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這是你大腦的展示圖。你的大腦可以分成兩部分,有左半邊掌管邏輯的部份,以及右半邊掌管直覺的部份。如果我們用一個刻度去衡量每個半球的能力,就能繪製出我們的大腦。例如,這是某個完全以邏輯思考的人,這是某個完全憑藉直覺的人。那麼,你會將你的大腦放在這個刻度上什麼地方?有些人可能選擇了其中一個極端,但我認為台下大多數聽眾的大腦是像這樣的,兩個半球同時具有很高的潛能,它們並不會相互排斥之類的,你可以同時具有邏輯和直覺。
我自認跟大多數其他實驗量子物理學家一樣,必須有很好的邏輯思維,來把這些複雜的想法串連起來,但同時,我們需要一個好的直覺,以使實驗確實進行。我們如何培養這種直覺?我們喜歡把玩東西,因此,我們走出實驗室把玩東西,觀察它如何反應,然後藉此發展我們的直覺。事實上你做的也是同樣的事。
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以下為系統擷取之英文原文
This is a representation of your brain. And your brain can be broken into two parts. There's the left half, which is the logical side, and then the right half, which is the intuitive. And so if we had a scale to measure the aptitude of each hemisphere, then we can plot our brain. And for example, this would be somebody who's completely logical. This would be someone who's entirely intuitive. So where would you put your brain on this scale? Some of us may have opted for one of these extremes, but I think for most people in the audience, your brain is something like this -- with a high aptitude in both hemispheres at the same time. It's not like they're mutually exclusive or anything. You can be logical and intuitive.
And so I consider myself one of these people, along with most of the other experimental quantum physicists, who need a good deal of logic to string together these complex ideas. But at the same time, we need a good deal of intuition to actually make the experiments work. How do we develop this intuition? Well we like to play with stuff. So we go out and play with it, and then we see how it acts. And then we develop our intuition from there. And really you do the same thing.
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有些直覺你可能培養了很多年,像是一個物體只能同時在一個地方出現。我的意思是,想到一個物體同時出現在兩個不同的地方聽起來很怪,但你不是與生俱來就有這個概念,這是後天培養的。我記得看過一個孩子在阻車器上玩,他只是還在學步的幼兒,不是很會走路,他不斷地跌倒,但我敢打賭,跟阻車器玩耍教了他相當寶貴的一課。這麼大的物體不會讓你直接穿過,它們固定在一個地方。
這是世上所具有的一個很棒的概念模型,除非你是一位粒子物理學家。對粒子物理學家來說,這是個很糟的模型,因為他們把玩的不是阻車器,而是這些怪異的小粒子。當他們研究這些小粒子時,發現它們表現出種種相當奇怪的現象,彷彿它們能穿牆而過,或同時出現在兩個地方。因此,他們寫下所有的觀察結果,並將其命名為量子力學理論。
這就是幾年前物理學的發展狀況。你需要量子力學來描述細小、微小的粒子,但你不需要用它來描述我們周遭那些大的日常物品。這不是很符合我的直覺,也許是因為我不太常把玩微粒,好吧,我有時會研究它們,但不太頻繁,而且我從來沒見過它們。我的意思是,沒有人曾見過一個微粒,但這也不是很符合我的邏輯觀念,因為如果一切事物都是由小粒子組成,而所有小粒子都遵循量子力學,那所有事物不是都應該遵循量子力學嗎?我看不出有什麼不該遵循的理由。如果我們能以某種方式,顯示日常生活中每件事物也都遵循量子力學,我對這整個情況的感覺會好多了。因此,幾年前,我開始著手進行這件事。
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So some intuition that you may have developed over the years is that one thing is only in one place at a time. I mean, it can sound weird to think about one thing being in two different places at the same time, but you weren't born with this notion, you developed it. And I remember watching a kid playing on a car stop. He was just a toddler and he wasn't very good at it, and he kept falling over. But I bet playing with this car stop taught him a really valuable lesson, and that's that large things don't let you get right past them, and that they stay in one place.
