Scientists ponder the future of mankind

The Breakthrough Prize, known as the “Oscars of Science,” was launched in 2012 by a group of Silicon Valley billionaires, with big names in high-tech industries joining every year.

The US$22 million awards, sponsored by tech celebrities such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and newcomer Tencent’s Pony Ma, were given to scientists in life sciences, mathematics and physics at a ceremony last week, each winning US$3 million.

The winners included the first cure for a deadly baby disease called spinal muscular atrophy, a new kind of matter that only conducts electricity on its surface, and an enzyme that launches the body’s immune defense against infections and cancers. They were among hundreds of scientific breakthroughs and discoveries across the world — from spotting a new pulsar star in the heaven to inventing a new material on Earth.

Shanghai Daily talked to top scientists at the recent World Laureates Forum in Shanghai, where more than 30 renowned scientists including 26 Nobel laureates brainstormed in the city.

We found out what they thought about whether there are aliens, how much longer can human beings survive, whether we are to be substituted by robots, and whether we can communicate faster through quantum mechanics, among others.

The race is on for a quantum computer

Huawei recently announced a new cloud service platform that includes a quantum computing simulator, available to the public to allow quantum research and education in the field. Earlier this year, Alibaba Cloud launched its quantum computing service in association with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Chinese companies are moving quickly though they are late entries in the quantum mechanics race, as international players such as IBM, Microsoft, Intel and a dozen others have been competing to build the first real quantum computer.

Classic computers store 1 or 0 in a “bit,” while a quantum computer uses qubit (quantum bit) to store a combination of 1s and 0s. One qubit holds two values, two qubits four, three qubits eight and so on. Thus its computing power is exponentially greater than that of “bits.”

The companies are betting big on that estimated computing power, which is said to far exceed super computers and can solve problems in many fields that are impossible today. Though a quantum computer big enough to calculate faster than current super computers has not yet been built, companies and innovators have already taken the hypothesis as granted and are working on possible applications, such as quantum GPS or quantum solutions to overcrowded subway stations.

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Shanghai Daily asked two Nobel laureates in physics about their take on this hypothesis and its possible applications. The 2012 laureate Serge Haroche, whose research laid the foundation for quantum computing, is highly suspicious while 2004 laureate and string theorist David Gross waits for it to tackle unsolved problems in atomic physics and many other fields. The hottest topic of all is the combination of artificial intelligence and quantum computation.

“Many problems in physics and other fields depend on the speed of calculation,” Gross said.

“By now, there is no question at some point there will be some kind of quantum computer, now we have them in 50 qubits, but it needs to be hundreds and thousands of qubits to have a powerful one, which is substantially more difficult to be built,” he added.

He estimated that it could become reality in 10 to 30 years, a lot shorter than the previous common expectations of 50 years. As a fundamental theorist physicist, he also explained how a quantum computer can simulate and create a model of the world — which is made of particles — better than classic computers.

“Nothing in the law of physics says it is impossible,” he said. “It is just very difficult.”

One of the difficulties lies in scale. Many big players have built a kind of quantum computer, but quantum physicist Haroche calls those “toys,” small systems that demonstrate the possibility of what it can do when scaled up.

 “The good question is not when (a real quantum computer will be built) but if, because I’m not sure it will be,” Haroche said. “A real quantum computer has to be useful and achieve where classic computers fail. To do that, you have to build it in a much larger scale than what has been done up to now.”

But it isn’t easy to scale up.

“You lose the quantum coherence very quickly when you increase the size of the computer,” Haroche said. “Something is missing in the basic science.”

Many companies have been trying to do quantum simulations on classic computers. Alibaba recently released a paper that indicates it might be more competitive against quantum chips, while other companies are comparing their latest quantum chips against regular supercomputers.

“Quantum communication is closer to becoming useful for practical application, maybe in the next decade even, but the question here is why,” Haroche said, referring to the double quantum-teleportation work done by the team led by Chinese scientist Pan Jianwei, who was named by Nature as one of the 10 people who mattered in 2017.

Pan’s vision is to build a global quantum communication network which will utilize satellites as middlemen. And that raises the question of post-quantum encryption, because the current public key system — meaning different codes for encryption and decryption — is certainly vulnerable to a quantum computer.

“We will know in 20 to 30 years whether it is serious,” Martin Hellman, co-inventor of the public key cryptography which won the ACM Turing Award in 2015, told Shanghai Daily.

“But we need to start getting prepared now, because items like our medical records that are encrypted now might be broken in the future.”

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Uncovering secrets of the universe

The 500-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), or the “Eye of Heaven” as it’s known in China, has discovered 44 new pulsars since it was installed in southwest China’s Guizhou Province in 2016. The observation of pulsars is one of the ways to confirm the existence of gravitational radiation, through which dark matters and dark forces such as black holes can be detected.

Joseph Taylor Jr, 1993 Nobel laureate in physics, was the first to discover binary pulsars and to provide the evidence for the existence of gravitational waves. He has high hopes that FAST will help scientists make more accurate observations in order to build a more detailed cosmological model.

For decades, the big bang theory has long been the prevailing cosmological model of the universe, but scientists have been struggling to work out the details.

“Ninety-five percent of the universe is still unknown, what we call dark matter and dark energy,” Adam Riess, 2011 Nobel laureate in physics, told Shanghai Daily.

“It’s a good basic model, but many parts of it are still unfilled. For example, what happened at the beginning of the big bang remains a mystery today, and what we desire to understand.”

The two frontiers of astrophysics, he added, are trying to detect aliens, and working out how fast the universe is expanding. There is no lack of alien/UFO-spotting alerts across the world, though it has never been proved. Many wonder: Are we alone and if not, where are the others?

“Life is likely to exist on many galaxies, but we haven’t found any aliens yet,” said David Gross, 2004 Nobel laureate in physics.

“We have been looking and nothing is found, which might suggest that advanced intelligent technological life like ours may not survive long enough to populate a galaxy. So my conclusion is that if we manage to survive as a species on Earth for another 10,000 years, which is short compared with universe, then we will start populating the galaxy.”

As for “we” here, Gross doesn’t refer to the human beings as we are today, since he expects a much accelerated voluntary evolution process to take place, such as genetic modifications or integrating with artificial intelligence. Gross isn’t too optimistic about whether human beings or the alternative species could survive that long.

“I’m most concerned about us surviving for another 100 years,” he said. “There are just too many dangers today, the nuclear weapons, the climate changes, the environmental pollution, etc. It’s important to realize all the dangers, because human beings are often not thinking very far ahead.”