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When you visit the doctor or have a hospital stay, you and your patient data become elements in a vast, highly complex digital technology ecosystem. This is because you (as the patient) generate enormous volumes of data which is stored and analyzed across interconnected systems. The goal of all of this is improved health care outcomes, but the current health care digital landscape also represents a critical cyberattack surface. This is particularly true of medical devices and the internet-of-medical-things (IoMT). Security is serious matter in health care, and most organizations involved in health care technology are busy implementing countermeasures against prevailing cyberthreats. More work is needed, especially considering the looming quantum computing threat to data encryption. This article examines the quantum threat to health care data and technology and offers some ideas on how this serious risk can be mitigated.

Healthcare is a field that runs on digital technology. Healthcare organizations deploy millions of connected medical devices that store personal patient data and real-time biometric data. These devices allow doctors and patients to communicate faster, more efficiently and, in some cases, more inexpensively than is possible with past communication methods. For instance, a direct digital heartbeat transmission is far faster and cheaper than a fax machine. In addition, back-end systems handle medical records storage, billing and operations.

Every medical device, computer server, network and storage array is vulnerable to cyberattack. Today, this means anything from ransomware to zero-day attacksany threat vector that enables a malicious actor to interfere with health care processes or steal data. In the near future, this digital healthcare landscape will also be vulnerable to attacks from quantum computers.

Briefly, a quantum computer is a new generation of computing technology that utilizes sub-atomic particles and the principles of quantum mechanics to deliver exponentially faster computation capabilities than existing computers. There are many exciting potential uses for quantum computing, including in health care, such as protein folding. However, the technology is also expected to break todays unbreakable cryptographic keys that secure data and critical systems.

Security experts are worried, with good reason, that within a few years, todays current forms of cryptography will be rendered useless by the quantum threat. At that point, virtually all data and systems will be exposed to threats, including those systems that manage health care information. This would be catastrophic on multiple levels. The quantum crisis threatens patient health, the large and lucrative health care industry, society and even the United States national security.

If all cryptography protecting the security and privacy of medical technology becomes inoperable, then patient health is at risk. Attackers could disrupt hospital networks and delay patient care. They could cause pacemakers, defibrillators, insulin pumps and other critical health devices to stop working. This could cause people to get sick or even die. Indeed, this type of thing has already happened. For example, in 2019 a ransomware attack on a hospital resulted in the death of a newborn.

Health care is a multi-trillion-dollar industry. The quantum threat puts this enormous slice of the economy at risk. Even just one sector, the IoMT market, is rapidly accelerating, expected to go from a $14 billion valuation in 2017 to $158 billion this year.

Medical information is also valuable. Research suggests that it can be valued up to 50 times more than a stolen credit card on the black market. This is an attractive target for hackers.

Regarding legal liability and ethics, unsecured devices or device exploit comprise a violation of trust to patients. Device manufacturers have a fiduciary responsibility to protect patient data. Adding in regulatory penalties, such as HIPAA violations, the quantum threats potential costs appear to be astronomical.

Risks to individual patients are bad enough, but overall health care cyber risk exposure threatens the broader society. If health care systems, especially emergency services, are unavailable during a crisis, the public could be in danger. This is not as far-fetched a scenario as people might imagine. After all, ransomware attackers have targeted municipal government and law enforcement in tandem with hospitals. A quantum attack that devastates all such systems could destabilize the public order.

Health care information also figures into geopolitics and the world of intelligence. This may seem a bit cloak-and-dagger, but the reality is that adversarial nation-state intelligence services are stealing hundreds of millions of American health records. The 2015 Anthem breach is cited as an example. Its unclear exactly why they are doing this, but possible explanations include a desire to create a social map of the United States to identify spies. There is also a theory that the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) industry is hacking American medical data to develop training data sets for medical AI software, which is considered a strategically important industry. The fascinating Wall Street Journal article What Does Beijing Want With Your Medical Records? explores this issue.

The government is taking a strong interest in cybersecurity for health care. U.S. federal agencies are expected to start mandating cybersecurity requirements through legislation such as the 2022 Protecting and Transforming Cyber Healthcare (PATCH) Act, which requires a software bill of materials (SBOM), as mandated by president Bidens May 2022 executive order. These measures also expect medical devices to have greater cryptographic agility.

The pending Healthcare Cybersecurity Act of 2022 is a further call-to-action from the government. The bill wants to make cybersecurity a primary goal of health care organizations and equipment manufacturers. This includes the critical step of protecting legacy devices incapable of withstanding todays cyberattacks. The bill is poised to impose financial constraints, with Medicare payment policies incorporating cyber expenses.

