Fifty years after Bell’s Theorem, tools that harness the weird properties of quantum mechanics are at work all around you
By Nicola Jenner
SMITHSONIAN.COM DECEMBER 1, 2014
Quantum mechanics is weird. The theory, which describes the workings of tiny particles and forces, notoriously made Albert Einstein so uneasy that in 1935 he and his colleagues claimed that it must be incomplete—it was too “spooky” to be real.
The trouble is that quantum physics seems to defy the common-sense notions of causality, locality and realism. For example, you know that the moon exists even when you’re not looking at it—that’s realism. Causality tells us that if you flick a light switch, the bulb will illuminate. And thanks to a hard limit on the speed of light, if you flick a switch now, the related effect could not occur instantly a million light-years away according to locality. However, these principles break down in the quantum realm. Perhaps the most famous example is quantum entanglement, which says that particles on opposite sides of the universe can be intrinsically linked so that they share information instantly—an idea that made Einstein scoff.
But in 1964, physicist John Stewart Bell proved that quantum physics was in fact a complete and workable theory. His results, now called Bell’s Theorem, effectively proved that quantum properties like entanglement are as real as the moon, and today the bizarre behaviors of quantum systems are being harnessed for use in a variety of real-world applications. Here are five of the most intriguing:
A strontium clock, unveiled by NIST and JILA in January, will keep accurate time for the next 5 billion years. (The Ye group and Brad Baxley, JILA)
Ultra-Precise Clocks
Reliable timekeeping is about more than just your morning alarm. Clocks synchronize our technological world, keeping things like stock markets and GPS systems in line. Standard clocks use the regular oscillations of physical objects like pendulums or quartz crystals to produce their ‘ticks’ and ‘tocks’. Today, the most precise clocks in the world, atomic clocks, are able to use principles of quantum theory to measure time. They monitor the specific radiation frequency needed to make electrons jump between energy levels. The quantum-logic clock at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Colorado only loses or gains a second every 3.7 billion years. And the NIST strontium clock, unveiled earlier this year, will be that accurate for 5 billion years—longer than the current age of the Earth. Such super-sensitive atomic clocks help with GPS navigation, telecommunications and surveying.
The precision of atomic clocks relies partially on the number of atoms used. Kept in a vacuum chamber, each atom independently measures time and keeps an eye on the random local differences between itself and its neighbors. If scientists cram 100 times more atoms into an atomic clock, it becomes 10 times more precise—but there is a limit on how many atoms you can squeeze in. Researchers’ next big goal is to successfully use entanglement to enhance precision. Entangled atoms would not be preoccupied with local differences and would instead solely measure the passage of time, effectively bringing them together as a single pendulum. That means adding 100 times more atoms into an entangled clock would make it 100 times more precise. Entangled clocks could even be linked to form a worldwide network that would measure time independent of location.
Observers will have a tough time hacking into quantum correspondence. (VOLKER STEGER/Science Photo Library/Corbis)
Uncrackable Codes
Traditional cryptography works using keys: A sender uses one key to encode information, and a recipient uses another to decode the message. However, it’s difficult to remove the risk of an eavesdropper, and keys can be compromised. This can be fixed using potentially unbreakable quantum key distribution (QKD). In QKD, information about the key is sent via photons that have been randomly polarized. This restricts the photon so that it vibrates in only one plane—for example, up and down, or left to right. The recipient can use polarized filters to decipher the key and then use a chosen algorithm to securely encrypt a message. The secret data still gets sent over normal communication channels, but no one can decode the message unless they have the exact quantum key. That’s tricky, because quantum rules dictate that “reading” the polarized photons will always change their states, and any attempt at eavesdropping will alert the communicators to a security breach.
