No Sleep ‘til Schrödinger

Speaker: Professor Vlatko Vedral

Schrödinger’s cat is perhaps the most famous thought experiment in the history of science. The main point of my lecture will be to say that it is becoming more and more a reality. En route we have been - and will be - creating various superpositions and entangled states of living systems. I will discuss experimental progress, in this direction, that involves entangled states of bacteria and light as well as tardigrades and superconductors. Can two living systems also be entangled? We might, of course, never be able to handle much larger organisms than ones low on the evolutionary ladder, however, one mind-blowing possibility presents itself from the world of Artificial Intelligence. Can we actually use a small scale quantum computer simulating AI to answer the question: “What does it feel like to be entangled?”. I will talk about the philosophical implications of this for our understanding of quantum reality. One counterintuitive consequence will be that even the “unobserved outcomes may affect future measurements”. This might sound like a Zen Koan, deliberately paradoxical, but I will try to convince you that it happens to be true in quantum physics. The ultimate goal is of course to see if quantum physics and general relativity can be unified or, if pushing quantum physics into the macro domain, will ultimately lead to us to glimpse into the physical theory that lies beyond.