Quantum defense still needs to be added to the legislative agenda for health care, but it will almost certainly be included soon. The government is starting to mandate mitigations of the quantum threat in government systems. For example, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) published guidance called Preparing for Post-Quantum Cryptography in 2022 in collaboration with NIST. Health care will likely follow.

It is important to start defending against the quantum threat now. Or, at a minimum, health care organizations can start preparing by assessing their cybersecurity to look for areas that will be vulnerable to a quantum attack. If health care companies want to follow the CISA/NIST guidance, they should start by inventorying their critical data and systems, including device operating systems. They ought to create an inventory of their cryptographic technologies and internal standards. This includes public key cryptography, which is most vulnerable to quantum attacks.

Health care organizations then need to move toward what is known as post-quantum cryptography, a new approach to cryptography that changes the way keys are generated, managed and used. Using advanced mathematical techniques, post-quantum cryptography methods can protect health care data from even quantum decryption processes.

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Protecting Patient Data: Why Quantum Security is a Must in Health Care - Security Boulevard

Yall, as a child of the 90s, I will forever quote Ian Malcolm fromJurassic Park when he says that the scientists there were so preoccupied wondering if theycould do something they didnt stop to wonder whether or not theyshould.

And honestly, I feel like there are way too many stories where scientists arent worried enough about setting up the new hit disaster movie.

Because creating a wormhole in a lab honestly seems like a recipe for disaster.

Hatim Saleh, a research fellow at the University of Bristol and co-founder of DotQuantum, obviously doesnt think so, because claims to have created The first ever practical blueprint for creating in the lab a wormhole that verifiably bridges space.

He calls his invention counterportation, which reconstitutes a small object across space without any particles crossing.

Heres the thing, though: its still all conceptual, as the computers needed to make this happen havent been designed or built yet.

If counterportation is to be realized, an entirely new type of quantum computer has to be built: an exchange-free one, where communicating parties exchange no particles.

Saleh says hes not worried, though, as he has plans underway to build the technology described in his paper.

While counterportation achieves the end goal of teleportation, namely disembodied transport, it remarkably does so without any detectable information carriers traveling across.

It relies on an aspect of quantum physics called quantum entanglement. This allows entirely separate quantum particles to be correlated without ever interacting.

According to University of Bristol professor John Rarity,

This correlation at a distance can then be used to transport quantum information from one location to another without a particle having to traverse the space, creating what could be called a traversable wormhole.

If this sounds like a long shot, thats because right now, it definitely is.

But you know. That might not be a bad thing.

See original here:
Scientists Say They've Got A Blueprint For Creating A Wormhole In A ... - Twisted Sifter

This is an audio transcript of the Behind the Money podcast episode: Night School, Class 3 Big Tech vs the insurgents

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Peter Spiegel Welcome to Behind the Money Night School. Im Peter Spiegel. Im the US managing editor of the Financial Times. BTM Night School is a special series made in collaboration with Blinkist that will serve as a guide to the US economy in 2023. For tonights lesson...

John Thornhill I think AI is different. It does disrupt peoples jobs. I dont think it ever tends to replace jobs outright. What it does do is change the nature of those jobs.

Peter SpiegelFrom the rise of ChatGPT to lay-offs at companies like Meta and Amazon, tech has dominated the headlines in 2023. Here to help us make sense of it all is the Financial Times innovation editor John Thornhill.

John, looking at the US economy, 2023 has been a year where weve seen the economy slow, and that is nowhere more apparent than in big tech, where firms like Amazon, Google and Microsoft have all announced some of the biggest lay-offs of any American companies. Why are they being hit so hard?

John Thornhill I think several things are going on at the moment. And youre right. I mean, so far this year, the latest tally, I think about 100,000 jobs have gone from the big tech companies, which is a lot of jobs. Several things, I think. One, last year, I think during the whole Covid pandemic, all of the big tech companies overinvested. They thought the future was gonna arrive quicker than it in fact did. And everyone was going online. They were using Zoom; they were using Google Meet. Everyone is working remotely. So there was a big demand for tech products. And so I think part of the story is were just coming off the peak. The Nasdaq index of kind of tech stocks is down 16 per cent over the past year, although its gone up 12 per cent this year. And I think that really, its just a recalibration when you look at a lot of the hiring figures or the investment levels or the VC funding, 2023 compared to 21, its really still showing an upward tick. Its just that this blowout year of 2022 has now been rolled back.