Today companies such as BBN Technologies, Toshiba and ID Quantique use QKD to design ultra-secure networks. In 2007 Switzerland tried out an ID Quantique product to provide a tamper-proof voting system during an election. And the first bank transfer using entangled QKD went ahead in Austria in 2004. This system promises to be highly secure, because if the photons are entangled, any changes to their quantum states made by interlopers would be immediately apparent to anyone monitoring the key-bearing particles. But this system doesn’t yet work over large distances. So far, entangled photons have been transmitted over a maximum distance of about 88 miles.
Closeup of a D-Wave One computer chip. (D-Wave Systems, Inc.)
Super-Powerful Computers
A standard computer encodes information as a string of binary digits, or bits. Quantum computers supercharge processing power because they use quantum bits, or qubits, which exist in a superposition of states—until they are measured, qubits can be both “1” and “0” at the same time.
This field is still in development, but there have been steps in the right direction. In 2011, D-Wave Systems revealed the D-Wave One, a 128-qubit processor, followed a year later by the 512-qubit D-Wave Two. The company says these are the world’s first commercially available quantum computers. However, this claim has been met with skepticism, in part because it’s still unclear whether D-Wave’s qubits are entangled. Studies released in May found evidence of entanglement but only in a small subset of the computer’s qubits. There’s also uncertainty over whether the chips display any reliable quantum speedup. Still, NASA and Google have teamed up to form the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab based on a D-Wave Two. And scientists at the University of Bristol last year hooked up one of their traditional quantum chips to the Internet so anyone with a web browser can learn quantum coding.
Keeping a sharp eye on entanglement. (Ono et al., arxiv.org)
Improved Microscopes
In February a team of researchers at Japan’s Hokkaido University developed the world’s first entanglement-enhanced microscope, using a technique known as differential interference contrast microscopy. This type of microscope fires two beams of photons at a substance and measures the interference pattern created by the reflected beams—the pattern changes depending on whether they hit a flat or uneven surface. Using entangled photons greatly increases the amount of information the microscope can gather, as measuring one entangled photon gives information about its partner.
The Hokkaido team managed to image an engraved “Q” that stood just 17 nanometers above the background with unprecedented sharpness. Similar techniques could be used to improve the resolution of astronomy tools called interferometers, which superimpose different waves of light to better analyze their properties. Interferometers are used in the hunt for extrasolar planets, to probe nearby stars and to search for ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves.
The European robin may be a quantum natural. (Andrew Parkinson/Corbis)
Biological Compasses
Humans aren’t the only ones making use of quantum mechanics. One leading theory suggests that birds like the European robin use the spooky action to keep on track when they migrate. The method involves a light-sensitive protein called cryptochrome, which may contain entangled electrons. As photons enter the eye, they hit the cryptochrome molecules and can deliver enough energy to break them apart, forming two reactive molecules, or radicals, with unpaired but still entangled electrons. The magnetic field surrounding the bird influences how long these cryptochrome radicals last. Cells in the bird’s retina are thought to be very sensitive to the presence of the entangled radicals, allowing the animals to effectively ‘see’ a magnetic map based on the molecules.
This process isn’t full understood, though, and there is another option: Birds’ magnetic sensitivity could be due to small crystals of magnetic minerals in their beaks. Still, if entanglement really is at play, experiments suggest that the delicate state must last much longer in a bird’s eye than in even the best artificial systems. The magnetic compass could also be applicable to certain lizards, crustaceans, insects and even some mammals. For instance, a form of cryptochrome used for magnetic navigation in flies has also been found in the human eye, although it’s unclear if it is or once was useful for a similar purpose.
Americans have surrendered democracy and enslaved ourselves to illegitimate power. The consequences are murder
ANDREW O’HEHIR
(Credit: AP/Charlie Riedel/Matt York)
This will long be remembered as the week when another grand jury declined to prosecute another white police officer in the death of another unarmed African-American man, this time in the nation’s largest and most diverse city, a supposed bastion of liberalism. For many black people, and indeed for many people of all races, this seemed like a disturbing lesson on race and state power in America. For all the apparent progress we have made, and all the enormous social change of the last half-century, it seems evident that those who wield state power on the most direct and intimate level – the police – still have the right to exercise lethal violence against ordinary citizens with impunity. At any rate, they have that right when it comes to some citizens.
