Why Erdős Was The Original Kevin Bacon

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Rest Is Science

Episode: Why Erdős Was The Original Kevin Bacon

Date: January 15, 2026
Hosts: Professor Hannah Fry & Michael Stevens (Vsauce)

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Episode Overview

Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens embark on a characteristically quirky journey through science and mathematics, anchored by unusual personalities, the interconnectedness of academic and pop culture networks (Erdős and Bacon numbers), and the mind-bending concept of left vs. right in the universe. The episode closes with Hannah sharing her prized prop: a quantum computer chandelier from the sci-fi series 'Devs', segwaying into a accessible primer on quantum computing.
Tone: Playful, nerdy, insightful, and filled with the energy of two science enthusiasts who are as entertained by the quirks of scientists as by the science itself.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Peculiar Scientists: Who Wins the Prize?

[03:29-12:39]

• Listener Q: "Who is the scientist with the most peculiar personality?"
• Hannah discusses mathematicians as especially "peculiar," singling out Paul Erdős—iconic for his wanderer lifestyle, mathematical output, and unique habits.
  • Cantor was mentioned for his wild ideas about infinity and his personal eccentricities (e.g., once believing he could cause rain by stirring his own urine) [04:13].
  • Historical odd beliefs: Newton predicting the end of the world, D.H. Lawrence claiming the moon produces its own light.
• Michael: "You have to be peculiar to... well, we're all peculiar in some way" [03:47].
• Erdős as "the six degrees of Kevin Bacon mathematician," respected not just for math, but for his remarkable collaborative life [05:06].

Notable Erdős Stories:

• Lifestyle: Erdős lived out of a suitcase, couch-surfed at mathematicians’ homes, and had no fixed residence.
  • He would let hosts feed and clothe him, then co-write papers with them—leading to an enormous web of collaborations [05:14].
  • He famously discarded clothes rather than launder them—not because he was rich, simply because he didn’t care [05:14].
• Collaborations & the Erdős Number:
  • Erdős Number: Your "distance" in co-publishing from Erdős himself. Hannah’s number is 5; her Bacon number is 3. "I've got an Erdős Bacon number of five. Two." [07:44].
  • Discussion about Daniel Kleitman, who has the rare, enviable Erdős Bacon number of 3 [08:23].
  • Michael: "Records that can't be broken, Michael, one of your favorite subjects" [09:32].
• Funny/Strange Habits:
  • Erdős was highly dependent on amphetamines, and upon being challenged to abstain for a month by Ron Graham (with a $500 bet), he succeeded, only to remark:

    "What you've proved is you proved that I'm not an addict... What you've done here is you've set mathematics back by a month." – Hannah Fry, [10:46].

  • Erdős' domestic incompetence: couldn’t make a sandwich, stabbed a carton of tomato juice open, left a mess for his host [11:42].
  • Attributed small misfortunes to "the Supreme Fascist" (God), but praised beautiful proofs as coming from "the Book" of perfect solutions [12:16].

2. The Six Degrees: Erdős vs Bacon Numbers

[06:24-09:38]

• Erdős Number:
  • How many steps are you from co-authoring a math paper with Paul Erdős?
  • Hannah recounts hers as 5; Michael contemplates how collaboration could reduce his.
• Bacon Number:
  • Used in Hollywood: Number of links (co-appearances) between an actor and Kevin Bacon.
  • Michael: "Is there a way to find out?" [07:37].
• Erdős-Bacon Number:
  • Sum of both your Erdős and Bacon numbers; legendary among nerds.
  • Daniel Kleitman holds a 3 (co-authored with Erdős, extra in Good Will Hunting with Bacon connections).
  • "Pathetic. I need to hunt down Kevin Bacon immediately." – Hannah Fry [08:53].
• Records and Impossibility:
  • Discussion about how, with Erdős deceased and Bacon alive, some records can only be tied, never beaten [09:32].

3. Physics of 'Left' and 'Right': Communicating With Aliens

[12:39-19:53]

• Listener Q: How could you explain "left vs right" to a symmetric, humanoid alien via words only—no visual reference?
• Michael references Martin Gardner's Ambidextrous Universe and the Wu experiment.
  • Three of the four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong force) are left-right symmetric.
  • Only the weak force breaks this rule—specifically, in the direction of electron emission in cobalt-60 decay (Wu experiment).
  • This allows for a universal, physically grounded definition of "left" and "right", though highly impractical:

    "If you’re willing to do a lot of work, I [the weak force] can help." – Michael Stevens [18:01].