Peter SpiegelSo these names that we were just talking about that dominate in many ways our daily life Microsofts, the Googles, the Amazons if were coming off the peak, are these lay-offs and the downturn sign that these companies are sort of losing the position in the US economy, that theyre gonna be diminished in the US economy going forward? Or is this a classic case of sort of retrenchment where theyre basically just sort of cutting costs to maintain their leadership position going forward?

John Thornhill Im definitely in the retrenchment school. If you look at the underlying trend lines on ecommerce or the shift to digital advertising or just the uptick of adoption of all these tech products, youre seeing the underlying trend is still moving very sharply northwards. Youre seeing a whole load of new start-ups being formed, partly as a result of the kind of tech lay-offs as well, that there are a lot of kind of surplus tech workers who are now thinking about what theyre gonna do. So theres been a big surge in kind of new business formation weve seen since the Covid pandemic. And I think just generally theres a whole secular trend towards increased use of technology. Five billion people in the world have a smartphone. Increasing amount of commerce is going online, about 20 per cent in the US now. And so I think the secular trend will eventually can outweigh the cyclical downturn.

Peter Spiegel All right. So lets talk about that because theres this trend towards increased use. I think when we talk about technology in general, we tend to focus on these big companies because, as I said, they tend to dominate our lives. But as you pointed out, new companies being started, a secular trend towards more use of technology in our daily lives, so although these big tech groups in Silicon Valley play an important role, its not the only way technology is impacting the US economy. But what are some of these trends that we should be watching, you know, to see whats going to influence our lives and whats going to influence the broader economy?

John ThornhillWell, I think part of the story is that youre gonna see a battle between the big incumbents the Microsofts, the Googles, the Amazons and so on that youve been talking about and the insurgents, if I call them, the next generation of those companies that are emerging. And I think its gonna be fascinating to see how this battle plays out. On the one hand, its been easier and cheaper to launch a company than ever before. You have, everyone can operate in the cloud, which means that the cost has been reduced, the cost of software has plummeted, and finance is more readily available than ever before. So I think we have seen this really interesting trend of new business formation post-the Covid pandemic and how these businesses grow and adopt the new technologies that are coming along. Are they gonna shake the market grip that the big companies have, or are we gonna see a lot more disruption from below?

Peter Spiegel OK, so disruption by insurgents takes us very quickly to what I mentioned at the top, ChatGPT. Now OpenAI, which is sort of the inventor or the developer of it, has gotten some backing from Microsoft, but it clearly has become a disrupter, as you say. And its also convinced a lot of people that AI has finally arrived, and it become a...have a real impact on the real economy. Whats your view? I mean, is AI now ready for prime time? Will it play a role as a disrupter, or should we not believe the hype?

John Thornhill Well, these technologies have been developing over several years. I mean, Google really, the first people who came up with the transformer technology, and GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformers. So they were the people who first came up with the technology, and then its been spread and other people have adopted it. As youre saying, OpenAI, which is this fascinating, kind of San Francisco-based research company, has really kind of pioneered the use of what are called large language models or the ChatGPT that came out. And I think theyve had a huge impact. So I think what...the difference is that a lot of the big companies and Google and Microsoft in particular had been developing these generative models. But when we saw the launch of ChatGPT in November last year, they really went mainstream. Millions of people started playing with them. About a hundred million people started using them within two months of launch, which is an astonishingly rapid take-up of a new technology. And I think we all had that kind of wow moment where you prompt a question in ChatGPT and you get this extraordinarily plausible instantaneous text coming out of the machine. And I think it is an amazing thing. But I think people are only just beginning to work out how its gonna have an impact.

Peter Spiegel Let me play the cynic or the sceptic here, because it was not so long ago that we had another, quote unquote, disruptive technology in something called the blockchain. And the most vivid thing we saw about this blockchain was in cryptocurrencies. And yet in the last few months, weve seen a complete collapse of the most prominent part of the crypto exchange called FTX. And that has seemed to raise all sorts of new questions about cryptocurrencies in general, but also whether blockchain is actually as disruptive as we maybe once thought. Take me through your thoughts on blockchain, and why perhaps AI as a disruptive technology is more worth paying attention to or not versus the hype that was around blockchain?

John ThornhillWell, Gartner, the data company, came up with this quite useful model called the hype cycle, which is rather nice (Peter chuckles). And so they plot where each technology is on this chart that they produced according to how much hype there is around a particular technology. So at the moment, AI is very close to the top of the peak of inflated expectations, as they call it. People are getting so excited about it. Metaverse and blockchain have gone over the top of that peak, and theyre now in what the Gartner would call the slough of despond. (Peter laughs) And then after a few months after people have stopped talking about it, then you get the slow adoption. And thats really when I think a lot of these technologies go mainstream. So I think that youre seeing exactly that with blockchain, there is massive overhyping of it. We saw the whole collapse of the FTX crypto empire. People have almost shaken their heads and thrown up their hands in despair and thought, this is never gonna come to anything. But I think people will start thinking, what are the real uses of this? How can we adopt it? And I think we might begin to see some really interesting uses over the next five, 10 years.

