Physicist Bob Coker: It’s easier to get kids to believe in quantum mechanics than adults

SecondProfessor Bob Coker, a 55-year-old Belgian physicist and musician, hopes to teach quantum physics to a wide audience.Paradox-filled theories describing the microscopic realm have become a staple of science fiction, via Marvel ant man multiple oscar winner everything everywhere everything immediately. It’s notoriously weird, and in the UK the subject is mostly reserved for physics undergraduates because it requires solving complex mathematical problems.But former Oxford University professor Coecke has designed a math-free framework for beginners using graphs, outlined in Quantum in pictures, his book with Dr. Stefano Gogioso was published earlier this year. Over the summer, they conducted an educational experiment in which they taught drawing techniques to British schoolchildren, who then performed better than the average of Oxford University’s physics graduate students.

Quantum physics is notoriously esoteric. Why do most people want to study it?
Think about artificial intelligence. Think about the mess the world has become now. Billion-dollar corporations are at the helm of a revolution that could control the world, but no one understands what they’re doing.I was a professor at Oxford University for 20 years and now work in industry, working with Quantinuum, building quantum computers [machines designed to exploit subatomic physics to one day outperform conventional computers]. We wanted people to understand what we were doing from the beginning, before the technology got huge.we want to make stems [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] Be more inclusive, make quantum more inclusive. This is completely counterintuitive, but in industry I can now do this educational experiment.

Your educational experiment involves 54 schoolchildren aged 15 to 17, who were randomly selected from around 1,000 applicants from 36 British schools, mostly state schools. The teenagers spent two hours a week attending online classes and eight weeks later were tested using questions from the Oxford Postgraduate Quantum Physics Examination. More than 80% of students Passed, with about half receiving distinctions. Are you surprised by their success?
At one point, I was going to cancel the whole thing because I thought it was going to be a complete disaster. We initially wanted the children to interact on social media or communicate online, but due to the ethics of the experiment, this was not allowed. I thought, what kind of educational experience is it if you can’t talk to each other?

This is the COVID generation: none of them have their cameras turned on [for the online classes], so what we see is a black screen. None of them asked questions with their voices, just typing. By all standards, this is a difficult teaching challenge. We also see students with self-esteem issues. But most kids like it when we announce that you don’t need a complex math background. Mathematics has always been a barrier for children who want to acquire this knowledge.

Then we got the numbers back. Their performance is much better than what we see from college students. The exam is blind, so we don’t know how many people took it to study Stem. We are processing this data now.

How did you come up with this quantum pictorialist approach? Is it originally aimed at children and beginners?
I’m a very visual person. Not only am I a quantum physicist, I’m an artist and musician. In fact, the only reason I ended up choosing Quantum Physics was because I wanted to support my music career, with my rock/metal/electronic fusion band Black Tish releasing two albums this year. In the 1990s, I got a job in the computer science department at Oxford University and my senior colleague Samson Abramsky told me that we needed a high-level programming language [future] Quantum computer. For ordinary calculations, you can program with zeros and ones, but most people don’t understand how to do this. But everyone knows how to use an iPhone. We want a quantum computer programming interface equivalent to the iPhone interface.Therefore, in 2004 Abramsky and I published a new formalism of quantum mechanics based on category theory [a well-established branch of mathematics that uses diagrams to describe collections of objects].

I then developed it with others and wrote a book about it for physicists in 2017 with Aleks Kissinger. But the hardest people to teach are theoretical physicists. They have so much to forget. Half of the mainstream people in quantum computing said: You use silly pictures to do things, it is useless, it is too simple! The other half said: Category theory is so difficult, this is useless, it’s too complicated! It took several years to get over the “it’s too complicated” stigma. So I wrote this new book with Stefano, who created all the images specifically to run this experiment, to show that it’s easy, that kids can do it, and perform better than graduate students at Oxford.

We hear a lot of weird and wonderful things about quantum physics: the cat in the box can be dead and alive at the same time until you see it; particles can be in two places at the same time unless their positions are measured; messages can be in Teleportation between quantum systems. How do you convey these processes using only pictures?
this is very simple.It’s all about drawing quantum circuits: boxes connected by wires [to demonstrate quantum phenomena]. Teleportation is simply sliding the box along the wire. Measurements are represented by boxes called “spiders” that have many legs or wires sticking out. A quantum particle that can be in two places at once before being measured is drawn as two legs entering a spider, with the spider’s body representing the measurement, and having one leg sticking out the other side, which is the result.

What are your hopes for the future of quantum pictorialism?
I have been contacted by people from the Australian and Greek government education departments who are interested in implementing this project. I’m also passionate about bringing this to Africa. It’s still early days, but we’re planning some things.

I initially wanted to change the way quantum mechanics was understood so that it would be easier to convince children than adults. They had no preconceived ideas. So maybe the next generation will carry it forward. As Max Planck, one of the founders of quantum physics, once said: Science advances one funeral at a time.