• Thought experiments involving mugs, handles, and communicating right-handedness.
• The right-hand rule and magnetism are dismissed as circular, since you’d need to agree on “north” first [19:18].
• Hannah: "I would say it doesn't matter if they print it on the left hand. I think it'd probably be all right." [17:22]
• Michael jokes about wanting a Father's Day mug labeled with a comically high number to reflect realistic rankings, not "#1 Dad" [19:59].

4. Quantum Computing: The Ultimate Nerd Trophy

[23:20-36:32]

• Hannah presents her favorite, most ridiculous possession: the ten-foot-tall quantum computer prop from the TV series Devs (created by Alex Garland).
  • Describes its visual presence: a dazzling, gold-wired chandelier-like structure [25:30].
  • Prop dropped into her life via Adam Rutherford, after museums declined (“wasn’t a real quantum computer”) [28:42].
• Real vs. Prop Quantum Computers:
  • Real ones look similar: gold wiring, complex structures for cooling and connections; see IBM’s System Two [29:16].
  • Real quantum computers are “just fancy fridges”—delicate, ultra-cold, with lavishly expensive gold wiring for conductance [30:38].
  • Despite technological sophistication, they're still connected using outdated USB 2.0 ports—"Even the most amazing places in the world, once you peer under the surface, it's all still gaff tape and WD-40." – Hannah Fry [30:22].
• Michael admits: “I actually know basically nothing about quantum computing. I have to attack the things I’m interested in one at a time.” [30:49].
• Quantum Computing 101 by Hannah Fry [31:09]:
  • Classical computer: bits are ones and zeroes, deterministic, always repeatable.
  • Quantum computer: qubits, exist in “probability distributions,” can process many possibilities at once—“like pouring water through every path in a maze simultaneously.”
  • They’re not "better" at everything, but they’re uniquely suitable for problems involving vast numbers of possibilities (e.g., modeling atoms, breaking encryption).
  • Potential to revolutionize fields like drug discovery and battery technology.
  • Hannah: “There are things traditional computers do that quantum computers are rubbish at. But vice versa is true as well.” [34:28].
  • The field is progressing rapidly: “There’s sort of a joke…quantum computing’s always been 30 years away. A bit like fusion. But I think that we’re really starting to see genuine progress.” [35:46].
  • Cautionary sci-fi: The Devs computer in the show does not bode well for humanity—be careful what you wish for! [35:59].

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Mathematicians’ Quirks:

  "Mathematicians...there's Cantor who discovered infinities can be different sizes. I mean, that in itself is a wild idea. But he at one point thought that he was causing the rain by stirring his own urine."
  — Hannah Fry, [04:13]

• On Erdős’ Academic Nomadism:

  "He didn't have a house. He didn't have a kind of traditional life. What he would do is rock up at different mathematicians' houses...and sleep on their couch where they would take on the responsibility for cleaning him, feeding him, laundering his—actually, he didn't do laundry, he chucked his clothes away once he'd worn them."
  — Hannah Fry, [05:14]

• On Erdős and Drugs:

  "What you've done here is you've set mathematics back by a month."
  — Hannah Fry, recounting Erdős' comeback after abstaining from amphetamines, [10:46]

• On “The Book”:

  "When he found a really beautiful mathematical proof...he said, 'That came from the Book.' And the Book was the Supreme Fascist's little handbook of perfect Mathematical proofs that could only have been created by God." — Hannah Fry, [12:16]

• Left/Right Problem:

  "Three of the four fundamental forces, we knew made no difference when mirror reversed, left and right didn't matter... But the weak force was hypothesized to not have that same symmetry."
  — Michael Stevens, [15:27] "If you're willing to do a lot of work, I [the weak force] can help."
  — Michael Stevens [18:01]

• Quantum Chandelier:

  "Every time someone—the postman comes in, you can see it from inside the front door. They wonder what it is because it sort of looks like a spaceship."
  — Hannah Fry, [27:25]

• Quantum Computer, Practically:

  "Basically what you're looking at here—the guts of quantum computer—is just a fancy fridge."
  — Hannah Fry, [30:38] "Even the most amazing places in the world, once you peer under the surface, it's all still gaff tape and WD-40."
  — Hannah Fry, [30:22]

• On Quantum Computing Potential:

  "Imagine how different the world would be if we could design better batteries. This is another one on the list for quantum computers...I do think it is coming."
  — Hannah Fry, [35:14]

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Timestamps for Essential Segments

• [03:29-12:39] — Eccentric scientists and the story of Paul Erdős
• [06:24-09:38] — Explaining Erdős number, Bacon number, and the pursuit of records
• [12:39-19:53] — The physics and philosophy of 'left' vs 'right', the Wu experiment and communicating with aliens
• [23:20-36:32] — Show-and-tell: Hannah’s Devs quantum computer, what real quantum computers are like, and a primer for beginners

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Conclusion

This episode offers a delightful and enlightening tour through mathematical folklore, the strange beauty of human (and scientific) interconnectedness, the odd facts at the boundaries of physics, and an accessible glimpse into the quantum future—delivered with laughter, humility, and genuine awe about the mysteries around us.

