Quantum computing is one of the first great technologies of the 21st century, but the details are still shrouded in mystery. I can explain conventional digital computing down to the electron in a MOSFET, and with this newsletter, I have made it my mission to do the same for quantum computing.

Welcome to the Quantum Edge newsletter. Here you will learn more than just: “quantum computing works because of superposition and entanglement.” The Quantum Edge newsletter will tell you what goes with superposition and entanglement and what those terms actually mean. Here you will read about the physics, chemistry, and all sciences that create the foundation for quantum computing. Join me in my quest to translate the mysteries of the quantum world to the language of the dinner table and the coffee shop.

In today’s newsletter: We look at scale - time and distance, big and small

A lot of the discussion on quantum principles has revolved around what things look like and act like. I’ve made heavy use of metaphor and analogy because our normal senses fail us when we peer down into the quantum realm. Our brain has developed around information that our eyes, ears, nose, touch, and other physical sensory organs can provide us. Those sense organs just don’t work once things get super small or super big.

We can understand things the size of a basketball, pool ball, or golf ball. We can understand time in terms of seconds, minutes, hours and years. Our conception of time starts to breakdown on the decade timescale. That’s part of why, as we get older, we keep thinking that time flies by.

As a youngster, we’re dealing with months and seasons. We get that. Nine months of school. Three months of summer. Later in life - 10, 20, 40 years later, we don’t have a good way to hold onto a frame of reference and time slips by, never to be seen again.

We are okay with size down to a grain of sand. Smaller than that and we can’t even count. Even with sand, if we have a lot, we can’t count it. Try and count the hairs on your head or your arm. You can’t. They are too small. Our brains don’t work at that scale.

Large distances are just as ooky. We can see things a few blocks away. We can walk ten miles in a few hours or drive it in a few minutes. That’s an okay distance. We have a feel for driving 100 miles away or flying 2,000 miles away. But our feel for those distances isn’t really a matter of distance. After a few miles, we start to think in terms of the time it will take us to get there.

A drive to Seattle, Washington, USA from here… About two hours 45 minutes. A flight to Phoenix, Arizona, USA… About two hours 45 minutes. Interesting that by looking at time, a 174-mile distance (driving) seems equal to a 1,271-mile distance (flying). Our brains don’t really think well in terms of long distances. That’s probably why we use light years (the distance that light travels in one year) to discuss the vast distances of interstellar space.

1,000 seconds is equal to 16 minutes and 40 seconds. You can boil an egg or cook a pizza in that amount of time. That we can grasp.

Multiply by a thousand and you get a million. A million seconds is 11 days, 13 hours, 46 minutes and 40 seconds. In that amount of time, you can read Tolstoy’s War and Peace without disrupting your life too much.

Multiply by a thousand and you get a billion. A billion seconds is 31 years, 251 days, and change. In a billion seconds, you are born, grow and go to school, become an adult, maybe get married, maybe have kids, and if you do have kids, see them into school.

Multiply by a thousand and you get a trillion seconds. That’s about 31,700 years, or before farming was invented on Earth. That’s a long time. Yet a flash of light from a planet in the same relative place as us, but on the other side of the Milky Way galaxy, would need another 22,000 years to reach us.

The closest galaxy to us is Andromeda. It’s about 2.5 million light years away, which means a flash of light from a planet in that galaxy would take around 2.5 million years, or 78,894,000,000,000,000 seconds to reach us - give or take a few trillion or so seconds (2.5 billion eggs boiled one after the other).

Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away, which means that when we see it, the light has been traveling to two and a half million years. The furthest away any of our telescopes can see as of this writing is about 13.5 billion light years away - 5,400 times further away than Andromeda.

In one second, light travels 186,282 miles (299,792 kilometers). In 1,000 light seconds (egg boiling time), light travels 186,282,000 (299,792,000) kilometers. Sunlight, leaving our sun, hitting a big mirror hear on Earth and returning to the sun would take just about that amount of time. Boil your egg or cook your pizza and you’ve got the light travel time from the sun to Earth and back.

Phoenix is 0.00682 light seconds away. Travel light (or as light) and you will get there faster than by plane. Seattle is 0.000934066 light seconds away. Ten miles - the three-hour walking time to the next town down the road is about 0.0000536 light seconds away.

When the distance is large, we are best off thinking in terms of how long it will take us to travel, or for even bigger distances, how long it will take light to get there. That doesn’t really work when we go the other direction - to super small distances.