It was also a week when another news nugget flashed by in my Twitter feed, noticed by hardly anyone and unlikely to be much remembered. But there were disturbing lessons to be found there also. A British legal nonprofit called Reprieve reported this week that, on average, every United States drone strike in the Middle East kills 28 unidentified people for every intended target. In America’s fruitless quest to kill al-Qaida head Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Reprieve report alleges, your tax dollars and mine have paid for the deaths of 105 individuals, 76 of them children. In its attempts to kill 41 specific people deemed “high-value targets” in the war on terror, the U.S. has apparently killed more than 1,000 people as unintended collateral damage. Incidentally, al-Zawahiri and at least five other of those celebrity villains remain alive. No one has taken to the streets to mourn those deaths and cry out for justice, largely because they took place far away in a murky war we are told nothing about. (Finding any media coverage of the Reprieve report proved to be a challenge.)
As the daughter of Eric Garner, the man choked to death by cops on Staten Island, said on Friday, this is a moment of national crisis, and one that is long overdue. But the true crisis is not limited to the relationship between African-Americans and the police, as urgent as that issue appears at the moment. Indeed, that is only one aspect of the crisis, which is not something that can be fixed with cop-cams or by sending a few rogue officers to prison. On a larger scale, the crisis is about the corruption and perversion of democracy, and in many cases the willing surrender of democracy by those who live in fear of terrorists from distant lands and criminals from the inner city. To borrow an explosive concept from Nietzsche and turn it to new purposes, it’s about the “slave morality” that characterizes so much of American life, meaning the desire to be dominated and ruled, to give up control over one’s own life and allow others to make the decisions.
Since the word “slave” carries special meaning in American history, let me be clear that I’m not talking here about the legacy of 19th-century human slavery (although that too is still a factor in our national life). I’m talking about the plurality or majority of contemporary Americans who have enslaved themselves – in moral and psychological terms — to the rule of a tiny economic oligarchy, and to a state that serves its interests, in exchange for the promise of order, safety and comfort. That order, safety and comfort then become the absolute values, the only values; they become coterminous with “freedom,” which must be defended by the most exaggerated means. If the leaders hint that those values are under attack from sinister forces, or might someday be, the timorous, self-enslaved majority consents to whatever is said to be necessary, whether that means NSA data sweeps, indefinite detention camps, mass murder by remote control or yet another ground war in the Middle East. Compared to all that, letting a few killer cops go free is small potatoes.
Racism and its close cousin xenophobia are ingredients baked into the slave morality that afflicts so many white Americans, feeding a persecution complex and a sense of permanent aggrievement among the most historically privileged demographic group on the planet. (Yes, there are millions of poor whites, and they have good reason to lament their marginal, forgotten status. They also have a strong tendency to look for enemies in the wrong places.) Crime is at or near all-time lows, employment is high, many consumer goods are cheaper than ever before and the United States has not experienced a major attack by foreign terrorists in 13 years. Given all that, it is crucial to conceal the real source of middle-class and working-class America’s worsening anomie: the vast gulf of inequality between the super-rich and the rest of us, along with the stagnant wages, declining benefits and longer work weeks confronted by ordinary people.
As the black radical philosopher Frantz Fanon observed in the early 1960s, racism becomes a tool in the hands of the masters, used to pit different sectors of the oppressed against each other. He was talking about the European working class and its reluctance to join forces with the anti-colonial struggle in Africa, but we face a version of the same problem today. This week I watched an eerie and powerful new collage film from Swedish documentarian Göran Hugo Olsson called “Concerning Violence,” which is inspired by Fanon’s revolutionary classic “The Wretched of the Earth” (a book not as far away from Nietzsche as you might suppose). The film is an essayistic and aphoristic assemblage of archival footage from the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, opening a window onto various episodes from that little-understood and profoundly important period of post-colonial and anti-colonial history in Africa. But it also struck me as a distorted mirror reflecting our own situation, which has elements of internal colonialism (with respect to the poorest elements of our population), and an external neo-colonialism, although held at a great distance and largely invisible.
