177 | Monika Schleier-Smith on Cold Atoms and Emergent Spacetime
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Sean Carroll | Wondery
4.8 • 4.4K Ratings
🗓️ 13 December 2021
⏱️ 71 minutes
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Summary
When it comes to thinking about quantum mechanics, there are levels. One level is shut-up-and-calculate: find a wave function, square it to get a probability. One level is foundational: dig deeply into the underlying ontology. But there’s a level in between, long neglected but recently coming to life. In this level you think about — or do experiments with — entangled quantum systems in the real world, putting entanglement to use. Monika Schleier-Smith is an experimental physicist specializing in cold atoms, which can be both entangled and manipulated. We discuss how to use such systems to study everything from metrology to quantum gravity.
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Monika Schleier-Smith received her Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is currently an Associate Professor of Physics at Stanford University. Among her awards are a MacArthur Fellowship, a Sloan Fellowship, and the I. I. Rabi Prize in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics from the American Physical Society.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everybody, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. |
| 0:04.0 | I'm your host Sean Carroll, and I do realize that by reading my books, listening to my |
| 0:10.0 | lectures, even listening to the Mindscape Podcast, you can get an impression of quantum |
| 0:15.6 | mechanics and in modern physics more generally that is a little way out, right? |
| 0:20.1 | We're talking about parallel universes or quantum gravity, emergent space time, evaporating |
| 0:26.8 | black holes, it may seem a little bit removed from the nitty gritty of not just experimental |
| 0:32.8 | physics but also of your everyday experience. |
| 0:35.3 | But of course, quantum mechanics itself was not invented by theoretical physicists just |
| 0:41.6 | trying to think of cool things. |
| 0:43.9 | They were forced to come up with these crazy ideas by trying to explain the data, by |
| 0:49.0 | trying to explain experiments. |
| 0:51.3 | And these experiments have not stopped, they've not gone away. |
| 0:54.4 | And I'm not talking about experiments that use quantum mechanics, those experiments have |
| 0:58.1 | also been going on a long time. |
| 1:00.0 | Every particle physics experiment, like the Large Hadron Collider, uses quantum mechanics |
| 1:04.2 | to make the predictions. |
| 1:05.6 | I'm talking about a new generation of quantum mechanics experiments that really digs |
| 1:09.8 | into entanglement. |
| 1:12.0 | Quantum entanglement is really one of the things that is special about quantum mechanics, |
| 1:16.3 | makes it very different from the classical world. |
| 1:18.2 | The idea that different physical systems can be related to each other in some deep quantum |
| 1:23.4 | way, what can we do with that? |
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