In 2016, I visited LIGO (laser interferometer gravitational-wave observatory), outside of Richland, Washington. That was a decade ago as of this writing. Seems like yesterday. LIGO is a giant interferometer with two four-kilometer-long arms. The arms are at 90 degrees to each other and, with mirrors, the light is split and bounced back and forth some 400 times in each arm before being directed back to a common target. 400 times 4 KM is 1,600 KM or just under 1,000 miles. That’s about 0.005337 seconds in light travel time. You can also read that as 5.4 milliseconds (ms). A honeybee flaps its wings in about 5 ms. When you talk, sitting across a large dinner table from someone, the sound of your voice will take about 5 ms to get to your audience’s ears. Light goes 1,000 miles in the same amount of time.

Back to LIGO. When a gravity wave hits Earth, it squeezes the planet like you might squeeze a balloon. The planet gets wider in one direction and narrower in the other direction. Since the two arms of the LIGO interferometer are at 90-degree angles to each other, one arm gets shorter and the other arm gets longer when this happens.

Light always travels at the same speed when traveling through a vacuum (and the interferometer arms are sealed, evacuated of air, and held at a vacuum). Since the two arms end up different lengths because of the squeezing, the light beams don’t exactly line up on the target during this gravity wave stretching.

The LIGO scientists can use this lack of lining up to measure the squeezing distance of as small as 1/10,000 the diameter of a proton. LIGO is the most sensitive measurement instrument ever created by humans. With two or more of these detectors, LIGO can use triangulation to tell which direction and how far away the gravity wave originated. In 2015, the year before I visited, LIGO observed its first gravity wave, from a pair of black holes that collided and combined long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

LIGO isn’t the point of this issue. It is quite interesting. For the first time in human history, we had seen something not in the spectrum of electromagnetic energy, which travels through the fabric of space, but we had seen disturbance in the actual fabric of space (a disturbance in the force??? - Don’t know. Force is a subject for another issue).

The point of this issue is an attempt to understand how small the things are that we are dealing with in the quantum world. I went big first, because as difficult as it is to comprehend distances on an astronomical scale, a quantum scale is even more difficult.

The analogy most people use when trying to describe the size of subatomic particles is to compare with a known object and then give distances in miles. For example, if a hydrogen atom were scaled up so much that the proton were the size of a golf ball, the electron would best be described as likely orbiting two to three miles away. If you try to search the Internet for this analogy, you will get many wildly different answers. Because of quantum effects and the better understanding of the makeup of these particles, we know less about their size than we thought we did. Yes. We know more, so we know less.

A proton is thought to be 0.831 femtometers (0.831 × 10^-15) in diameter. That is 0.831 meters (32.7 inches) divided by 10, 15 times, or 0.000000000000000831 meters in diameter. Divide that by 10,000 and tell me how precise the LIGO instrument must be.

An electron is considerably smaller. I’ve seen some texts that say an electron is 10^-22 meters in diameter. Current thinking says that an electron is a point without size. The diameter is so small as to not really exist by conventional thinking. Yet an electron does exist.

Humans start to use time to better understand very large distances because beyond a certain distance, our brains just aren’t’ capable of understanding distance - it no longer makes any sense. Time is easier. Physicists start to use energy as a primary measurement for fundamental (can’t be broken into smaller pieces) subatomic particles because below a certain size, distance just doesn’t make any sense.

Electrons, photons, quarks, and other fundamental particles are thought to be so small as to not have a structure or size. I will leave you to ponder on that.

New to the Quantum Edge newsletter?

Thinking about re-reading it but want a more transportable format?

I’ve wrapped the first ten issues of The Quantum Edge newsletter into book form. The collection, called “The Quantum Computing Anthology, Volume 1”, is now available in Kindle and paperback on Amazon. The book collects newsletter issues 1 through 10 and has some additional material and edits for continuity and clarity.

Coming soon: Volume 2, collecting newsletter issues 11 though 20 is in the works. Look for it on Amazon soon.

In the meantime, you can order the Volume 1 Kindle or paperback editions on Amazon today: The Quantum Computing Anthology, Volume 1

Check your email box Thursday - probably. (Okay, some of these weekly issues have come out on Friday, or not at all. But, in a quantum world, how can you tell?)

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Positive Edge is the consulting arm of Duane Benson, Tech journalist, Futurist, Entrepreneur. Positive Edge is your conduit to decades of leading-edge technology development, management and communications expertise.