Peter SpiegelAnd when you say find ways to use it, do you mean cryptocurrencies specifically or more broadly, the blockchain technologies and how something that is, you know, visible and transparent to the world and cannot be hacked at is something that other industries could use potentially?

John ThornhillI think its the underlying blockchain technology that people are beginning to think, is this a different way of handling data and making transfers in a way that is more decentralised, is not controlled by one central authority and so on? So I think a lot of the models that weve seen emerge so far have failed, but there is still, I think, possibilities that they could get adopted in the future.

Peter Spiegel Lets go back to AI and to a certain extent to ChatGPT, but AI more generally, because if you combine AI with robotics, you have a debate about whether basically increased automation and machine learning through robotics is good or bad for the US economy. So on the upside, theres the obvious economic argument that automation increases productivity and productivity is key to any country increasing its collective wealth. So therefore, on paper at least, this is a good thing for the US economy. But many of us have seen that there are, automation frankly takes jobs away from a lot of blue-collar Americans, which means there are even fewer well-paying jobs for the average American. So in your view, because you are a columnist, is automation and robotics, you know, a plus or a minus for the US economy?

John Thornhill I would say its definitely a plus. I think this debate has been going on for several centuries and in fact, ever since the Industrial Revolution, that its very easy to see which jobs are destroyed by new technologies and very hard to predict which jobs are gonna be created. I think AI is different. Its an incredibly powerful whats called a general purpose technology that infuses the whole economy at large. I think it will have an incredible impact on productivity in a whole load of different areas. And one of the ones Im most interested in is healthcare at the moment. But as you say, it does disrupt peoples jobs. So I dont think it ever tends to replace jobs outright. What it does do is change the nature of those jobs. In healthcare, for example, a lot of speculation out there that it will change the role of a doctor a lot more than it will change the role of a nurse, for example. In the past, when manufacturing was automated, it definitely hit the blue-collar jobs. It was that kind of automation of muscle. What AI is doing is automating the brain. And so I think thats gonna affect a lot more white-collar jobs going forward...

Peter Spiegel Hopefully not journalists...

John Thornhill Well, maybe some journalists (laughs), but not columnists, I think.

Peter SpiegelBefore I let you go, I want to change topic slightly from the hard science and the disruptive nature of technology to sort of the policy side of things, because one of the biggest stories in technology, I would argue, is that its become in many ways the big battleground in geopolitical conflict, particularly between China and the US. So almost on every sector in technology microprocessors, quantum computing, renewables, green technologies, 5G you have the US and China at loggerheads, sanctions, bans, all these kinds of things. Just to throw this out there, who do you think is winning the global tech war? Because there is a lot of nervousness in Washington that China has taken a quantum leap ahead of the west on many of these technologies. Is that paranoia? Is that actually happening? What would be your view in terms of where China and the US stand right now in advanced technologies?

John ThornhillIf I can put it in a slightly different way, I think both sides are winning, which means also both sides are losing. In some areas like 5G telecoms infrastructure that you were talking about, no doubt China has won that war. I think in open areas that are still now very competitive, in particular, three I would pick out. One is chips that you mentioned. At the moment, 90 per cent of the worlds leading chips are manufactured in Taiwan, which a lot of people in Washington worry is an incredible kind of geostrategic hotspot. What happens if Taiwan came off market? Thats obviously an enormous kind of strategic challenge for America, which is, explains why theres been this massive investment in kind of chip production in the US. AI, I think, is one of the other areas when you look at the papers that are now coming up. China has put an enormous effort into increasing its capability in that area. I think for the moment, as far as anyone can tell, America still has the significant edge in terms of research. But I think China has probably got the edge in terms of the application of a lot of these AI models, certainly kind of ecommerce and online world and digital payments and so on. So I think thats an even contest in a way. And then I think the real joker is quantum, and weve been spending quite a lot of time at the FT trying to investigate quantum computing. In truth, nobody knows who is ahead in this field.

The idea is that if one side or the other did develop a fully functioning quantum computer, they would be able to crack open the other sides encryption methods, the so-called Q-Day, which would have an enormous strategic impact if one of those two sides got ahead of the other. But the truth is that we have no idea really who is where at the cutting edge of this technology. So thats definitely an open race.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Peter Spiegel OK, John, Im gonna ask you, if our listeners were to just walk away and say, here are the three things I need to take away from John Thornhills discussion, what are the three most important things do you think right now?