For the science-curious, “Why Erdős Was The Original Kevin Bacon” is both a celebration of strange geniuses and a primer on some of the most fascinating ideas in mathematics and physics.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

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[A]

Welcome to the rest of science. This is Field Notes. It's a sort of a podcast expedition, if you will, where Michael and I are going to trade curious objects or things that have been occupying our minds. Yeah, that's right.

[B]

Every week we're going to bring something from our little, you know, the mystery bags of our lives to share with the other and with you.

[A]

I mean, put it this way, Michael and I are Massive nerds and always have been. So over the years we've. We've collected all manner of bonkers and bananas, objects and ideas and that's. I mean we've got. We've got at least seven to eight years worth of stuff to go through, Michael. I reckon in terms of episodes.

[B]

Yeah, right. And there's even more than that because we want things from you guys. So send in your questions and ideas to where.

[A]

Well, I know it's. The rest is sciencealhanger.gov what a great email address. Yeah, you would think that by now we would remembered it, but. But no, it still remains a difficulty for us. Later on in this episode, I'm going to be showing you the ultimate nerd trophy. It's. It's the most remarkable and weird thing that I own. Oh, that's coming up in our episode. But first some questions from you.

[B]

That's right, from you guys who are out there listening, not from me. I will read this one to you though, Hannah. This is a question from Haley, who asks who is or was, in your opinion, the scientist with the most peculiar personality?

[A]

Most peculiar personality. I mean there's a lot of. There's a lot of people who could be in that category.

[B]

Right. It's like all of them. Like you have to be peculiar to. Well, we're all peculiar in some way.

[A]

Some of us more peculiar than others. It definitely helps, doesn't it? I think if you're willing to completely dedicate your entire life to advancing human knowledge by just the smallest, smallest amount, no guarantee of success, then. Then I think there's usually. Does have to be something a little bit peculiar about it. I mean, mathematicians, I think, are often right up there with the most peculiar of all. I mean, there's Cantor who discovered that infinities can be different sizes. I mean that in itself is a wild idea. But he at one point thought that he was causing the rain by stirring his own urine. So I mean there's a lot of.

[B]

Wait, really?

[A]

Yeah, really.

[B]

Oh, that's incredible. See, I don't know anything about him outside of the mathematics that he worked on. I'm gonna write that down because I love examples of things like Isaac Newton believing that the world was going to end on a specific date and all the esoteric work that he did. D.H. lawrence, the author, believed that the moon produced its own light.

[A]

Oh.

[B]

And it's just kind of surprising when you're like, oh, yeah, it was easier to believe that confidently back then.

[A]

Yeah, absolutely was. I think number one, though. Number one for me. Is gonna go to erds.

[B]

Is that the six degrees of Kevin Bacon, mathematician?

[A]

It absolutely is the six degrees of Kevin Bacon Mathem.

[B]

Explain what that is to our listeners.

[A]

Okay, so he did a lot of work on graph theory, which, it's not about graphs as an x and Y axis, it's graphs as in networks, that's what mathematicians call them. But he also was a sort of lived example of this. He published an incredible number of papers, but in particular he published with a lot of co authors and what he would do actually he, he didn't have a house. Right. He didn't sort of, he didn't have a kind of traditional life. What he would do is he would rock up at different mathematicians houses and then turn up and say my brain is. And, and sleep on their couch where they would take on the responsibility for cleaning him, feeding him, laundering his. Actually he didn't do laundry, he chucked his clothes away once he'd worn them. Not because he was ostentatious and rich, just because he, he didn't care for such things, but while he was there he would write papers with them. But what it then meant is that over time he had collaborated with such an unbelievable number of people that people came up with the idea of an Erdos number, which is how many steps away in a network you are from having collaborated directly with Erdos, the man himself.

[B]

So not only a lot of collaborators, but it sounds like also a very diverse variety of types of papers in mathematics.

[A]

Yeah, absolutely. And this, I think this is the one that is the most famous idea. So the Bacon number is analogous, but the idea is that Kevin Bacon has been in so many different films with so many different people that if, that you can have a Bacon number too. So you, if you have a Bacon Number of 0, you are Kevin Bacon himself. If you have a Bacon Number of 1, you have appeared on screen with Kevin Bacon and a, a Bacon number of two and you, you have appeared on screen with somebody who has appeared on screen with Kevin Bacon and so on and so on and so on.