As you watch guerrilla fighters attack Portuguese colonial troops in Mozambique, or white Rhodesians insult the servants and prepare to flee their homeland, Lauryn Hill reads oracular passages from Fanon, which sometimes also appear on-screen as overlays. Colonialism, he says, shows us “a world cut in two; its borders and frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations.” While a police officer, who may well be a “native” drawn from the oppressed class, is positioned as a neutral intermediary or a keeper of the peace, he is in fact “the bringer of violence into the mind and the home of the native.” It is through the instrument of policing, Fanon says, that the colonist teaches the colonized that violence is the only effective strategy, and the only language the colonist can understand.
“The zone where the natives live,” Fanon writes, “is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers. The two zones are opposed, but not in the service of a higher unity.” While the white settlers live in “a strongly built town all made of stone and steel,” with bright lights and smoothly paved streets, the natives live somewhere quite different. “The town belonging to the colonized people – the shantytown, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation – is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where or how.” Perhaps the contrast between, say, Ferguson and the most desirable St. Louis suburbs, or between the housing projects of Staten Island and the Upper West Side, is not quite so dramatic, nor the segregation so ironclad. But Fanon’s almost mathematical formula – the two zones of American life are opposed, but not in the service of any higher unity – feels distressingly accurate.
If we have no literal division between natives and settlers in this country – the continent’s native population having been driven to the outermost margins of society – multiple overlapping forms of bigotry and prejudice have served the purpose well. A litany of threats must be concocted or inflated, and then suppressed, by means the morally enslaved majority embraces, tolerates or ignores. Ebola-infected terrorists must be wiped out in Yemen before they can come here; invading brown hordes from Mexico must be thwarted by an impregnable border fence; African-American men, understood to be “violent” and “angry” whether or not they behave that way, must be cut down in the streets, or incarcerated en masse, before they can invade the suburbs.
One could argue that Mike Brown and Eric Garner died because they expressed insufficiently avid slave morality, or did not do so rapidly enough. Reasonable-sounding people on TV and the Internet have repeatedly assured us, over the last few weeks, that those who submit to authority and trust the system (despite the manifest and obvious failures of the system) need not fear being killed in the street. There is a logic here, but it is the logic of military occupation that Fanon would have recognized in the colonial context, not the logic of democracy: Capitulate entirely and without hesitation, do not insist on your so-called rights, and you will be permitted to live.
When a police officer kills an unarmed black man and goes unpunished, we see two interdependent problems at once: the problem of racism, and the problem of state power exercised in its most brutal and overt fashion, violence legitimized by the cloak of authority and exercised with only the barest pretense of accountability. That kind of violence is self-evidently not compatible with the principles of democracy, and we can see that contradiction embodied in someone like Bob McCulloch, the St. Louis prosecutor who nominally serves as an elected representative of the people but whose true role was revealed to be that of servant and protector of state power.
At first glance, the ongoing drone war in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia – and perhaps other places we don’t know about – seems entirely disconnected from the Brown and Garner killings and the subsequent legal whitewashing. The latter reflects a domestic social issue of long standing, bound up with America’s convoluted system of state, regional and local jurisdictions and law enforcement agencies. The former is a matter of “foreign policy” and executive power, an artifact of the technological age and the officially endless war on terror. The drone war is conducted in secret, with the government almost never acknowledging whom it has killed or why. Police killings of civilians generally happen in public, and generally require at least the semblance of a public response.
But the two phenomena are more closely connected than they appear. As we have seen in Ferguson and elsewhere, the military-industrial complex is now heavily invested in American policing, and local law enforcements now resemble poorly trained regional armies. Furthermore, both invoke the well-established principle that the state holds a monopoly on legitimate violence, and then extend it in insidious fashion: All state violence is now deemed legitimate by definition, and the state itself is the sole judge and guarantor of that legitimacy. As the state holds out to us its open hand, seeking to reassure us that all has been handled according to law and in the interests of order, it keeps the other hand clenched in a fist behind its back.