John ThornhillWell, first, I think the macro trend towards tech is still very strong. We had this blip in 22. Weve had the retrenchment in 23. But I think we still are gonna see a very strong uptake of technology, particularly in ecommerce, a whole load of software services and in generative AI. Number two would be the impact of generative AI. I think people are still trying to figure this out. Huge numbers of start-ups being created and getting funded right now, who are trying to work out how they can apply AI. Ninety per cent of the start-ups are gonna go bust, but the 10 per cent of them are gonna transform the workplace, I believe. And I think in many areas theyre gonna augment human creativity. Theyre gonna threaten a number of jobs, particularly kind of white-collar jobs. Theyre going to change the nature of work. But I think they will also augment human creativity and lead to a lot of increased productivity. And the third one is really how this all fits into the context of the US-China tech war. I think people have kind of pulled back from calling it the new cold war, but theres certainly very heightened rivalry between the two powers, most particularly in chips, where America is kind of really squeezing China. And China is putting huge effort into trying to develop state-of-the-art computer chips. But were also seeing it in the areas of kind of AI quantum computing and also synthetic biology.

Peter SpiegelOK, Im gonna be very unfair and push you even further. If theres one thing that our listeners should take away about technology and the US economy, what do you think that one thing is?

John ThornhillIts all about the humans, rather perversely. I would argue that technology is a subject that everyone gets obsessed by and they look at the kind of capabilities of the technology and what it could do. But technology is only useful when its applied, and thats all about how people use it. And so I think humans very much are in the driving seat still. Were trying to figure out how we use this technology. We can use it for wonderful, productive ends. We can also use it for very harmful purposes as well. Dont forget the humans.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Peter SpiegelThanks again for listening. Im Peter Spiegel. You can find more of Johns reporting on FT.com. This episode was done in collaboration with Blinkist. If you want to find out more about conversations and topics like this, check out the Blinkist app. This episode was produced by Zach St. Louis. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer. Sound design by Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco. Cheryl Brumley is our global head of audio. Thanks for listening. Class dismissed.

[SCHOOL BELL RINGING]

See the rest here:
Night School, Class 3: Big Tech vs the insurgents - Financial Times

From a deep dive into Steely Dan to a journey into the ocean depths

What do you have planned for this May? As the weather heats up and the outdoors beckon, its never been a better time to lose yourself in a good book. Our recommendations for this month cover a lot of ground; whether youre looking for an in-depth biography of someone who changed a nation or would prefer a thrilling exploration of the Grand Canyons history, theres probably something on this list for you. Read on for our May picks.

Katherine C. Mooney, Isaac Murphy: The Rise and Fall of a Black Jockey

Yale University Press

May marks the beginning of this years Triple Crown, and if you find yourself with horse racing on the brain, you might want to explore the sports history with this biography of Isaac Murphy, one of the sports greatest jockeys. Murphy would go on to win three Kentucky Derbies over the course of his career, even as he faced racial prejudice and a changing nation.

Michio Kaku, Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything

Doubleday

If your interests fall onto the scientific side of the spectrum, you may well have heard the term quantum computer used with increasing frequency in recent years. (Science fiction readers might have experienced the same thing.) In this new book, physicist and occasional television correspondent Michio Kaku offers a detailed look at precisely what quantum computers are and explores the different avenues of life that they might expand.

Jonathan Eig, King: A Life

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

There are some historical figures for whom a massive, thoroughly-researched biography seems eminently appropriate; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is certainly one of them. Jonathan Eigs new book King: A Life, is precisely that an expansive look at the life of one man who had a substantial effect on the nation (and the world). And the advance word on it is encouraging; Publishers Weeklys review states that Eigs evocative prose ably conveys [Kings] bravery, charisma, and spell-binding oratory.

Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay, Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan

University of Texas Press

Quantum Criminals has a fascinating idea at its core: its a look at all of the characters who appear in Steely Dans discography. There are few other musicians for whom this approach might work (The Mountain Goats come to mind), and Steely Dan have both the cult following and the mass appeal to make this fascinating. Combining words by Alex Pappademas and art by Joan LeMay, Quantum Criminals looks to be a new angle on an iconic bands catalog.

John Wray, Gone to the Wolves

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

In 2006, novelist John Wray wrote about Sunn 0))) for The New York Times Magazine. And while his fiction has covered other subjects from a mentally ill teen to the ominous landscape of pre-World War II Austria metal has never seemed far from his mind. With his latest novel, Gone to the Wolves, Wray reckons directly with it, tracing the story of a group of metalhead friends from coming of age in 1980s Florida to a bizarre event years later that shatters their comfortable dynamic.

