The Quantum Revolution

Here's a go. I remember my school teacher announcing one day that there was an object so small. So tiny we'd never be able to see it. Well fortunately that didn't put me off. In fact I spent my entire career studying this amazing object without ever setting eyes on it. That elusive remarkable object was the atom. Atoms are the fundamental building blocks of everything that we can see. So if you understand the atom, you understand the universe. The scientific quest to understand the atom is largely completed. But today I believe we are entering a new era. An era where we do more than simply understand atoms. We begin to control them. Amazingly we can now manipulate individual atoms. We can pick them up, move them around and even play with them. All my life I've worked with the theories of Einstein, Stephen Hawking, string theory. And now for the first time I'm actually seeing what I'm manipulating with my equations. In every time I move my body I move trillions of atoms, but to see a single atom move like this. It's quite intoxicating. Today we can manipulate individual atoms, but this is just the beginning of a journey. A journey which will ultimately give us the power to manipulate the very stuff of our universe. Matter itself. We are on the brink of a revolution which will give us control, it's was a control of our physical world. In this program I will show how our mastery of matter will profoundly change our lives and the world around us. How atomic scale machines will revolutionize medicine. How invisibility and teleportation could make science fiction come true. How we will generate limitless clean energy and how cheap space travel might give us all a new perspective on our planet. These technologies will give us the power to utterly transform our future. But how are we going to use this power? Our deepest insight into the atomic world comes from a quantum theory. But the quantum theory gives us more than the ability just to manipulate individual atoms. It also underlies the architecture of the 20th century. The marbles of science like the internet, laser beams, telecommunications satellites, radio, television, microwaves, even the structure of the DNA molecule and biotechnology. All of it, ultimately, comes from the quantum theory. This theory offers a very different explanation of our world. One where the laws of conventional physics simply don't apply. The quantum theory is so strange and bizarre that even Einstein couldn't get his head around it. At the atomic level, we see phenomenon that normally we would consider sheer madness. In the real world, you can't simply disappear and reappear someplace else. That's nonsense. But in the quantum world, it happens all the time. At the level of atoms and subatomic particles, matter can be in an infinite number of places at once. The theory sounds preposterous, but it has one tiny thing going for it. And that is, it works. And in the coming century, it will enable us to radically transform our world. These maglev trains travel on air to the magnetism, hovering just above the track. They cruise at up to 500-8 km an hour, and they use less energy than regular trains. Thanks to a quantum phenomenon. Superconductivity. Syrpaconductors are a miracle of quantum physics. And they're an outstanding example of how we are gradually becoming masters of matter itself. Now, usually, superconductivity is quite difficult to achieve in the laboratory, and it's quite expensive. But about 20 years ago, there was a revolution when it was discovered that certain ceramics, like, Yhtrium, Barium, Copper Oxide here, become superconducting when exposed to ordinary liquid nitrogen. Now liquid nitrogen causes much as ordinary milk. By cooling the ceramic to minus 200 degrees centigrade, I'm effectively creating a new state of matter. The new material loses all its electrical resistance and become superconducting. Ableton boosts powerful magnetic fields. I'm now going to place a magnet directly on top of the superconducting ceramic. The polarity has to be just right. There. It's floating now. This is the Maisner effect. The presence of the magnet on the top induces a secondary magnetic field within the superconductor, and the two magnetic fields repelled each other, giving you the illusion of anti-gravity. Loanets at this thing is spinning without any friction whatsoever. Scientists hope to raise the temperature of the Maisner effect to avoid having to cool the ceramic. Imagine roads made out of silicon doctors at room temperature. Cars would hover right over the road without even touching it, without using any gasoline whatsoever. Or imagine a belt made out of this material. You could then float in the air. You could then fly almost like Superman floating on magnetism. So this is the realization of the ancient dream of floating against gravity, anti-gravity, using magnetism to counteract the force of gravitation. We won't just change transport with our mastery over matter, and the future will also create materials with amazing new properties not found in nature. Until recently there was a property of matter so fantastic, it was thought to exist only in myths and legends. It was thought to be incompatible with the laws of physics, but last year scientists made it happen. They created a material which shouldn't exist in nature. When light hits an object, if the objects atomic structure that determines what we see, whether it's translucent marble, clear water, or green leaves, it all depends on how the light interacts with the atoms. If we can manipulate those atoms, that we can ultimately control what the world looks like. This is exactly what David Smith and his team and North Carolina are beginning to do. By creating artificial materials called metameterials. We started thinking about interesting things we could do with artificial materials, and one of the things that came up was we could make something like an invisibility cloak. What we've done is to take materials that are commonly found something like copper and plastic, which is what our circuit board materials are made out of, and we've placed patterns in the copper so that they're tiny circuits. And these circuits act as artificial atoms in a regular material except now we've made an artificial material. And this ultra-material has a unique property. It can bend electromagnetic radiation.