[B]

If you have an Erdos number of zero, you are, you are. Yeah, which by the way, until you said it, I thought it was Erdos. Oh, so that's, that's why it's helpful to do audio programs about mathematicians. Erdos.

[A]

I think I've got an Erdos number of four, by the way. I think mine is four.

[B]

That's yours. Yours is four.

[A]

I think so, yeah. Let me just double check.

[B]

We haven't published a paper together which is like the Rule. Right. But if we did, I would have a number of five.

[A]

Absolutely. But we have appeared on screen together. What's your bacon number?

[B]

I don't know. Is there a way to find out? I don't know, I haven't really been in enough like IMDb type shows.

[A]

Oh, it's five. My ERDS number is five.

[B]

Oh, okay.

[A]

Oh, hold on. I've got a bacon number of three. How? I've only done one thing ever where, which was drama, but I appeared on screen with Lenny Rush, who is this absolutely amazing actor. He has a bacon number of two. So there we go. I've got an Erdos bacon number of five. Two. But that means you're six' three at the very least.

[B]

You think I have a bacon of 6?

[A]

Erdos of 6. We have to publish something together, but after that.

[B]

Well, should we come up with a name for the bacon ERDS ratio?

[A]

Yeah, go on.

[B]

Oh. Oh my gosh. There's an Erdos bacon number. It measures the collaborative distance in authoring papers between that person and Erdos and their bacon number. Oh, no, go on. It doesn't have a funny name, it's just called the Erds bacon number. And the lowest is 3. Mathematician Daniel Kleitman has an Erdos Bacon number of 3 because he co authored papers with Erdos and has a bacon number of two because he appeared as an extra in Good Will Hunting with Minnie Driver, who appeared with bacon in Sleepers.

[A]

Yeah, that is impressive. So what was his three? Mine's seven. Pathetic. Pathetic. I need to hunt down Kevin Bacon immediately.

[B]

Right. I mean, yeah, so. So, so you could probably collaborate with someone who worked with ERDs directly.

[A]

Yeah, not, not. I mean, I haven't got long to go because it's. This is, you know, he was around in sort of the. He was particularly big in the 1960s. Yeah.

[B]

You got to do it now. But you could achieve what at most today, a Erdos number of two.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Then bacon is still alive. That can become a one. So you could beat Daniel Kleitman.

[A]

You could equal him. No, two and one.

[B]

Yeah. You add them together. So the best you could do would be.

[A]

Would be to tie him records that can't be broken. Michael, one of your favorite subjects.

[B]

Wow. Okay. Yet another tab I'm not going to be closing.

[A]

How many are there out of interest?

[B]

Let's see if I can figure that out. There's too many for me to easily navigate, but on this one window I have, it's over 100.

[A]

Can I tell you why I pick Erdos? Right. As the most peculiar person because, I mean this is the Erdos bacon stuff is all very nice, but, but what makes Erdos peculiar apart from the fact that he didn't have a house and just turned up his friends doors insisting that they take care of him. He also took a lot of amphetamines and some people were concerned that he was addicted to them. He was working like 19 hours a day. And so a friend of his, Ron Graham, bet him $500 that he could, he, he wasn't able to stop taking the drugs, Right. He couldn't go cold turkey for 30 days. And so Erdos was like, fine, I'll do it. So he stopped, he immediately stopped. He took the 500 do from, from Graham and you know, didn't touch the drugs at all in that time. And then at the end he said, look, see you, what you've proved is you proved that I'm not an addict, so well done you. But what you've done here is you've set mathematics back by a month because.

[B]

He needed the drugs to do math.

[A]

And he knew the drugs to do the math, which I quite like. The other thing about him is that he, my, my favorite story about him is that he was totally incapable of feeding himself, right. Just couldn't, didn't understand the most basic ideas of how to construct a sandwich, for instance. So there was one day where he was staying at a friend's house and he was hungry, he went into the kitchen, probably cause of all of them amphetamines, went into the kitchen, opened the fridge and found a carton of tomato juice. Couldn't work out how to open it, so got a knife from the counter, stabbed it open, tomato juice went everywhere, drank from the carton, left it on the side and then went off back to work. And his friend came down just to witness what looked like a murder scene in his kitchen. Just like, that's just Erdos. That's just Erdos. There he is.

[B]

I mean that sounds like something I might do in college. Not saying I'm Erdoshi, but I get it, I get it.