Jeff Biggers, In Sardinia: An Unexpected Journey in Italy

Melville House

Travel southwest from Rome and youll find yourself in Sardinia, an island in the Mediterranean with a long history and an abundance of scenic landscapes. Its through these landscapes that Jeff Biggers travels in his new book, the aptly titled In Sardinia. Biggers argues here that Sardinia is key to a complete understanding of Italy; perhaps reading this will inspire your next international trip.

Sebastiano Brandolini, The House at Capo dOrso

MIT Press

What happens when an architect turns his eye for design and history to the home in which he grew up? That question is at the heart of Sebastiano Brandolinis new book, The House at Capo dOrso a book thats both about the house where he grew up in Sardinia and the ways that the right space can spark creativity. Can you go home again? Maybe not but you sure can write about it.

Katsushika Hokusai, Mad about Painting

David Zwirner Books

If youre familiar with the print Under the Wave off Kanagawa, then you know the work of Katsushika Hokusai. In this volume, Hokusai shares what he learned about art, composition, color and the act of painting itself. This new edition of Mad About Painting also features an introduction by Ryoko Matsuba, an expert in Japans Edo period, who helps quantify why Hokusis writings still resonate today.

Melissa L. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon

W. W. Norton & Company

In 1938, a pair of scientists traveled to the bottom of the Grand Canyon with a singular mission in mind: to fully document the plants that called that ecosystem home. This was not considered to be an easy task, given the unpredictability of the Colorado River; many observers believed that the scientists in question, Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter, would not survive. And yet they pulled it off and now, 85 years later, a new book records their adventures along the way.

Brad Fox, The Bathysphere Book: Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths

Astra House

Life gets strange in the depths of the ocean. The creatures that live there look like little else on the planet, and the technology used to explore it requires its own branches of expertise. In his new book, Brad Fox chronicles the history of these explorations while expanding his focus to find other applications for the discoveries that they have made. Its a fascinating and enlightening journey into the deepest of waters.

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The 10 Books You Should Be Reading This May - InsideHook

If youve ever wondered how an invisibility cloak would work, how to terraform Mars, how to make a forcefield, whether were living in a Matrix-like simulation or how far we are from a working teleportation device, Michio Kaku is your man. In books such as Physics of the Impossible, Physics of the Future and Parallel Worlds, Kaku combines the scientific chops of the theoretical physics professor he is with the gee-wow wonder of a sci-fi geek.

Thats apt for someone who grew up worshipping at the twin altars of Albert Einstein and Flash Gordon. It all started when I was eight, he says. All the newspapers said that a great scientist had died. And they said that on his desk was a manuscript that he could not finish. I was fascinated by that. And so I looked up who was this man who could not finish this book. What was in it? Well, the mans name was Albert Einstein. And that book was to be the theory of everything. An equation perhaps no more than one inch long that would allow us to read the mind of God. Well, I was fixed. I was fascinated. I had to know what was in that book.

When the eight-year-old Kaku (who, by the way, went on to dismay his mother by building a particle collider in the family garage in San Jose for a school science project) found nothing in the library that could explain Einsteins theory to a child, he turned to science fiction. Its all there in the original Flash Gordon series: ray guns, invisibility, extra-terrestrial civilisations, nuclear energy. He is adamant that the two great passions of his life the unified field theory on one hand and science fiction on the other are related to each other.

His new book, Quantum Supremacy, argues here I simplify, but not much that quantum computers are going to be the solution to all mankinds problems, and that shift from the digital to the quantum age will be a greater leap than the original digital revolution. Everything, he says, everything about the economy, medicine, warfare everything is going to be turned upside down. Why? Because quantum computers are unimaginably more powerful than the digital sort.

Digital computers work with bits, noughts and ones, a very crude approximation of reality. But quantum computers use the qubit the state of an atom as a unit of computation. As we know from quantum theory, atoms can point up or down, but also spin: There are infinitely more states than just zeros and ones the digital revolution will look like an abacus. To give a sense of how fast that scales, in 2019 Google reported that its 53-qubit Sycamore computer could solve in 200 seconds a mathematical problem that would take the fastest digital computer 10,000 years to finish. Last year, IBM unveiled a 433-qubit quantum computer. The 1,121-qubit follow-up is due any day, and it hopes to have a 4,000-qubit version working by 2025.

