The Quantum of Life
I have written in the past about string theory and ring theory, but doubt I could give you an elevator pitch on either. I think I am a reasonably intelligent guy, and I’m certainly well-educated by most standards. Nonetheless, I know a fair bit about my limits. I hit some of those limits ( a funny mathematical pun which gets me right to my “limit” when it comes to mathematics) as an engineering student when my mind could just barely gets itself around calculus and its non-material, theoretical basis. It was enough to drive me away from engineering and heading towards economics and government, from which I headed straight to business with its less cerebral needs. Strangely enough, the area that did most to advance my career was when I took over the nascent futures and options trading business. I had to hire a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from NYU to help concoct algorithms to help us structure and hedge various risk positions. At that point I was determined to understand what he was crafting and would force him to walk me through the process. I would stare at the paper and its newly penned symbols and could literally feel my brain go tilt. I would thank him and recognize that I was running up against those limits again. Some would find that barrier upsetting or perhaps get mad about it all. Instead, I found peace in understanding what I could and couldn’t do and I actually learned how to manage that sort of resource without needing to understand it down to the bottom calculations (or estimations, as the non-finite nature of the work required).
That last bit may be the reason why I can’t get my head around this stuff. I have explained that I am a sequential thinker and if the logic thread gets broken or even vague, I lose the line of thought. All of this calculus work with partial differential equations strives to calculate approximations, not finite solutions and that, while understandable to me, is not easy for me to fully grasp. But knowing what you do not know can be very powerful and it did not stop me from going on a few years later to run the global derivatives business, a business that employed over 60 advanced degree professionals (like that Ph.D. in Applied Math), who controlled the underpinnings of this juggernaut called derivative products. The other night I was at a dinner party and was asked to explain what a derivative was. I inherently understand derivatives very well and even teach derivatives as part of my Advanced Corporate Finance course, but I found it harder to explain what derivatives are to a dinner party than I had thought. I started strong by using a paper napkin and its sale today versus its sale in the future, but as Kim told me later, I lost her and probably all the rest of the group when I left the napkin. And the funniest part about that is that I cannot do partial differential equations and never have been able to, but I do understand what they can do and how they can be used.
Why does that matter? At this stage, other than my teaching duties, it doesn’t. But funny thing, the world keeps on turning and human knowledge keeps moving forward. I have tried for years to understand Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics (actually fathered by Niels Bohr and Max Planck, but helped by Einstein in his description of light as a quanta) and have read the “Quantum for Dummies” books to try to help me get there to minimal impact. My friend from college, Doug, was here not so long ago and he spent his career at Bell Labs (or its successors), working as a physicist, so he probably understands this shit and I really should get him to give me a 101 version to help me get my elevator pitch on the topic. Meanwhile, I am finding myself inundated by new science that goes beyond my innate ability to understand. First there are all the recent announcements about breakthroughs in the study of nuclear fusion. They say this will revolutionize how the world obtains the energy it needs to survive and thrive. That is enough of a mouthful or mindful with which to wrestle, but the world seems to want to go beyond that at the same time. The one thing I now remember from my visit to the Brooklyn set of Fallout with my buddy Chris is that this fusion stuff required super-cooling. Today I read my latest copy of The New Yorker. This is the one with the George Booth cartoon Santa face on the cover and the piece on a Portuguese restaurant in Staten Island. Yeah, that same magazine has published a lengthy article on Quantum Computing. Naturally, the one thing that sticks out in a world dominated by global warming, is that Quantum Computing requires super-cooling to operate optimally. Whoa! Am I starting to make connections here or what?
From what I have read, we are in a bit of a race with China on this Quantum front and while I’m sure we all have many lofty reasons for this race, I also know that Quantum Computing is supposed to be able to crack every cyber-code that exists in less than a day such that every text, every email, every bank account and every missile launch code is out there for all to see and abuse. This seems to be a real threat since the Biden administration has announced objectives to have all major systems (those listed above and beyond) be anti-Quantum-proof by 2035. The problem may be that current forecasts have the first Quantum Computer getting released in 2029. I guess we can hope we are ahead of schedule on our Y2Q efforts and slow on our Qubit development efforts. Seems like a fine line to this barely informed mind. I suppose the good news is that by 2035 I will be 81 and probably won’t give a damn about Qubits since my money will have run out by then anyway.
To get your head around Quantum Computing, I heard this great example. If you had a closet with 1 million drawers and you hid a tennis ball in one drawer, probability theory says that you should, on average, be able to find that tennis ball in 500,000 drawer pulls. Fair enough, college statistics tells me that is all reasonable. But with Quantum Computing, it is said you will be able to find the tennis ball in 1,000 drawer pulls. I don’t get it, so I guess I don’t get Quantum Computing.
I know quantum physics is the physics of atomic and sub-atomic particles. I know that physics involves real stuff like tennis balls in drawers. The two operate very differently with different natural laws…that much of Einstein I get. I even know that nano-physics is about molecules, which exhibit some qualities of atomic particles and some qualities of tennis balls, though I doubt I could draw the line as to which are in and which are out at any moment. The weirdest part of Quantum thinking is what they call entanglement theory (not so much a theory as a reality now that it has been tested and proven in the lab and granted a Nobel Prize for that work). That says that if there are two coins that are “entangled” (as happens with stuff like photons at the sub-atomic level), and you held one across the room and I held the other, and I flipped mine and got a heads, your would automatically be a tails…assuming I looked at mine. Double-Whoa! First of all, there’s that part about one probability outcome influencing the other, no matter how far away (both physically and temporally, I suppose) it is and in opposite manner (quite the Bizzaro thing, right?). Then there is the part about it only being the case if observed and that is the cliff that my understanding cannot get across. I know Einstein taught us that the observation of some event changes that event (trees falling in forests are trickier than we men thought), but this is simply getting to be too much for my peabrain.
The Quantum of life is too beautiful to be so complicated, so I will just go on staring out the window and leaving it to Gen Z to figure all this out.