[A]

Yeah. Fair, yeah. What nice, I mean, what a great guy. He also, he thought that God was the supreme fascist and he would, he would regularly attribute every time he lost his, his glasses or, you know, couldn't find a book that he wanted to read or whatever, he would be like, it was the supreme fascist that did that. But when he found a really beautiful mathematical proof that was, that couldn't be approved upon, that was essentially perfection. He said, look, that came from the book. And the book was the Supreme Fascist. Little handbook of perfect Mathematical proofs that could only have been created by God.

[B]

Oh, so it's like a bittersweet supreme fascist.

[A]

A bit of a bittersweet supreme fascist. That's a sentence, I think, that has not ever been spoken before and probably never will be again.

[B]

Good.

[A]

This is a great question. It's from Francisco from Lisbon. Would it be possible to explain to a humanoid alien, bilaterally symmetrical, via written or spoken message, no direct or visual contact, which side is left and which is right? The alien would have no access to anything on Earth or. Or a human body as a reference, nor would they be really aware of north and south. Is there a fundamental physical or cosmological real world difference between left and right, and can that information be passed on? Great question, Francisco.

[B]

Oh, my gosh, yes. I love this because I. I got really obsessed with it years ago. I read Martin Gardner's Ambidextrous Universe, which I recommend to everyone. It is a book all about mirror images, symmetries. He poses that same question and goes through all the ways we can't answer it. And so I, I read the whole book thinking we still don't know the answer. And I'm like, I'm going to make a video about this. It's such a deep mystery. And then at the end, he's like, oh. And then in 1956, we figured it out. So to. To kind of like lay the scene. I think it's good to imagine communicating with aliens through, say, radio waves only, so we can't send images. And we're trying to tell them how to build something that is anatomorphic, like a coffee cup, a Father's Day number one dad. Coffee cup. All right, so you tell them, all right, this is easy. You make a cylinder, fine. They know what a cylinder is, right? There are symmetries in our universe that make that something we can easily explain. We can talk about points and whatever. Now we tell them, like, take off the top and empty the volume inside, but leave one one side at the bottom. And now they've made a cup. And then you tell them, print number one, dad, so that when you look at it, you see it. And they're like, yep, we're following. And they're doing this. And now you tell them, you got to put a handle on it. And you say, now the handle should go. Since, you know, here on Earth, most people are right handed, we tend to put the handles on the right side. So when you hold it, you see the printing. And they go, which one's the right side? Think about it. This is much harder than you might imagine was. Remember, we cannot reference anything in the environment. You can't say, look at, look at number one dad on the mug, look at Earth. And the Virgo supercluster is to the right. You can't do that. If you're not allowed to do that, what do you tell them to differentiate left and right?

[A]

Because you could say, you could say, okay, place the handle along the axis of the cylinder so that it's perpendicular to the base. That would be fine. And then you could say, and now rotate it so that the handle so it's no longer symmetrical about the central line. That would be fine. But distinguishing left from right, really hard.

[B]

Yes, because we could tell them to, you know, looking at the handle, rotate the mug, but rotate which way, which way is right and which is left. And how do we tell them? With words alone and no references to any other models. Ever since at least Kant, people wrote about how, golly, it doesn't make any sense. Like a right hand floating in a universe all on its own, doesn't have a rightness or a leftness. So for decades, we thought maybe there wasn't an answer. Because of the four fundamental forces, three of them we knew made no difference. When mirror reversed, left and right didn't matter. So gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force make no distinction. If you watch them do things in a mirror, it all looks fine. Right. You look at a pendulum in a mirror, it's obeying all the normal physics and it fits all the normal formula and equations. So this was true for these three fundamental forces. But the weak force was hypothesized to not have that same symmetry. And an experiment was devised that essentially looked at the spin of electrons emitted by decaying cobalt 60. This is called the Wu experiment. So in the Wu experiment, they use cobalt 60 atoms that are decaying, and they put them into both, let's call it regular spin orientations and mirror image spin orientations, and found that the electrons that decayed out came out in the same direction. It's not like, okay, you spin this way, the electrons come up and you spin the other way and they come down, in which case then it's. You can't really know. You just reverse it and it's the same. Instead, they found it didn't matter. The electrons always came out in one direction. So that can be called, you know, your left or right, whichever it is. I don't know enough about cobalt. But that is a way to agree because you'll both see the same thing.

