). In any collider, particles are accelerated to give them more energy, then smashed into each other to concentrate that energy into a small space, from where new particles emerge. Most known particles were discovered when they emerged from collisions like this, and the LHC is gradually re-discovering them as the collisions are fine-tuned. Supersymmetric dark matter particles are predicted to be much more massive than anything yet created, and I hope that the faster speeds in ATLAS will produce sufficient energy to create some for the first time. Interestingly, they will still not be seen directly. Once dark matter is produced, it is invisible! The key signature will be more energy going in than particles coming out. The missing particles would be the dark matter.

SRM: So fascinating… What publications would you recommend, in order to have an accessible in-depth information about this spellbinding subject?

DR. RICHARD MASSEY: Two really great books have been published about this in recent years. A very approachable (and amusingly illustrated) tour of current mysteries in cosmology is A User’s Guide to the Universe, by Dave Goldberg and Jeff Blomquist.

A more in-depth discussion of the hunt for dark matter and dark energy is provided by Einstein’s Telescope: the Hunt for Dark Matter and Dark Energy in the Universe, by Evalyn Gates.

SRM: Dr. Massey, what is your personal perception about the mysterious composition/purpose of dark energy? Does the gap between the scientific and the spiritual/mystical narrow at this point?

DR. RICHARD MASSEY: Dark energy is an ethereal force that governs the fate of the Universe, and it is mysterious in the sense that we do not understand it. But we have quantitative, reproducible evidence that it exists, and measurements of its behaviour. In a hundred years, it will be just a page in a text book.

The gulf between science and spiritualism is drawn wider by their responses to mystery. Astronomers may occasionally borrow religious terminology to convey the awe we feel in studying the cosmos, but the scientific method is grounded in more than an expression of feeling. Science is uniquely equipped to ask questions, and its constant self evaluation continues to deliver worthwhile progress (even Einstein isn’t safe). Meanwhile, astrology is trapped ever further behind, in the medieval idiocy that stars care about our love lives. Sorry, but neither stars nor dark energy have a purpose – let alone a purpose for us. The humbling realisation we have obtained from dark matter and dark energy is that 95% of the Universe is unaware we even exist.

SRM: This was brilliant. Again, thank you very much for your time.

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RELATED LINKS:
Dr. Richard Massey’s papers & publications >