There are infinitely more states than just zeros and ones the digital revolution will look like an abacus

So the field is moving fast. Quantum supremacy the point at which a quantum computer kicks a digital computers ass is in the rear-view mirror. The only problem is that for quantum computers to work, so far, they need to be cooled to very near absolute zero. You have to cool it down to where all the extraneous vibrations and noise are eliminated, Kaku explains. Somebodys burping. Somebodys jumping up and down. A car backfiring a block away would ruin a quantum calculation. A whole range of different approaches are even now competing worldwide to get the edge on making bigger quantum computers faster.

When they get there, though, they will transform everything. Digital computers simply dont have the capacity to model chemical reactions at the molecular level. Quantum computers will. Chemical reactions are mediated by electrons. Electrons are described by waves. Waves are probability, Kaku says. Where are the zeros and ones? Nowhere to be seen. A zero and a one is an approximation, a crude approximation, to a wave. And that wave is the wave of an electron. Why is that important? Because that electron gives you cancer, gives you wellbeing, gives you solar energy, gives you fusion power. Mother Nature is quantum mechanical. The universe is in some sense a quantum computer.

That means, if I understand him rightly, that quantum computers will allow us to do chemistry without chemicals. Everything from batteries to vaccines is currently invented, effectively, by trial and error: but if you can accurately simulate chemical reactions, you dont need bubbling flasks. The secrets of everything from human ageing to photosynthesis (a near 100 per cent efficient quantum process that, Kaku reminds us in tones of wonder, takes place at room temperature) can be unlocked.

Pleasingly, some of the first and most important possibilities he sets out are `very material ones. The century-old Haber Process for making fertiliser out of atmospheric nitrogen has made it possible to feed billions who would not otherwise be alive today, but it consumes fully 2 per cent of all the worlds energy. Quantum computing could give us the ability to fix nitrogen without the huge temperatures and pressures required ushering in a new green revolution.

In the medical domain, quantum computers will be able to analyse how drugs work at a molecular level, model and test new ones without ever going near a patient, and analyse the vast and noisy datasets that will allow medics to spot the outbreak of a new pandemic long before humans could. Kaku envisions quantum computers sniffing out cancer years to decades before tumours form with routine liquid biopsies performed by a smart toilet in your home.

On the cosmic level, as well as predicting asteroid strikes, solar flares, gamma-ray bursts and other planet-threatening nasties, quantum computers will allow us to model the life cycle of stars, create stable fusion reactors, and interpret the flood of data coming out of the successor to the Large Hadron Collider. Quantum computers, he says, are the tools we need to deal with problems in physics whose maths cant be handled by digital computers among them the mind-bending Planck energy (ten to the 29th power: the energy of the Big Bang way beyond anything that we can create on the planet Earth), the mysteries of dark matter(Its very embarrassing that most of the universe is dark matter and we dont know what it is), and even the twisting of space-time beyond the event horizons of black holes, where its thought wormholes to parallel universes may form.

In Kakus account of it, then, there doesnt seem to be a human problem that quantum computers wont be able to fix. The only fly in the ointment, as he mentions not very much more than en passant, is that between here and all the good stuff there are a couple of potential road-bumps.

Quantum computers may indeed get round to abolishing disease, hunger and global warming. But, even leaving aside the control problem when quantum computers give the development of AI a hyper-speed boost, the first thing that theyll do along the way is to make it possible to break by brute force (i.e. sheer computational welly) every form of encryption on the planet. So, potentially, goodbye to all military and civilian secrets, not to mention the secure transactions on which the entire global financial system depends. And with world powers competing to get first-mover advantage in the quantum computing realm, that gives the phrase Quantum Supremacy a geopolitical shading. Isnt that something that worries him just the teeniest little bit?

Yes, he concedes. What branch of the government is most interested in advancements in this technology? Its the CIA. Government agencies are already beginning to issue statements saying: Be prepared, start to make changes now in your behaviour, because when this revolution is in full blast, it means that all your secrets can be read by your next-door neighbour. Were not at the point where we have to worry about this technology every day. But its coming.

The likely defence against this sort of disaster, he says, is use quantum to defeat quantum. Another idea is to have a dual internet: one internet that can never be broken because its all based on laser beams and the quantum principle, and the other one we use, you and me, that can be broken if you have a powerful enough quantum computer. A laser internet, he says, could use quantum principles to incorporate tripwires. Laser beams are polarised, meaning they vibrate in only one plane and that plane changes when they are interfered with: By looking at the change in the direction of the polarisation, immediately you know that somebody is trying to hack into your system and then you can take safeguards to kick them out.