[A]

So, okay, let me make sure I understand this then, right? So you get the mug. You. You're like, you've got number one to add on it. And then the only way to distinguish left from right as innate properties of the universe, rather than just some sort of convention that we have decided on, is to get subatomic particles perform these experiments where you are looking at the spin, looking at the direction of the electrons, and then that's the way that they can print the handle on the right. I would say it doesn't matter if they print it on the left hand. I think it'd probably be all right.

[B]

I think if we want them to match, we have to do all of that rigmarole. And that is such a cool feature of our universe because it is otherwise so simple. Left and right. Come on. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's right there. And yet it isn't. Except the weak force comes in clutch at the end and says, all right, guys, technically, if you're willing to do a lot of work, I can help.

[A]

There is something really nice about this idea that there are directions. I mean, time is the other one, right? Time faces only in one direction. You know, you can't go backwards in time. There's something really nice about this idea of these fundamental rules of physics. Maybe this is. Maybe I don't think about this deeply enough, but couldn't you just say, all right, you've got some electrons going through a wire. Those electrons are going in, say, one particular direction, and they will create a magnetic field that wraps around the wire. I mean, that's the right hand rule, right? Could you not say that it wraps around clockwise, anti clockwise? I don't know. Is there not a way to get it that way?

[B]

Yes, there is not a way to do it that way. And I unfortunately do not know why. I think it has something to do with. You need to both agree on which is the north side of a magnet first.

[A]

Oh.

[B]

It'S something like that. Now, we've since learned that you can use other things besides cobalt. You can use uranium 239. You know, that might help us if the aliens are like, ooh, we don't have any cobalt. But still, it's a lot of work.

[A]

So then if you get the mug to bring the mug in, you say, all right, whichever way the electron goes off in, orient the mug so that the axis or the, the wording of the number one dad is in parallel to that and then perpendicular. Whatever. I mean, that's the way that you do it.

[B]

That's the way you would have to do it. Yeah.

[A]

Wow. Extraordinary. Extraordinary.

[B]

By the way, this is my dream Father's Day gift. I want my daughter to get me a number. 2,587,312.

[A]

Dad, why specifically that number?

[B]

I just feel like that's probably where I am, you know, like I'm not the number one dad. There can't be anyone number one. But that's all they sell, number one dad mugs. I want to have a reasonable. I'm probably like, you know, top, top 30%, maybe, like, put me there, make it act like I actually earned this. Anyway, that's the gift that I want. But after the break, Hannah, you've got a gift for me.

[A]

It's a treat, Buck.

[B]

This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK, who over the past 50 years have helped double cancer survival in the UK.

[A]

You might have heard of BRCA genes. These are the ones that made headlines when Angelina Jolie revealed that she carried a faulty version.

[B]

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[B]

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[A]

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[A]

Welcome back from the break. I've been saving this one, Michael. This is, by quite a long stretch, the best thing I own. It's also the most ridiculous thing I own. So, you know, don't judge my entire character based on this.

[B]

I will. I'm going to.

[A]

Okay, It's. It's as I described it earlier on, the ultimate nerd Trophy. Okay, so there is a science fiction director called Alex Garland. He wrote the Beach. He directed Ex Machina. It's really amazing film about the sort of future of. Of humanity with artificial intelligence embedded in it. He also did this amazing HBO show called Devs, which was about a sentient quantum computer that was able to calculate the position of every atom in the entire universe, and thus all of the future and the past was available to him.

[B]

Oh, like Laplace's demon.

[A]

Exactly. Laplace's demon. This theoretical construct that was based on the idea that if the universe is deterministic, then every single thing should be predictable. The only problem is we don't know where all the atoms are. And that's the thing that's stopping us knowing every single thing.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

So this is. This is the. The. The central idea of this. Of this show. Now, as part of the show, they made a quantum computer, or at least a prop that looked like a. A quantum computer. And what they made was this very beautiful thing.

[B]

Ooh, yeah.

[A]

Very beautiful prop that was made for the show.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

This is designed to be an accurate representation of what you really see from quantum computers.

[B]

So what we're looking at here is like the Tower of Babel, but upside down. Like an upside down tiered cake, but without the cake. Just the tiers. A series of platforms, like circular discs connected one below the other by thin rods with a big collection of very thin, very ultra fine wires coming out, but arranged very neatly, like they've just Been so precisely combed and gelled into this arrangement. It's almost like lit from inside as well. Very golden everywhere. Gold and silver are the big notes of color.

[A]

It's very blingy, isn't it?

[B]

It's very blingy, but very, like, delicate. Like a fish skeleton. These very thin bones arranged so purposefully.

