Making your way to the cutting edge of any field is a daunting challenge. But especially when the edge of the field is expanding; and even harder still when the rate of expansion is accelerating. John recently helped Physics World create a special 25th anniversary issue where they identified the five biggest breakthroughs in physics over the past 25 years, and also the five biggest open questions. In pure John fashion, at his group meeting on Wednesday night, he made us work before revealing the answers. The photo below shows our guesses, where the asterisks denote Physics World‘s selections. This is the blog post I wish I had when I was a fifteen year-old aspiring physicist–this is an attempt to survey and provide a tiny toehold on the edge (from my biased, incredibly naive, and still developing perspective.)
The IQI’s quantum information-biased guesses of Physics World’s 5 biggest breakthroughs over the past 25 years, and 5 biggest open problems. X’s denote Physics World’s selections. Somehow we ended up with 10 selections in each category…
The biggest breakthroughs of the past 25 years:
*Neutrino Mass: surprisingly, neutrinos have a nonzero mass, which provides a window into particle physics beyond the standard model. THE STANDARD MODEL has been getting a lot of attention recently. This is well deserved in my opinion, considering that the vast majority of its predictions have come true, most of which were made by the end of the 1960s. Last year’s discovery of the Higgs Boson is the feather in its cap. However, it’s boring when things work too perfectly, because then we don’t know what path to continue on. That’s where the neutrino mass comes in. First, what are neutrinos? Neutrinos are a fundamental particle that have the special property that they barely interact with other particles. There are four fundamental forces in nature: electromagnetism, gravity, strong (holds quarks together to create neutrons and protons), and weak (responsible for radioactivity and nuclear fusion.) We can design experiments which allow us to observe neutrinos. We have learned that they are electrically neutral, so they aren’t affected by electromagnetism. They are barely affected by the strong force, if at all. They have an extremely small mass, so gravity acts on them only subtly. The main way in which they interact with their environment is through the weak force. Here’s the amazing thing: only really clunky versions of the standard model can allow for a nonzero neutrino mass! Hence, when a small but nonzero mass was experimentally established in 1998, we gained one of our first toeholds into particle physics beyond the standard model. This is particularly important today, because to the best of my knowledge, the LHC hasn’t yet discovered any other new physics beyond the standard model. The mechanism behind the neutrino mass is not yet understood. Moreover, neutrinos have a bunch of other bizarre properties which we understand empirically, but not their theoretical origins. The strangest of which goes by the name neutrino oscillations. In one sentence: there are three different kinds of neutrinos, and they can spontaneously transmute themselves from one type to another. This happens because physics is formulated in the language of mathematics, and the math says that the eigenstates corresponding to ‘flavors’ are not the same as the eigenstates corresponding to ‘mass.’ Words, words, words. Maybe the Caltech particle theory people should have a blog?
Shor’s Algorithm: a quantum computer can factor N=1433301577 into 37811*37907 exponentially faster than a classical computer. This result from Peter Shor in 1994 is near and dear to our quantum hearts. It opened the floodgates showing that there are tasks a quantum computer could perform exponentially faster than a classical computer, and therefore that we should get BIG$$$ from the world over in order to advance our field!! The task here is factoring large numbers into their prime factors; the difficulty of which has been the basis for many cryptographic protocols. In one sentence, Shor’s algorithm achieves this exponential speed-up because there is a step in the factoring algorithm (period finding) which can be performed in parallel via the quantum Fourier transform.
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