Sept. 19, 2012 David W. Lyons, a mathematical sciences professor at Lebanon Valley College, came to the Bowers Writers House to give a lecture entitled “Writing as a Path to Understanding and Discovery.”
The focus of the lecture was how we, as humans, can further our communication skills with the aid of quantum physics. This appears to be a difficult topic to understand, and indeed it turned out to be that way, but it was easy to notice that Lyons was able to bring this complicated subject matter down to an understandable level while still keeping the audience involved.
Lyons brought up the information theory: there must always be a sender, someone trying to share a message, and a receiver, someone who will receive the message from the sender and understand it. To show this, he brought up a Power Point slide displaying stick figures, one indicating the sender — who must always be named Alice, he told the audience — and the receiver who must always be named Bob.
At this point in the lecture, the audience was on-board. But then, Lyons brought it back to quantum physics. He spoke of the mathematical importance of the middle ground of information theory, or what is between the sender and the receiver. There is always noise in the middle, other things that can often garble the message being sent. This, he told the audience, is where Quantum physics can play a role. With quantum physics, we can encode our messages so tightly that no eavesdropper would be able to understand the messages we are sending. “[Message encoding] is serious. People in their basements, evil teenagers can do terrible things with the wrong information. Secure communication is dead serious,” Lyons said.
To use a real life example, think of purchasing an item on Amazon using a credit card. We find the item we want, enter all of the card’s information and click “purchase.” Now this information we input is encrypted and sent to the right place. “We think when we type our credit card information into Amazon we are safe,” Lyons said. “It is a hard code for hackers to break, but it’s not impossible.” As computer hackers get better, the security of our information will be more at risk. That is why quantum computers are being developed. They will provide us with far more security and will be able to decode a message very, very quickly. Perhaps this means we can get what we order even quicker from Amazon.
A question that many audience members were probably wondering toward the end was: Why don’t we have quantum computers right now? Luckily, that was explained. First off, money is always an issue and the funding for quantum computers isn’t completely available yet. Another reason is that, in the current state, quantum computers are very delicate. Within the computers are things called quantum bits that store and encode information in a more complex way then the 0’s and 1’s that the average computer uses to store information. The quantum bits, or Q-bits, are very susceptible to decay and haven’t been able to be kept in a secure environment. These two things are at the forefront of why quantum computers aren’t available.
Overall, the lecture turned out to be very informational and interesting. Lyons showed a superior understanding about the topic at hand and did a good job of keeping his talk at the level of the audience, a task that seemed difficult given the complexity of the topic. However, what turned out to be an odd choice was the title of the lecture. To the casual observer, it would appear they were about to listen to a lecture on why writing poetry or stories will lead one to learn more about themselves, rather than a lecture where at least half of the time will be spent on quantum physics. Regardless, Lyons turned out to be a stellar speaker; he kept things light and amusing with jokes and kept the information tangible and interesting.