Author Archives: Eann Patterson

Chirping while calculating probabilities

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Decorative image of a pink roseA couple of weeks ago, I visited the London headquarters of IBM in the UK and Ireland for discussions about possible areas of collaboration in research and education.  At the end of our meeting, we were taken to see some of their latest developments, one of which was their Quantum System One computer.  We had seen its casing, a shiny silver cylinder about half metre in diameter and a metre and half long with a hemispherical lower end, hanging in a sealed glass cube in the lobby of the building.  The computer we viewed was also suspended from the ceiling of a sealed glass cube in order to isolate it from vibration, but was without its cylindrical cover so that we could see its innards which need to be cooled to cryogenic temperatures.  The room in which it was displayed was darkened and a soundtrack of the computer operating added to the atmosphere – it sounded like birds chirping.  IBM are already operating quantum computers, starting in 2019 with a 27-qubit processor and achieving 433 qubits last year with plans for 4,158+ qubits in 2025 in their roadmap.  There are about 80 companies focussed on quantum computing worldwide, including Universal Quantum who are working on a million qubit computer.  Qubit is short for quantum bit and is the quantum mechanical analogue of a classical computer bit.  A computer bit works in binary and can only have a value of 0 or 1.  Whereas a qubit holds information about the probability amplitudes for 0 and 1 which will always have a sum of 1.  The use of probability amplitudes allows complex systems to be described more efficiently and larger solution spaces to be explored.  IBM’s quantum processors are thin wafers about the same size as the one in your laptop but their need for cryogenic temperatures and vibration isolation means we will not be using them at home any time soon.

Achievements, happiness and the passage of time

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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about time as ‘a giant wheel rotating through cycles of creation and destruction leading, over aeons, to the birth and death of entire worlds’ [see ‘Aeonian cycles of creation and destruction’ on October 18th, 2023].  I had written previously about Aristotle’s view of time as the measurement of change and how Newton believed that time passes even when nothing changes [see ‘We inhabit time as fish live in water’ on July 24th, 2019].  I recently read ‘The Wall’, a beautiful and thought-provoking, post-apocalyptic novel by Marlen Haushofer, in which the narrator states ‘Time only seemed to be passing quickly.  I think time stands quite still and I move around in it, sometimes slowly and sometimes at a furious rate.’  This aligns with the fish-in-water concept of time rather than the giant revolving wheel.  I recently had a conversation with a colleague about our perception of time as we looked back on our lives which made us feel that time has sped past whereas at the time it appeared to be passing slowly.  Perhaps our familiarity with the past, a landscape through which we have travelled, foreshortens it or is that I might have less than a thousand weeks left [see ‘One just raced past and I have only about 1000 left’ on September 8th, 2021] .  Haushofer’s narrator also says, ‘I had achieved little that I had wanted, and everything I had achieved I had ceased to want’.  In my working life, I have some empathy with this statement, particularly the second part.  I have moved through time at a furious rate, striving towards accomplishments; but now that I have most of them, they seem relatively unimportant.  They are certainly not the key to happiness which can be found anywhere through supporting and valuing others [see ‘A view from the middle’ on March 22nd, 2023] as well as in concentration so intense, for instance though reading or writing, that you lose your sense of time leading to a deep sense of happiness and well-being [see ‘You can only go there in your head’ on May 11th, 2022].  I wrote this post on a Sunday afternoon after spending a couple of hours sitting in the warm October sunshine on the campus of the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign reading ‘Mr President’ by Miguel Angel Asturias – both the reading and writing have left me in a happy state of mind.

Source:

Marlen Haushofer, The Wall, Vintage Classics/Penguin Random House, 2022.

Do you think that you have a miserable job?

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Many years ago I attended the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina. There I was introduced to a series of books by Patrick Lencioni.  I use one of them, ‘The Five Dysfunctions of a Team‘, regularly as part of module that I teach on Science Leadership and Ethics which is in turn part of a Continuous Professional Development (CPD) programme [see ‘On being a leader‘ on October 13th, 2021].  I pulled the book off my shelf a few weeks ago in preparation for delivering the class and next to it was first one I read and enjoyed, called ‘The Three Signs of a Miserable Job: A Fable for Managers‘.  If you are only reading this post to find out if your job qualifies as miserable, then the three signs are anonymity (you see yourself as being invisible), irrelevance (your work does not matter to anyone, not even the boss) and immeasurement (you have no tangible means of assessing success or failure in your job).  The message of the book is that a manager has a responsibility to ensure none of their team suffers any of these basic signs of a miserable job.

Personale mappa mundi

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I wrote a few weeks ago about appreciating a good infographic [see ‘Inconvenient data about electricity generation‘ on October 11th, 2023].  I realised recently that I had enjoyed another one vacation without appreciating it as an infographic.  During our vacation, we stopped for a few days in Hereford and visited the cathedral where they have a map of the world made around 1300, known as the Hereford Mappa Mundi.  The map is roughly circular with a diameter of about 1.5 m and is drawn on vellum made from calf skin.  It shows the history, geography and destiny of humanity from the perspective of Christian Europe seven hundred years ago with 500 drawings depicting towns, plants, animals and Biblical events – so more of an infographic than a map though of course the word ‘infographic’ had not been invented when it was produced more than 700 years ago.   The perspective is unusual to the modern eye and was described to us by a curator as the view that a fly would have of the surface of an apple as it crawled around on it.  It is arranged using an O and T motif, in which the T is inside the O creating three sectors.  Jerusalem is at the centre with Asia above it, and Africa and Europe to the bottom right and left respectively.  The idea of a fly crawling around on an apple set me thinking about what my map of the world would like from the perspective of the regions I have explored at ground level.  Most of the oceans would be very small because I have crossed them at about 500 mph in an aircraft, except for the seas around Europe which I visited by ship in the Royal Navy.  Liverpool would replace Jerusalem at the centre and North America would replace Africa in the bottom right because I have never been to Africa but I spent several years in North America. Asia at the top would feature images of universities and conference venues in China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan squashed together because I have visited all of them several times but always by plane.  Europe would be shown in some detail with pictures of research laboratories though somewhat distorted due an emphasis on a few places that I have visited frequently when participating in research collaborations, such as Milan, Toulouse, Ulm and Zurich.  When we lived in the US, we made a number of road trips to both the east and west coasts as well as northwards into Canada, so North America would be shown in more detail than either Europe or Asia and would include family photographs.

Image: Philip Capper, Mappa Mundi (c.1290) Hereford Cathedral. CC BY 2.0.  https://www.flickr.com/photos/flissphil/1385520222