[A]

So they are indeed made with this incredible amount of gold. All of this wiring, this is all very accurate. I mean, it's sort of like slightly fancified for the purposes of production. If you've photographs of quantum computers, that is exactly what they look like. These. These great golden structures with wires all over the place. They're very beautiful. Would make, I think, a very nice chandelier. That's. That's. That's what I think about it.

[B]

That's what it looks like.

[A]

That is exactly what it looks like. Very beautiful. Anyway, so they made this show, and a little while after it was made, they still had this beautiful prop. The problem was that after they finished filming, they had this. This object in a storage unit.

[B]

How big was it? It's hard for me to get a sense of its scale.

[A]

I mean, big. We're talking sort of from top to bottom, maybe 10ft.

[B]

Oh, wow. Okay.

[A]

Right. Giant. Okay. So they have these giant crates, this big storage unit. And these storage units were costing an absolute fortune. So a couple of years after production ended, Alex Garland and his team were. They were like, we don't want to throw it away. We spent an absolute fortune making this incredibly beautiful model of a quantum computer. So they were ringing around the different museums and places which might take it. And it just so happened that at the time I was doing up my house, and I have in my house this. This big sort of hole that's cut in the floor, kind of a big void. And I was looking. I just so happened to be looking at that moment in time for something that I could hang in that void. And so I basically rescued it out for Skip.

[B]

So it's hanging from the ceiling.

[A]

It's hanging from the ceiling.

[B]

Like a big chandelier.

[A]

Like a giant chandelier.

[B]

Oh, Hannah, that is incredible.

[A]

No, isn'? I mean, you can. Michael can see the picture of my house, and he can confirm that my house is not massive. It basically takes up quite a lot of my house. Every time someone. I mean, the postman comes in, you can see it from inside the front door. They wonder what it is because it sort of looks like a spaceship. If I accidentally leave the curtains open.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, it. It can pass As a chandelier, as an. As a piece of artwork. How is it lit up? Is that the way it was lit up in the movie, or did you have to add the lighting? The bulb.

[A]

The light panels were in there from the movie. Real quantum computers, by the way, do not have light panels. This. You can see sort of like a scan of it in position. We replaced the LED so that they could be. They would last much longer. Also what I did is I. I've made it so they're each individually controlled. So I have put a little computer in there, Bluetooth, that's connected via Bluetooth. And one of my projects for a summer when I have some time off, what I want to do is program it so that when I play music in the house, the quantum computer sort of twinkles in time.

[B]

Visualizes the music.

[A]

Exactly right. But what I really wanted to do, I wanted to show you this image because I sort of actually wanted to talk a little bit about. About the way that these things work.

[B]

Okay, but first of all, I'm sorry, how did you get it? Did you reach out to them?

[A]

No. So I have a. My. My very good friend Adam Rutherford is. Was the scientific advisor on the series and is a very good friend of Alex Garland'. Just so happened to be in the right room when they were like, we're gonna have to throw it away. We're gonna have to basically sell it for scrap because nobody wants it. The museums didn't want it because it wasn't a real quantum computer.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean, where else would you put it? You know, who would be crazy enough to have one of these?

[B]

It's a very interesting thing because it's beautiful. It's a piece of, like, science fiction history. It's a part of the history of human ambition.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

And storytelling.

[A]

And storytelling. That is something that is also this piece of art. This really stunning piece of art. So this is the real thing. Here's a picture of the real thing. This is IBM's quantum computer. This is a system two. This is, I mean, one of the most sophisticated objects in the entire world. The insides of these, the guts of them, they really are made of real gold, partly because it's such an incredible conductor. Also, these things need to be unbelievably cold. My favorite thing, by the way, about going to visit the proper one in Boston with IBM, is that, I mean, you're standing there next to these machines that are worth quite literally hundreds of millions of dollars. Right. That the research project itself, probably billions. These are the most sophisticated machines in the entire world at the absolute cutting edge of technology. And then you go around the back of them and they're still using USB 2.0. They haven't upgraded to USB C yet.

[B]

Oh, I love that.

[A]

So how you connect your computer to them is old school.

[B]

Just usb? Yeah. Oh, that doesn't work most of the time. Yeah.

[A]

Like even the most amazing places in the world, once you peer under the surface, it's all still gaff tape and WD40.

[B]

Well, I love that. It's. It's like this progression of more and more sophisticated from the USB in the laptop all the way down to this like cradled chip.

[A]

What you notice is that the physical design of this, I mean basically what you're looking at here, the guts of quantum computer is just a fancy fridge.

[B]

I actually know basically nothing about quantum computing. I have to attack the things I'm interested in one at a time. And so I literally don't know what a quantum computer is. How much of it is real, how much is sci fi? How is a qubit different from and better than a bit? I mean, just give me like the, for a kid version.