And so this is a great conceptual model to have of the world, unless you're a particle physicist. It'd be a terrible model for a particle physicist, because they don't play with car stops, they play with these little weird particles. And when they play with their particles, they find they do all sorts of really weird things -- like they can fly right through walls, or they can be in two different places at the same time. And so they wrote down all these observations, and they called it the theory of quantum mechanics.
And so that's where physics was at a few years ago; you needed quantum mechanics to describe little, tiny particles. But you didn't need it to describe the large, everyday objects around us. This didn't really sit well with my intuition, and maybe it's just because I don't play with particles very often. Well, I play with them sometimes, but not very often. And I've never seen them. I mean, nobody's ever seen a particle. But it didn't sit well with my logical side either. Because if everything is made up of little particles and all the little particles follow quantum mechanics, then shouldn't everything just follow quantum mechanics? I don't see any reason why it shouldn't. And so I'd feel a lot better about the whole thing if we could somehow show that an everyday object also follows quantum mechanics. So a few years ago, I set off to do just that.
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所以我做了這個。這是第一個你能看見的以量子力學疊加製成的物體,我們在這裡看到的是一個微型電腦晶片,你大概可以看到中間那個綠點,這就是我稍後要講的金屬。這是這個物體的照片,我將這裡放大一點點,我們看到的是它的正中心,這是這個小金屬片非常大的特寫,我們看到的是一小塊金屬,它的形狀像一個跳水板,從一端伸出,我用幾乎和製造電腦晶片相同的方法製造出這片金屬。我帶著一個新的矽晶片進入無塵室,然後在這些大型機器中操作了大約100小時。為了最後的成品,我不得不自行製造一台機器,在這個設備下方開了一個泳池形的洞,這個設備有進行量子疊加的能力,但它需要一點幫助才能做到。
我來做個比喻,你知道在一個擁擠的電梯裡有多不舒服嗎?我的意思是,當我獨自在電梯中時,會做各種奇怪的事,但當其他人進來時,我就停止做這些事,因為我不想打擾他們,或坦白說,嚇到他們。因此,量子力學顯示,無生命物體也表現出同樣情形。這些隨後進來的無生命乘客,不只是人,還包括照射它的光、吹拂而過的風和室內的熱度。因此我們知道,如果我們想看這片金屬表現出量子力學的行為,必須踢走所有其他乘客。
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So I made one. This is the first object that you can see that has been in a mechanical quantum superposition. So what we're looking at here is a tiny computer chip. And you can sort of see this green dot right in the middle. And that's this piece of metal I'm going to be talking about in a minute. This is a photograph of the object. And here I'll zoom-in a little bit. We're looking right there in the center. And then here's a really, really big close-up of the little piece of metal. So what we're looking at is a little chunk of metal, and it's shaped like a diving board, and it's sticking out over a ledge. And so I made this thing in nearly the same way as you make a computer chip. I went into a clean room with a fresh silicon wafer, and then I just cranked away at all the big machines for about 100 hours. For the last stuff, I had to build my own machine -- to make this swimming pool-shaped hole underneath the device. This device has the ability to be in a quantum superposition, but it needs a little help to do it.
Here, let me give you an analogy. You know how uncomfortable it is to be in a crowded elevator? I mean, when I'm in an elevator all alone, I do all sorts of weird things, but then other people get on board and I stop doing those things, because I don't want to bother them, or, frankly, scare them. So quantum mechanics says that inanimate objects feel the same way. The fellow passengers for inanimate objects are not just people, but it's also the light shining on it and the wind blowing past it and the heat of the room. And so we knew, if we wanted to see this piece of metal behave quantum mechanically, we're going to have to kick out all the other passengers.
