Beyond Helgoland
Exactly 100 years ago this June, a young German physicist went down with a bad attack of hay fever. The windswept island of Helgoland was an ideal escape, and he took his work with him. It went so well that on 7 June he worked on into the night and in the early hours of the morning he completed what would be the foundations of quantum theory. He couldn’t sleep and went out to walk and then sit on a rock to watch the sunrise.
A century on, the theory has been brilliantly confirmed in so many ways and has led to a rich harvest of technology – from lasers and transistors to LEDs and atomic clocks used in GPS. But it is still regularly described as “weird” by physicists and science writers.
We’ve invited some of the freshest thinkers to tackle the situation – to explore the meaning of quantum theory and to look ahead to new applications, from building a quantum camera to developing a quantum computer.
We’ll also explore how core quantum concepts can be communicated through poetry and through music – and a concert in St Magnus Cathedral will be narrated by the director of the Helgoland Museum.
It gives us lasers and computer chips, and it explains the bonds that build atoms into materials and the forces that power the sun; and Heisenberg completed the first stage in the island of Helgoland 100 years ago. The story starts with something familiar – heating an object and observing the heat it emits. To make the calculations fit, Max Planck suggested that radiation – till then pictured as waves – comes in tiny units; he called them ‘quanta’. The outcome was the groundwork for the whole of modern physics, as Prof. James Millen of King’s College London explains.
It’s an utterly different type of computing, which we’re told will make it possible to do things that have never been done before. But how does it work? And what are the dangers? And when will the first working machines arrive? Prof. Andrew Briggs of Oxford University is working on the development of quantum computers. He explains the underlying ideas and the application of AI for taking them forward.
We often picture the quantum world as ‘uncertain’, a world of probabilities and randomness. Not so, says Slovenian physicist Andrej Detela. It's more like a dance, with entangled particles part of a deeper layer of harmony – which we break when we interact with them. To understand, he says, we have to look afresh at the concept of disorder – entropy – that has dominated physics since the 19th century. Alongside it we must put the concept of order, syntropy – which leads to a second stream of time.
Geometry deals with shapes, algebra with numbers. To bring them together fascinates Prof. Minhyong Kim, director of Edinburgh's International Centre for Mathematical Sciences. He is a leader in arithmetic geometry, which seeks to build the familiar world of geometry from deep number structures. He also has a long interest in physics, and its huge challenge: how to reconcile quantum theory with Einstein’s general relativity? Is the question, he asks: is the universe algebraic or geometric?
The synthesizer trio QRM perform a non-stop piece of electronic music heavily inspired by 70s/80s musical genres, shaped by their own style, accompanied by specially-created art from Hilary de Vries. The music follows quantum themes including entanglement, wavelike particles, and sometimes-random event outcomes.
From distant stars to tiny cells, cameras open up new worlds – and now they have entered the quantum domain. At the University of California, Berkeley, a team of physicists and biologists use individual electrons to image proteins inside cells. One of the team, Dr Eric Cooper, shares the latest images and explains how quantum mechanics holds the key to building ever more powerful quantum cameras.
Dr Russell Miller and Dr David Whittaker of the National Physical Laboratory describe how quantum effects underpin much of technology today – from semiconductor chips in mobile phones to atomic clocks providing precise timing for telecommunications and banking systems. They tell the story of advances in precision measurement and demonstrate examples of cutting-edge techniques.
Poet Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan joins physicist Prof. James Millen on a journey of exploration into the quantum world. “Art and science are just different languages trying to understand the what, the why, and the how in everything around us."
A concert of music to celebrate a great discovery and the island where it happened a century ago. Helgoland Museum director Dr Simone Arnhold, tells the story, with music from Orkney Camerata conducted by Iain Campbell; the Orkney Chamber Choir conducted by Robert Hersey; Hannah Firth (soprano) and Iain Campbell (piano). There is Haydn, Grieg, Elgar and Mogens Pedersøn; Edward Bairstow, Hindemith, Nielsen and Ronald Binge – and the world premiere of a new work by George McPhee in memory of the physicist Peter Higgs and his love of hillwalking and music.
Orkney-based accordionist Karen Tweed and Edinburgh-based quantum physicist and pianist Erika Andersson present a performance of music inspired by quantum physics. They share a passion and fascination for music, art, textiles and science and explore topics from entanglement to quantum computers. In each case the music expresses the essence of the concept.