[A]

Oh yeah, okay. So the thing is that the sometimes presented as though they're better and I think that that's the wrong way to think about them. They're definitely different. It's a completely different paradigm. And the way to think about it is that bits, normal computers are ones and zeros, right? It's like a switch. It's on or it's off. And what you can do with that is you can program things in a very deterministic way. There's no sort of extra probability that's thrown in there. There's no randomness. Everything ideally is like very controlled. You run the same program twice, you get exactly the same answer. That's sort of normal traditional computing. The quantum computer is based on a qubit, which you can think of. Instead of it being like a one and a zero, like a yes or a no, it's much more like a distribution. It's much more like a. Even like a dial if you like. So instead of dealing with like absolute facts, yeses and no's, you're handling everything in probabilities. My favorite analogy to describe this, although, you know, all of the analogies eventually break down if you think about them too hard. But I think that this is a good illustrative example that if you wanted to solve a maze using a traditional computer, the only way that you can do that is you start at the beginning and you try one route and it fails. And you go back to the beginning and you try again and it fails and true and so on. With a quantum computer, because you are handling probabilities, you're handling sort of numbers that take on more than one value, what you can do is you can chuck a bucket of water in at the top of the main. And what that will do is flow through all of the various possibilities simultaneously and give you a sort of probability distribution at the end of what happened across all of those different routes. And this is like both the incredible potential of these quantum computers because it means that suddenly we are in a quantum world, right? We can handle probability and uncertainty and, and, and quantum effects. Actually, you can now model things down at the level of atoms in a way that's really, really hard to do with a traditional computer that only deals in absolute certainties.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But it also simultaneously means that all of our encryption, essentially, which is based on this idea that you have to do things one after the other after the other after the other, that it will take too long for you to try all possible routes, it means that that is now out the window. It means that the way that we send secrets online, the way that you keep your bank information to yourself, or the way that, I don't know, even like national security ideas transported around the world without being completely open to anyone who's listening, a lot of that falls apart. Because as soon as a quantum computer can check every possible variation, our traditional encryption methods are no longer secure. Wow. There are ways around it though. And maybe we'll talk about that in a different episode.

[B]

Yeah, I would love to, because I want to learn about this. It's unbelievable how little I know. So they aren't necessarily better at finding the square root of a three digit number. A regular calculator can do that just fine. An abacus can do that just fine. But these can tackle problems that were literally so hard for other types of computers that that's how we make things safe and, and their paradigm is so different that it's a whole new world.

[A]

It's a whole new world. Exactly. And there will always be things that traditional computers can do that quantum computers are rubbish at. The key difference is that vice versa, things that have always been hard to do on traditional computers, like searching vast, vast, vast number of options, I mean that in particular, or trying to model what happens in the deeply complex intermolecular forces of the sor. Quantum realm, all of that stuff which has been so hard to get computers to do. I mean, AI sort of manages to Do a little bit of that. But all of that now is suddenly, suddenly open and available to us. So. So the real hope is that once you have quantum computers, things like drug discovery, you know, understanding how molecules interact with each other and proteins, you know, to the point where you can actually design something at the level of atoms, suddenly become way more available. Or, you know, battery design. Right. Like, imagine how different the world would be if we could design better batteries. This is another one on the list for quantum computers. Once we get this sort of up and running, and I do think it is coming, you know, there's sort of a joke about how far away it is. Quantum computing's always been 30 years away. A bit like fusion.

[B]

Right, Right.

[A]

But I think that we're really starting to see genuine progress.

[B]

You've got, not a quantum computer, but our, like, hopes and dreams as shown in a show hanging in your home.

[A]

I absolutely do. You can. Next time you're in London, Michael, you can come and have a. Have a glass of champagne. Underneath my Laplace's demon, my imagined version of a future with scientific advances should just tell you in the show itself that quantum computer did not lead to good for humanity. So maybe be careful what you wish for, but nonetheless.

[B]

Yeah, I can cheers to that.

[A]

Yeah. As soon as I turn it on, I'm gonna. I'm gonna get it to calculate how to pay its own electricity bill. That's. That's what I'm gonna do.

[B]

There you go.

[A]

If you have any questions that you would like us to answer or objects that you would like us to discuss, then you can send them in to thereest issolehanger.com.

[B]

Yeah, please do that. I cannot wait to hear from you. If you want to hear from us even more often, join our [e-mail] science.

[A]

We're going to be back next Thursday with another edition of Field Notes and on Tuesday with our normal episode.

[B]

Yep. See you then.

[A]

Bye.