From Quantum in Pictures to Speech, Space, and Music

Portrait of Bob Coecke
07 Jun 2022
18:00 - 19:30
Conron Hall, UC 3110

From Quantum in Pictures to Speech, Space, and Music

Abstract:
This talk requires no mathematics background, as I will talk entirely in terms of simple pictures.  These are the pictures of my forthcoming book, “Quantum in Pictures”, which is aimed at the teenage enthusiast, and pretty much everyone else too.  We go through a bit of history of how one of the most inaccessible areas of science, quantum, has become a frontrunner in making science accessible to a broad audience.  Even more interestingly, one finds the same pictures in natural language, what goes on in our brain, and even space and time can be shaped according to those pictures.  One consequence of this is that natural language really wants to live on a quantum computer, which is something that we meanwhile realised.  We also show how these pictures guide us towards a new form of natural language, one in which different languages all become the same.  All together, these pictures provide an entirely new manner of looking at the world in which we live.