Seeing that Chicago is the epicenter of a major effort in the future of technology, at the very moment our government is waging a glittery-eyed war on science, I checked in with the man coordinating it all.
What’s going on?
“In the last couple of decades, scientists and engineers have been able to engineer the way that matter behaves at the atomic scale,” said David Awschalom, a professor of molecular engineering and physics at the University of Chicago. “We can take the rule of nature and develop a new technology, which has unusual properties, while common in the atomic world, we don’t see every day, like entangling bits of information, or thinking of a bit as not just a zero or one but an infinite combination of the two.”
While those with knowledge of physics are collecting their jaws off the floor at the suggestion of practical applications of entanglement and departure from the binary 0 or 1 holy writ of the digital age, I’ll point out that Awschalom is director of the Chicago Quantum Exchange, a massive initiative based in Hyde Park but involving Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and more — over 60 partners.
“This could really be new way for universities, national laboratories and companies to all work together at the birth of a new technology to move discoveries rapidly into society,” he said.
One way to conceive of what this is about is to consider the first sustained nuclear reaction — Dec. 2, 1942, also at the University of Chicago. If that was harnessing the energy locked in an atom, this is finding a way to access the information hidden within.
“It’s possible now to take a number of quantum bits, entangle them with one another and share a single bit of information,” Awschalom said.
Today, if you order your dog pajamas for Christmas on Amazon, your credit card number passes through intermediaries, where it can be stolen. But someday it could be sent directly, via entanglement.
“A special link between two points,” Awschalom said. “You could transmit information in a secure way.”
The strings of 0s and 1s are shattering into an infinite set of values, “like a miniature gyroscope you can spin in all three directions.” Navigation could no longer need satellites orbiting the globe but use the earth’s magnetic field, the way birds do.
“This is important given the number of spoofing attacks on commercial aircraft,” Awschalom said. “If you had a quantum system, it’s safe.”
Plus the creation of very small computers would reduce the enormous amount of electricity artificial intelligence currently requires.
The question that always fascinated me about Fermi splitting the atom in 1942 was: “Why here?” Why perform an experiment that Edward Teller worried might set the atmosphere on fire in the middle of a crowded college campus in the nation’s second-largest city?
The top reasons are gloriously random. For starters, Columbia University tried to split the atom first. But their experiment failed: bad uranium.
So why is quantum computing happening here? Did Caltech and MIT drop the ball?
“It’s not the weather,” said Awschalom, who left California to come here. “This part of the country just collaborated beautifully, quickly, with support, from the mayor at the time.” Rahm Emanuel, if you’ve forgotten that a mayor can draw business to the city as well as drive it away. Gov. JB Pritzker was an early advocate.
Strong community colleges are also key, supplying workers for the hundreds of thousands of “really interesting, high-paid, high-tech jobs” that might come from “scalable atomic-size technologies.”
Could a person draw a line between Fermi’s 1942 breakthrough and what’s happening now? Is there a connection beside the word “quantum”?
“I’d like to say there’s a correlation,” Awschalom said. “Honestly, I believe there’s serendipity here. A moment in time when (the) university decided it had to think outside the box and bring together the brightest. That’s what attracted me to Chicago. So creative, so forward thinking. A place willing to take risks.”
I see a connection. Note that Awschalom said “brightest.” Not “most subservient.” In the 1930s, the best physicists — Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, Leo Szilard — were forced out of Europe by the same bigotry driving U.S. policy now. Fermi, whose wife was Jewish, left fascist Italy to collect the 1938 Nobel Prize and never went back.
When we tally up the growing harm of our war on immigrants, we think of families shattered and lawns uncut. The scientific toll can never be grasped.
So it makes sense, and is immensely satisfying, that Chicago, standing up courageously against ruthless federal oppression, is poised to reap the rewards of tolerance, hosting the Chicago Quantum Exchange. Creativity over cowardice. Genius over genuflection. The future over the past.