I have no doubt that Barack Obama, like many other people in and around the Democratic Party, feels profoundly troubled by the Brown and Garner deaths and the resulting grand jury decisions, with their distinctive taint of Jim Crow justice. While the president is certainly not responsible for the persistence of racism, he might well ask himself about his uses of state power, and about how police violence inflicted on random citizens in America’s streets relates to the violence inflicted by America on random citizens of faraway places. Obama has expanded executive power beyond Richard Nixon’s wildest dreams, and has claimed the right – without quite coming out and saying so — to conduct extrajudicial executions of American citizens and foreign nationals alike without even the pretense of due process. No future president is likely to relinquish that right voluntarily.
When state violence happens in secret and for undisclosed reasons – death from above, raining down on some village in the desert – we currently don’t even have the right to know about it, and still less to question it. When the violence happens out in the open, with the world’s cellphones watching, the convention that the dead person had certain rights, and the rest of us still have them, must be maintained. Those rights look more tenuous all the time, and rights not claimed or exercised have a tendency to wither away. Still, even the spectral semblance of theoretical rights is important. In the wake of the Brown and Garner decisions we have seen a series of spontaneous street protests unparalleled in recent American history, by people of all races determined to reclaim those rights for everyone.
Where will those protests lead, and what kind of social change can they accomplish? If we really want democracy – a proposition that is by no means clear — we will have to take it or make it, by whatever means necessary. Nietzsche would no doubt tell us it was a sham and a fraud, an empty ideal of universal mediocrity not worth pursuing. Frantz Fanon would insist that nonviolent civil disobedience will not be enough, and that we will need “a process of complete disorder” in which the state’s monopoly on violence is confronted and overthrown. Only a cynic would suggest they might both be right.
“Concerning Violence” is now playing at the IFC Center in New York, and opens Dec. 12 at the Music Hall in Los Angeles, with other cities and home video to follow.
This might be useful but comes with something of a health warning: it makes little difference to the individual if the police are acting lawfully or not, if the police are set on killing you…
STEVEN ROSENFELD, ALTERNET
07 DEC 2014
People hold up their hands in protest at a vigil in St. Louis, Missouri, October 9, 2014. (REUTERS/Jim Young)
Everyone knows the First Amendment guarantees free speech and freedom of assembly—the right to protest. But as demonstrations build across the country over institutional racism and excessive force in policing, there are other things protesters need to know, from legal limits on protests to what to do if arrested.
In some cities, there’s no guarantee that police will behave, balancing the rights of protesters with what they will say are the rights of everyone else. In recent years, cops have rounded up protesters and bystanders, quarantined or held them without charges for a day or more, and then let them go—pretending the whole episode never happened.
What follows are summaries and links to five guidelines and legal analyses for protesters from civil rights’ lawyers. They say what you can and cannot do, tell protesters to be prepared for possible arrest, what to do if arrested and more.
1. The ACLU Lays Out The Basics. Yes, the First Amendment says you can speak out. But the law—based on a mountain of legal decisions—regulates the “time, place and manner” where your speech can occur, the ACLU’s guidelines remind us. You can assemble in most public places, such as streets and sidewalks, but not inside federal courthouses or on private property—like shopping malls.
You can set up tables on sidewalks and give out flyers. But bigger events, where a sound system is used, could cross the line in some locales that require protest permits. You also have to be aware that counter-protesters have the same legal rights to be present and speak. The ACLU also warns against arguing with police officers in the street.
2. Now You Have To Prepare To Protest. As this guide from St. Lawrence University says, there’s more to do than having planning meetings, hanging posters and signs, and calling the media to cover you. “Safety is one of the most important things,” they say. “We go into a protest knowing that there is a chance that we will get arrested, tear gassed, shot with rubber bullets, or billy clubbed. This isn’t to be dramatic, but realistic.”
