Science

My initial motivation for studying quantum computing was a desire to understand the fundamental computational limits of the universe. Even in the absence of practical applications, I believed this pursuit was worthwhile as the most rigorous test of quantum mechanics to date. In fact, I often joke that disproving quantum computing sceptics is the primary application of a quantum computer, with everything else being a bonus.

Theoretical computer scientist specializing in quantum computing and computational complexity

A quantum computer is very similar to a classical computer, with one key difference: it takes full advantage of the laws of quantum mechanics. The heart of quantum mechanics is the concept of amplitudes. An amplitude is a new kind of number, related to but distinct from an ordinary probability. Amplitudes can be positive, negative, or even complex numbers.

Theoretical computer scientist specializing in quantum computing and computational complexity

The strangeness of reality was apparent long before the advent of quantum mechanics. The history of science is a sequence of revelations, each showing that the true nature of things is not what it seems to the casual observer. Quantum mechanics, however, takes this weirdness to a new level.

Theoretical computer scientist specializing in quantum computing and computational complexity

Einstein famously said time is what a clock measures, which was a half-joke but also the best answer he could give. A clock measures the 'distance' it travels through spacetime between events. That's fascinating, but it still doesn't tell you what time actually is.

Theoretical Physicist & TV Science Communicator

Quantum mechanics is a consistent mathematical structure, not that difficult to understand in itself, which nature has chosen. The confusing thing is that nature chose something that doesn't feel intuitive to us. It has a reputation for being mystifying mainly because of its history rather than what it really is as a theory.

Theoretical Physicist & TV Science Communicator

The paradox is that in the Milky Way galaxy, with something like 400 billion stars and trillions of planets, it's estimated there may be around 10 billion potentially Earth-like worlds. And the galaxy has been around for about 13 billion years. If a civilisation had developed ahead of us and become spacefaring, it's very hard to see why we haven't noticed any evidence of that.

Theoretical Physicist & TV Science Communicator

Many biologists I speak to would say it's almost incomprehensible that something as complex as us has even appeared at all—we might just be very lucky. Or maybe it normally only takes a few hundred million years to go from life to intelligence, and we were just slow. We have a sample size of one.

Theoretical Physicist & TV Science Communicator

Whatever you think it is, it self-evidently exists, because the universe means something to each of us. But I would argue that whatever it is, it's an emergent property. So it exists here on Earth because there are complex biological systems. Without those complex biological systems, it doesn't exist. There is no meaning. We bring meaning to it.

Theoretical Physicist & TV Science Communicator

I think these are all cases where our brains lie to us. It's not because they're doing something insidious or that there's some advantage to messing up our sense of happiness—it's just the normal processes of our brains sometimes go awry, and we end up not appreciating what we have as much as we could.

Psychologist known for teaching popular "Science of Well-Being" course at Yale

Most people assume a wound heals at its natural pace. But no—it healed according to perceived time. If the clock ran faster, the wound healed faster. If it ran slower, healing slowed.

Harvard psychologist & researcher in mindfulness and the psychology of possibility

Our body operates both quantumly and classically, and the quantum computation within us is far more sophisticated than any quantum computer we could imagine building—so we already possess that capability. Yet consciousness does not reside in our body, however quantum or classical it may be; it resides in the field that we are. This field communicates with the body and, through it, exerts control.

Co-Inventor of the Microprocessor & Founder of Zilog

They described, for example, taste as if it were just electrical signals in the brain, but there's no way such signals alone can produce the sensation of taste. That's the hard problem of consciousness: qualia—the sensations and feelings through which we know the world and ourselves—bear no resemblance to electrical impulses, and physics offers no explanation for how one could give rise to the other.

Co-Inventor of the Microprocessor & Founder of Zilog

We are fields endowed with consciousness and free will, existing in a reality deeper than the familiar realm of space, time, and interacting objects—precisely the view scientism asserts: that we are merely bodies, properties of physical matter. But scientism is mistaken. Consciousness exists independently of any physical form; it resides in the underlying field that instantiates the matter and energy we measure in space and time.

Co-Inventor of the Microprocessor & Founder of Zilog

Consciousness lies beyond the framework of quantum mechanics. It must be regarded as a primitive of the universe itself, not merely of brains. If consciousness is a universal primitive, then the entire totality of what exists is conscious and desires self‑knowledge. That offers the best way to understand evolution and why we can know: we are parts of a greater whole, we are fields—not bodies. The body is simply the creation of the field, enabling the field to have experiences in a reality collectively constructed by a multitude of fields.

Co-Inventor of the Microprocessor & Founder of Zilog

There's a considerable correlation between symbols and meaning—especially given how we train modern computer networks these days with unbelievable amounts of data and trillions of parameters. Each parameter is a number representing a probability, but with so many parameters, the answer you get—if you can't follow the vast number of steps—seems unpredictable, much like flipping a coin and not knowing heads or tails. But if you could view all the information, you could determine with certainty which side lands up—that's classical physics. Only in quantum physics does probability acquire a different meaning.

Co-Inventor of the Microprocessor & Founder of Zilog

As a psychotherapist, you have diagnostic categories for problems. There are specific techniques and therapies to apply. So the book really comes out of that frustration. If you think about science, it progresses from description, to categorisation, then to explanation, prediction, and control — and I wanted to feel like there was some science behind what I was doing.