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所以這就是我們所做的。我們關了燈,然後將它放在真空抽氣機中,抽出所有空氣,將它冷卻到稍高於絕對零度。現在,這小金屬片獨自在電梯裡,可以為所欲為。我們測量了它的運動,發現它用相當奇怪的方式運動。它並非完全靜止,而是在振動,它振動的方式就像某種呼吸-就像風箱的擴張和收縮。將它輕微撞擊一下,就能讓它同時振動及不振動,這是某些只有在量子力學下才會發生的事。
我在這裡告訴你們的是一些相當奇妙的事,一個物體同時既振動又不振動是什麼意思?我們考慮一下原子,在某種情況下,組成這塊金屬的億萬個原子是靜止不動的,同時,這同樣的原子正上下移動,只有在某特定時間,它們的運動是一致的,其餘時間它們是非定域的。這意味著每一個原子同時身處兩個不同地方,這又意味著整塊金屬片是在兩個不同地方,我認為這真的很酷。(笑聲)真的。
(掌聲)
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And so that's what we did. We turned off the lights, and then we put it in a vacuum and sucked out all the air, and then we cooled it down to just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Now, all alone in the elevator, the little chunk of metal is free to act however it wanted. And so we measured its motion. We found it was moving in really weird ways. Instead of just sitting perfectly still, it was vibrating. And the way it was vibrating was breathing something like this -- like expanding and contracting bellows. And by giving it a gentle nudge, we were able to make it both vibrate and not vibrate at the same time -- something that's only allowed with quantum mechanics.
So what I'm telling you here is something truly fantastic. What does it mean for one thing to be both vibrating and not vibrating at the same time? So let's think about the atoms. So one case: all the trillions of atoms that make up that chunk of metal are sitting still and at the same time those same atoms are moving up and down. Now it's only at precise times when they align. The rest of the time they're delocalized. That means that every atom is in two different places at the same time, which in turn means the entire chunk of metal is in two different places. I think this is really cool. (Laughter) Really.
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這些年來,我把自己鎖在無塵室做這些很值得,因為,仔細想看看,單一原子和金屬片的比例差距,大約和金屬片跟你的比例差距是一樣的。所以,如果一個原子可以同時在兩個不同地方,金屬片也可以在兩個不同地方,那為何你不能呢?我的意思是,這只是我掌管邏輯那一側大腦的想法。想像一下,如果你同時身處在多個地方會是什麼情形?你的意識如何掌控你身處在非定域空間中的身體呢?
這故事還有另一個部份。當我們把它加熱,打開燈光,觀察盒中時,我們看到這片金屬仍是完整的一塊,所以我不得不發展出這個新直覺。似乎所有電梯中的物體,事實上都只是被塞進一個極小空間的量子物體。
你們聽過很多關於量子力學認為萬物都互相聯繫的說法,嗯,這不完全正確,它不只如此,它是更深奧的。正是這些聯繫,你跟周遭萬物的聯繫,真正定義了你是誰,這就是量子力學的深奧和不可思議之處。
謝謝。
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It was worth locking myself in a clean room to do this for all those years. Because, check this out, the difference in scale between a single atom and that chunk of metal is about the same as the difference between that chunk of metal and you. So if a single atom can be in two different places at the same time, that chunk of metal can be in two different places, then why not you? I mean, this is just my logical side talking. So imagine if you're in multiple places at the same time, what would that be like? How would your consciousness handle your body being delocalized in space?
There's one more part to the story. It's when we warmed it up, and we turned on the lights and looked inside the box, we saw that the piece metal was still there in one piece. And so I had to develop this new intuition, that it seems like all the objects in the elevator are really just quantum objects just crammed into a tiny space.
You hear a lot of talk about how quantum mechanics says that everything is all interconnected. Well, that's not quite right; it's more than that, it's deeper. It's that those connections, your connections to all the things around you, literally define who you are. And that's the profound weirdness of quantum mechanics.
Thank you.