They discuss the need for affinity groups, having non-violent training, legal information, contact information for participants, setting up a voicemail box to keep in touch, anticipating lodging and food needs, and making banners and noise makers. Their details are good, such as what to bring—paper, pens, cameras, water, energy bars, and even “bandannas soaked in vinegar (1:15 ratio) or lemon juice in a plastic bag” to neutralize tear gas. They also remind people what not to bring, such as illegal drugs and weapons.
3. Know Your Cellphone Rights. Cellphones can document police counter-protest tactics and be a very powerful tool in the media and in court. But cellphones also are a treasure trove of private information for police if you are arrested. Luckily, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a rare decision affirming the rights of individuals above the government, last June ruled that police need a search warrant to examine cellphones. But as Slate.com has noted, that alone may not stop cops from confiscating phones and trying to look at them anyway—starting with pressuring you to reveal passwords.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s guide for cellphones at protests suggests having encrypted “end-to-end” communication software for calls and texts. They note that despite the Supreme Court’s ruling, cops will still pressure people for passwords. They also suggest reading the ACLU’s advice on photographers’ rights, which include that police cannot demand to see your pictures or videos without a search warrant, nor can they freely delete them from cameras and phones.
4. What To Do If It Gets Ugly. This guide from MatadorNetwork.com reminds protesters to be prepared and lookout for a police crackdown. They tell people that cellphones can become unreliable if they get wet. They remind people that certain cosmetics will worsen the effects of tear gas, such as “heavy creams or lip balm.” They suggest identifying possible escape routes and looking for signs—such as the arrival of SWAT units—that police are preparing for a round up. Should one get tear-gassed, they suggest getting home quickly, removing one’s clothes and shoes, and starting a long shower with cool water and soap.
5. What To Do If You’re Arrested. This guide from the Center for Constitutional Rights tells people who commit nonviolent civil disobedience what they can expect if arrested. That action could be as simple as lying down in the street—the “die-in” protests—or not moving when police say they’re trying to clear a street or let an ambulance through. They mention the prospect of being charged with different state and federal offenses, and that protesters should expect to spend at least several hours—or even a day or more— in jail. They also discuss the consequences of an arrest, from having to appear in court months after the protest, to the possible impact on student loans, to the reality that non-citizens who are arrested almost always face much harsher treatment.
6. Advice For Hardcore Activists. This guide, from OccupyWallSt.org, tells how to use your body to “maximize your protest!” It discusses linking arms, sitting down in the street, passive resistance, using a variety of chains and locks to attach oneself to cars and fences, as well as arm tubes requiring the police to dismantle them (including tips on avoiding injury). It even discusses buying and abandoning used cars in the street to thwart police.
The guide also talks about having communication networks established and supporters nearby for assistance, in case of a crackdown. They note people on the sidelines also can be arrested, and suggest that someone be designated as a police negotiator ahead of time, “since they can’t offer effective support from the back of a police transit van.”
The First Amendment
As you can see, the right to speak freely is not as simple as it sounds. The bottom line in First Amendment law is that political speech is still governed by “time, place and manner” restrictions. In the heat of the moment, protesters cannot count on police to defer to their constitutional rights—in the same way a judge might when reviewing what happened afterward. That means the people who want to protest should hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. That’s the sad state of democracy in America today.
It would have been appreciated had Mr Castaing provided information regarding the location of this photo, but my guess is somewhere in Tuscany…any better ideas out there?
This blog is devoted to legal, historical and human rights matters, in which issues of general concern are addressed freely and spontaneously. It is intended to further an informal exchange of views in the democratic spirit of freedom of opinion and respect for the opinions of others, in an effort to understand rather than condemn, to propose constructive solutions rather than grandstand. The perspective is both from inside and outside the box and the added value lies more in the questions than in the answers.
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