But: Were talking about ten, 15 years in the future when quantum computers are so powerful they can break any code. And then, of course, the CIA has a nervous breakdown trying to figure out all the different ways we can use the quantum principle to defeat the quantum principle. Cross that bridge when we come to it, then.

Quantum Supremacy, along the way, not only explains in laymans terms how these things work, but gives vivid sketches of some of the scientists who have laid the groundwork for the quantum revolution many of whom, such as Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman, Kaku has met and worked with. The books Acknowledgements has a separate section for the many Nobel Laureates that I have consulted with or interviewed who provided invaluable advice. There are 16 of them. I wonder if Kaku has an idea about what drives physicists at that level.

Well, one thing when you encounter these individuals, he says, is that you have to throw away common sense. Everything you thought you knew about the world is wrong. You have to talk to individuals who are willing to open their minds to the impossible. Ever since we were children, we were told you cannot be two places at the same time. Actually, at the quantum level, you can be in an infinite number of places at the same time. Einstein said, The more successful the quantum theory becomes, the sillier it looks. And its absolutely true. Its a silly theory, but get used to it. The world is quantum mechanical independent of your classical mind.

What branch of the government is most interested in advancements in this technology? Its the CIA

Its not just the wildness of theoretical physics that attracts Kaku, but the aesthetics: the instinct that a profound truth must be beautiful or simple or both remains strong in the field, as witness the fabulous simplicity and generative power of the Schrdinger equation (from which all chemistry proceeds) or, for that matter, E=mc2. Kakus dissatisfaction with the Standard Model of particles which gives us four forces, 12 particles and a boson is, he writes, at least in part because it is such a mess: A theory only a mother could love. Its like putting an aardvark, platypus and whale together with Scotch tape, and calling it natures finest creation.

The proposed successor to the Standard Model is Kakus own academic specialism, string theory, which he calls crazy but the only game in town. Its certainly beautiful. Those of us who work in string theory, we think the final theory is based on music. Music is based on vibrating strings. Each vibration corresponds to a particle, so the electron vibrates this way, a proton vibrates this way and a neutron vibrates this way. Theyre nothing but musical notes.

So physics is the harmonies that you can create on musical forms. Chemistry is the melodies that you can create out of these musical notes. The universe is a symphony of strings, and then the mind of God, the mind of God that Einstein wrote about for the last 30 years of his life, would be cosmic music resonating through hyperspace.

So the ancients idea of the music of the spheres a heavenly symphony arising from the proportions of the planetary bodies in space might after all have been in the right direction? That is the only paradigm rich enough to explain the diversity of everything there is, says Kaku. The atomic theory simply says there are atoms. It doesnt explain why. String theory says its all music. Music that obeys harmonies. And these harmonies are the laws of physics.

He adds: Once I gave a talk at Aspen in Colorado, which is where theoretical physicists go to recharge their batteries, and Richard Feynman was in the audience. I gave an introductory talk on string theory. Feynman was famous for putting down rival theories: one phrase, one slight joke would just send the whole audience laughing and humiliate the speaker. So I was a little bit apprehensive. Feynman was a critic of string theory. He didnt quite think it was philosophically his cup of tea. After I finished my talk he came up to me. And I said, OK, here it comes. He said: This talk was one of the most beautiful talks Ive ever heard. Gorgeous. Maybe its all wrong. But it was gorgeous. I began to realise that, well, the power of beauty will sway some of the greatest minds. So that was rather encouraging knowing that even though I could be wrong, the theory had emotional power to resonate within the human mind.

For Kaku, resonating in the human mind is a blessing but proving it would be the real prize. The way string theory is tested involves lattice quantum chromodynamics: a calculation problem far beyond what digital computers can achieve. Quantum computers, he writes, may be the final step in finding the Theory of Everything.

Im not a computer person. Im a theoretical physicist, he says. But I got into quantum computers because I realised this may be the only way to quantitatively prove that string theory is correct. String theory exists in the multiverse. That is, we exist perhaps in parallel states which are bizarre, with new laws of physics, but we coexist with them. The way to prove it is with a quantum computer.

Such a proof would shed light on a question that Einstein thought was one of the most profound that could be asked: did God have a choice in making the universe? Einstein thought that there was no choice, says Kaku. The universe had to be this way because any other way it would fall apart. Do you believe in God yourself? I ask him. I believe in the God of Einstein: that the universe in some sense was not an accident, that the universe is not just chaotic that there really is a rhyme or reason to the universe.

Quantum Supremacy is published by Allen Lane on 2 May

Original post:
'Everything is going to be turned upside down': Michio Kaku on the new world of quantum computing - The Spectator