The Bit and the Pendulum: From Quantum Computing to M Theory-The New Physics of Information - Softcover

Siegfried, Tom

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0471399744 ISBN 13: 9780471399742

Verlag: Wiley, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

Funny, clear, deep, and right on target. [Siegfried] lets us get a handle on ideas that are essential for understanding the evolving world -K. C. Cole, author of The Universe and the Teacup "An eager, ambitious book. A stimulating, accessible introduction to scientific theory" -Dallas Morning News An award-winning journalist surveys the horizon of a new revolution in science Everything in the universe, from the molecules in our bodies to the heart of a black hole, is made up of bits of information. This is the radical idea at the center of the new physics of information, and it is leading to exciting breakthroughs in a vast range of science, including the invention of a new kind of quantum computer, millions of times faster than any computer today. Acclaimed science writer Tom Siegfried offers a lively introduction to the leading scientists and ideas responsible for this exciting new scientific paradigm.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

TOM SIEGFRIED is Science Editor of the Dallas Morning News. He is the recipient of the 1997 American Psychiatric Association's Robert T. Morse Writer's Award.

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"An eager, ambitious book. A stimulating, accessible introduction to scientific theory."--Dallas Morning News "An enjoyably quick-paced interdisciplinary survey of the outer limits of scientific thought."--Kirkus Reviews
 
"Siegfried weaves a provocative and convincing argument. . . . Recommended for an informed audience."--Library Journal "An excellent introduction to the myriad small worlds that can be teased out of our big one."--Publishers Weekly
 
"A volume of remarkable sweep."--Booklist
 
Now in paperback, The Bit and the Pendulum explores the radical idea at the center of the new physics of information: everything in the universe, from the molecules in our bodies to the heart of a black hole, is made up of bits of information.Award-winning author Tom Siegfried interviews top scientists-all using "bits" to solve the seemingly unsolvable-and provides a highly accessible introduction to a fundamentally new way of seeing the world. Lively, engaging, and topical, The Bit and the Pendulum shows how the computer and the "bit" are revealing secrets of the brain, the nature of matter, and the workings of the universe.

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Chapter One - Beam Up the Goulash

It's always fun to learn something new about quantum mechanics. - Benjamin Schumacher

Had it appeared two months later, the IBM advertisement in the February 1996 Scientific American would have been taken for an April Fools' joke.

The double-page ad, right inside the front cover, featured Margit and her friend Seiji, who lived in Osaka. (Margit's address was not disclosed.) For years, the ad says, Margit shared recipes with Seiji. And then one day she emailed him to say, "Stand by I'll teleport you some goulash."

'Margit is a little premature," the ad acknowledged. "But we're working on it. An IBM scientist and his colleagues have discovered a way to make an object disintegrate in one place and reappear intact in another."

Maybe the twenty-third century was arriving two hundred years early. Apparently IBM had found the secret for beaming people and paraphernalia from place to place, like the transporters of the famous TV Starship Enterprise. This was a breakthrough, the ad proclaimed, that "could affect everything from the future of computers to our knowledge of the cosmos."

Some people couldn't wait until April Fools' Day to start making jokes. Robert Park, the American Physical Society's government affairs officer, writes an acerbic (but funny) weekly notice of what's new in physics and public policy that is widely distributed over the Internet. He noted and ridiculed the goulash ad, which ran not only in Scientific American but in several other publications, even Rolling Stone. He pointed out that IBM itself didn't believe in teleporting goulash, citing an article in the IBM Research Magazine that said "it is well to make clear at the start" that teleportation "has nothing to do with beaming people or material particles from one place to another."

"So what's going on?" Park asked. "There are several theories. One reader noted that many research scientists, disintegrated at IBM labs, have been observed to reappear intact at universities."

Moderately embarrassed by such criticism, IBM promptly prepared an Internet announcement directing people to a World Wide Web page offering a primer on the teleportation research alluded to in the ad. "Science fiction fans will be disappointed to learn that no one expects to be able to teleport people or other macroscopic objects in the foreseeable future," the Web explanation stated, "even though it would not violate any fundamental law to do so." So the truth was out. Neither Margit nor IBM nor anybody else has the faintest idea how to teleport goulash or any other high-calorie dish from oven to table, let alone from orbit to Earth. That's still science fiction. But the truth is stranger still. Serious scientists have in fact begun to figure out how, in principle, teleportation might work.

The story of teleportation begins in March 1993. In that month the American Physical Society held one of its two annual meetings (imaginatively known as "the March meeting") in Seattle. Several thousand physicists showed up, most of them immersed in the study of silicon, the stuff of computer chips, or other substances in the solid state. There are usually a few out-of-the-mainstream sessions at such meetings, though, and this time the schedule listed one about the physics of computation.

Among the speakers at that session was Charles Bennett of IBM, an expert in the quantum aspects of computer physics. I had visited him a few years earlier at his lab, at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, hidden away in the tree-covered hills a little ways north of New York City. And I'd heard him present talks on several occasions, most recently in San Diego, the November preceding the March meeting. When I saw him in Seattle, I asked if there was anything new to report. "Yes!" he enthusiastically exclaimed. "Quantum teleportation!"

This was a rare situation for a science journalist - covering a conference where a scientist was to present something entirely new. Most "new" results disseminated at such meetings are additional bits of data in well known fields, or answers to old questions, or new twists on current controversies. Quantum teleportation was different. Nobody had ever heard of it before. It was almost science fiction coming to life, evoking images of Captain Kirk dematerializing and then reappearing on some alien world in Star Trek.

In retrospect, quantum teleportation should have been a bigger story. But it isn't easy to get new developments in quantum physics on the front page of the newspaper. Besides, it was just a theoretical idea in an obscure subfield of quantum research that might never amount to anything, and it offered no real hope of teleporting people or even goulash. To try to make teleportation a news story would have meant praying up the science-fiction-comes-to-real-life aspect, and that would have been misleading, unwarranted sensationalism, or so I convinced myself. Instead I wrote about quantum teleportation for my weekly science column, which runs every Monday in the science pages tucked away at the back of Section D. My account appeared on March 29, the same day the published version of the research appeared in the journal Physical Review Letters. So if teleporting goulash ever does become feasible, March 29, 1993, will be remembered as the day that the real possibility of teleportation was revealed to the world. (Unless, of course, you'd prefer to celebrate on March 24, the day that Bennett presented his talk in Seattle on how to teleport photons.)

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Wiley
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2000
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0471399744
• ISBN 13: 9780471399742
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland