Entanglement between superconducting qubits and a tardigrade

https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.07978

by caymanjim • 5 years ago

152 111 5 years ago

arxiv.org

lawrenceyan• 5 years ago

The dream of a quantum bear has been realized.

selimthegrim• 5 years ago

As Jeff Kimble used to say, it’s the dreams stuff is made of.

mikewarot• 5 years ago

I'm not sure what the practical outcome of this will be, but the quantum woo community is going to have a field day with it. Ugh!

colordrops7• 5 years ago

What does that even mean? The term "woo" is so condescending and useless.

dr_dshiv• 5 years ago

Demand operationalization of “woo”! Otherwise, it’s just another form of self satisfied group think

dogma11382• 5 years ago

I guess they mean the “What the bleep do we know?” and CCC (not chaos computer club) crowd

zwkrt2• 5 years ago

Well what’s condescending and useless is the crowd of people that, in absence of any understanding or genuine interest in the subject, use words and phrases from quantum mechanics to enforce their beliefs or sell snake oil to others. I can see the books and blog posts and motivational videos now:

“Entangle yourself to your successful universe”

“Science proves life is quantum”

“What entanglement to life proves about our spiritual path”

“

lisper• 5 years ago

You pretty much nailed it: "woo" is something that is so useless as to be worthy of condescension when it is presented otherwise (which woo invariably is).

fourtrees2• 5 years ago

People with (often) new age mystical beliefs justify them with unconventional, incompletely understood, or naïve views of QM. Like the belief in the healing effects of crystals due to some quantum effect or that consciousness is generated by quantum effects in neurons.

I seriously doubt any quantum mysticism is true, and I'm happy to defer to the physicists to get my woo from QM as in this experiment.

dkersten2• 5 years ago

The way I’ve always heard it used, it basically means “scientific sounding words/sentences that are actually gibberish, used to make something with little or no evidence sound more credible to laypeople“. If you’re in the business of selling laypeople on fancy terms to mislead them, then sure, it’s condescending, but I think condescension is warranted in that case.

tomrod11• 5 years ago

The term "woo" is so condescending and useless.

This is what makes it so effective of a term, as it accurately describes the activities, behaviors, and ideologies to which it is applied!

jkhdigital• 5 years ago

The animal is then observed to return to its active form after 420 hours at sub 10 mK temperatures and pressure of 6×10^-6 mbar, setting a new record for the conditions that a complex form of life can survive.

!!!

quadcore• 5 years ago

I think we should throw a tardigrade at a black hole

dogma11382• 5 years ago

Do you want cthulhu?

ortusdux• 5 years ago

We've already bombarded the moon with them...

https://www.wired.com/story/a-crashed-israeli-lunar-lander-s...

codezero• 5 years ago

Don't you remember? That's how we got into this mess in the first place!

pjs_• 5 years ago

Incredible. They paused his ass

yholio• 5 years ago

We need to take control of the tardigrade DNA and use it to build space stations, terraform new planets and whatever else we might need as the uncontested TardiGods of the Galaxy.

syngrog66• 5 years ago

we must never ever release tardigrades onto an alien planet.

definitely not a desert planet. or one named Arrakis. or Dune

oh wait... we must

jhgb• 5 years ago

"Consider a spherical tardigrade in vacuum..."

29athrowaway• 5 years ago

Blaze it

onemoresoop• 5 years ago

Do you expect any life form to survive fire?

BobbyJo• 5 years ago

I survive fire every day at 4:20.

akomtu• 5 years ago

The future of quantum computers: scientists watch how a few tardigrades navigate a labyrinth, make notes in complete silence and with a straight face expression update the chalkboard filled with GR/QM equations.

otikik• 5 years ago

They should have put Paul Stamets in the references at least.

gmuslera• 5 years ago

More than an achievement it was a Discovery.

ben_w• 5 years ago

I’m still surprised the character shared a name with a real mycologist.

meristem• 5 years ago

And on purpose.

zepto• 5 years ago

Obviously quantum entanglement is how the tardigrade remains connected to the subspace mycelial network. I’m surprised they don’t mention this.

ggfgg• 5 years ago

Please don’t give me flashbacks to that horse crap.

tomrod11• 5 years ago

Horse crap grows the best mushrooms, I hear.

And modern Star Trek rocks. Definitely a different groove but a fun one regardless.

dash2• 5 years ago

Is it like Schrödinger's Tardigrade?

ajb• 5 years ago

Not unless they kill it conditionally on the value of a qubit. But in fact they 'merely' affected some charges on the tardigrade. Its living/dead status was not entangled.

TheOtherHobbes• 5 years ago

Although with tardigrades, it's not as if anyone can tell.

I hope this is not the beginning of quantum tardigrade computing. (Because that has Netflix Original all over it.)

anotheraccount9• 5 years ago

No. It's more like alive versus Schrödinger's Tardigrade.

thehappypm2• 5 years ago

Is this parody?

dang4• 5 years ago

I have the same question. It seems https://www.vlatkovedral.com/entangled-tardigrades/ is serious? and it's by an Oxford prof.

thehappypm2• 5 years ago

It seems like a social experiment or something..

daltonlp• 5 years ago

Yes.

My favorite laugh line from the paper: "Maximum likelihood estimation was then employed to prevent the resulting density matrix from having nonphysical properties."

In other words, "We made up some numbers that looked impressive"

dang4• 5 years ago

Ok, maybe we'd better downweight this submission. Thanks.

_joel• 5 years ago

Does this mean the spore drive is on it's way :)

account-5• 5 years ago

There's a joke here somewhere about entangling an NTF to the thing it's meant to convey ownership of, and thereby negating all criticism of NFTs... Maybe not

dkersten2• 5 years ago

An NFT halting problem? The NFT points to a thing that only exists if the NFT doesn’t point to it, or something.

billiam• 5 years ago

Don't know what to say, I'm speechless. We all love us some tardigrades, but this is quite a statement about the resilience of life. If anything from here can colonize the universe, it's these guys.

hkt• 5 years ago

Tardigrades are amazing and so is this. But I fully expect the next experiment will end with facehugger sized tardigrades tearing through some Black Mesa-esque lab.

ghostly_s• 5 years ago

Torturing Tardigrades For Fun and Profit^X^X^X^X^X^X^X Citations.

6177c40f• 5 years ago

I'm not really sure what they're trying to accomplish here, but I never thought I'd read a quantum physics-related paper with the sentences:

"We place a tardigrade tun on a superconducting transmon qubit and observe coupling between the qubit and the tardigrade tun via a shift in the resonance frequency of the new qubit-tardigrade system. This joint qubit-tardigrade system is then entangled with a second superconducting qubit."

roughly• 5 years ago

Same - it’s technically impressive, but I just have no idea what one can Do with this, it’s so incredibly weird.

colechristensen• 5 years ago

It might be quite the stretch, but possibly one day real beam-me-up-scotty quantum teleportation of a living thing.

anigbrowl• 5 years ago

Presumably, changes in the quantum state of the tardigrade's atoms could be inferred from the state of the qubits, thus potentially allowing chemical activity inside cells to be monitored without dissections.

dang4• 5 years ago

All: could you please not post dumb, obvious comments about this?

Either the story is interesting and significant [1] or it shouldn't be on HN's front page. Either way, the thread shouldn't fill up with shallow internet reflux. I get that the novelty of this story is activating, but we're trying for something different here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] which does seem to be the case? I can't really tell. But this alone is significant: "setting a new record for the conditions that a complex form of life can survive"

Edit: I'm downweighting this as some sort of parody, barring more information.

thisrod3• 5 years ago

So this is me. A decade ago, I would have been a plausible choice of referee for a paper like this.

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=C6BzRwwAAAAJ

You'll have to take my word for it, as I don't currently have a university job. For some reason, Google doesn't let you authenticate your Scholar account with your ORCID account, even though they trust ORCID to verify that you wrote the papers.

This paper sounds legitimate to me. If it was made up, it would be a fraud, not a spoof. That's unlikely, because the authors come from the most legitimate institutions there are (The University of Oxford, The National University of Singapore). ArXiv verifies institutional affiliation. Even if it is made up, the experiment is plausible.

I can get how it sounds like a spoof. I laughed out loud at:

We simulate the electric fields and capacitance shifts using ANSYS Maxwell where the tardigrade is modelled as a cube of length 100μm

I.e, they literally assume a cubical tardigrade in a vacuum!

Actually, I did present this experiment as a spoof, at a physics department O-week camp 20 years ago. I think we used a monkey instead of a tardigrade. It was as lame as it sounds.

My favorite laugh line from the paper: "Maximum likelihood estimation was then employed to prevent the resulting density matrix from having nonphysical properties."

What they did is totally legitimate. Reconstructing density matrices is numerically unstable, a bit like any computerized tomography. This is similar to constraining a noisy CAT scan, to avoid the "nonphysical property" that the air at some point in your lungs has density less than zero.

Engtangling a live animal is a hell of a party trick. No doubt about that. So how much does this matter scientifically? Here we're getting into subjective territory, and what follows is my opinion.

The surprising aspect is biological, not physical. I might have guessed that, if you cooled a tardigrade to the temperature that quantum electronics operate at, you could use it as a quantum electronic component. I wouldn't have guessed that the tardigrade would get up and walk away afterwards!

The philosophical significance? It depends, of course. For materialists like me, who make sense of quantum wierdness the Everettian way, it makes no difference. Of course electrons can get entangled, and the electrons in a tardigrade—or a physicist—are still electrons. (The price we pay is a very, very, odd sense of personal identity.)

For idealists, this is quite a big deal. If you insist that you are a definite state of consciousness, then you need to draw a line somewhere, between the part of the universe that is you, and the other parts that can be quantum superpositions. Twenty years ago, that was easy: you're an animal, not an atom, duh.

This makes it a bit harder: you're a ... big animal? How big, exactly? You could be some non-electronic degree of freedom, but surely that's a stretch neurologically.

It's a lot easier to draw a categorical distinction of animal vs mineral than of human-like observers vs other animals. If they can entangle a tardigrade, then in principle they could entangle your pet dog. Is it much comfort that they can't, yet, entangle you?

dang4• 5 years ago

Thanks! I appreciate the detailed and super interesting explanation.

I may be wrong, but my sense is that the authors confused things a bit for the general internet reader by (let's say) not entirely resisting the troll potential here.

dekhn• 5 years ago

Note that they describe using a tun, which is a form of tardigrade which has evacuated pretty much all water and is metabolically inert. These forms can survive thousands of years of harsh conditions and have effectively no chemical activity. None of this work would translate beyond organisms that enter such states.

I won't really comment on whether the authors did what they said, except to point out that academics are highly incentivized to make their work sound both more "significant" (that is, important beyond what they did in their lab) and "impressive" (that is, a greater technical achievement than what they did in their lab).

mensetmanusman• 5 years ago

“ Here we not only go beyond Bohr’s complementarity by entangling a living system to two superconducting quantum bits, but we also expose an additional twist in areas where quantum physics, chemistry and biology all overlap. Namely, the living system we study is a tardigrade which is capable of suspending its living functions for an indefinite amount of time if the external conditions are deemed to be adverse enough for survival [2]. In that sense, and this is a point that Bohr certainly missed, it is possible to do a quantum and hence a chemical study of a system, without destroying its ability to function biologically.”

I would argue that it isn’t living when it’s at mK temperatures, but that it is frozen/dead but revivable (like the children who have fallen recently off of bridges in to frozen rivers and been revived hours later).

Life is amazing.

karlicoss• 5 years ago

Sort of a big philosophical question in quantum physics is what would be the experience of an entangled consciousness being (say, a human).

However if you have to freeze the human to a complete metabolic halt (to achieve coherence), then it seems that it wouldn't be able to experience anything at all? And if you don't freeze the human, then it would be impossible to entangle it with an external system?

Then, I guess one could argue that you could build a more thermally efficient system (say an AGI) that can experience and tell us about what it feels like to be entangled. But in order for it to experience/think, it would need to do some computation, so is subject to the Landauer's limit, and would need to release heat, which will also break the coherence? Has anyone done this kind of calculation?

wyager2• 5 years ago

what would be the experience of an entangled consciousness being

Is there any reason to suspect it wouldn't feel completely normal? Obviously whether we're entangled all the time varies depending on which model of QM you're working with (any linear model like MW would say we are), but I can't think of an interpretation that would predict a difference in subjective experience of a quantum system that's entangled from the POV of some observer outside the system.

sideshowb2• 5 years ago

Is there any reason to suspect it wouldn't feel completely normal?

Exactly

an interpretation that would predict a difference in subjective experience

Chaos makes this effectively impossible to achieve, but: what if you (embedded in the experiment) could achieve the exact same end state via multiple different intermediate states, ie in one case you observed the qubit on, and in the other you observed it off. Now what would you remember?

aleks224• 5 years ago

same authors and their previous paper about magnetized cockroaches

https://www.quantumlah.org/about/highlight/2019-09-cockroach...

The award was presented for the paper “In-vivo biomagnetic characterisation of the American cockroach", published in Scientific Reports in March 2018 by Rainer and five collaborators

fractallyte• 5 years ago

What's most intriguing is that it lends support to Roger Penrose's theories of the role of quantum mechanics in the brain. Here's a nice article: https://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/roger-penrose-on-wh...

And if that's true, then our notions of AI are seriously underestimated. (Which is what biologist Brian J Ford has been saying for a long time...)

Quantum mechanics rocked the physics world a century ago, perhaps now it will do the same to biology and computer science...?

Sporktacular• 5 years ago

Was downvoted before for asking, but was serious: why was this conducted? What's the scientific value?

Have reread it since and just can't see it, or see the joke if it's meant as one.

Entanglement between superconducting qubits and a tardigrade

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