The Limits of Human Understanding? | Pavel Hrmo

Entanglement can't send a message faster than light. Stephanie Wehner, director of Europe's Quantum Internet Alliance, says it allows something stranger: two parties can coordinate faster than light without communicating at all. And she says secure communication alone is not the reason to build a quantum internet. Anders Indset sits down with Stephanie Wehner, professor at QuTech in Delft and director of the Quantum Internet Alliance, to ask what a quantum internet is and isn't, which hardware can carry it, when it will reach 500 kilometers, and why Europe, at the forefront today, could still lose the race. In this conversation, they explore: • Why a quantum internet doesn't need a quantum computer • Why networking needs long-lived qubits and an optical interface, and which hardware has both • NV centers vs trapped ions, and why only about 3% of an NV center's photons end up in the fiber • Why entanglement allows faster-than-light coordination but not faster-than-light communication • Whether robots, or humans with brain interfaces, could ever use entanglement • Whether we are just machines, and whether believing in a soul is wishful thinking • The roadmap: 500 km by 2030, and quantum-secure links already running in the Port of Rotterdam • Private quantum computing in the cloud, linked telescopes and other uses beyond security • Harvest now, decrypt later: how long do your secrets need to stay secret? • Why Europe is at the forefront but neck and neck with the US and China • Why Europe's quantum startups can't wait two more years for public money • Why Stephanie is working on a game and an art installation so kids grow up with quantum About Stephanie Wehner Stephanie is a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences, has won the Koerber European Science Prize and the KNAW Ammodo award, and co-founded QCRYPT, which has become the largest conference in quantum cryptography. She has written numerous scientific articles in both physics and computer science. From 2010 to 2014, her research group was located at the Centre for Quantum Technologies, National University of Singapore, where she was first Assistant and later Associate Professor. Previously, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology in the group of John Preskill. Earlier, she worked as a professional hacker in industry. LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stephanie-wehner-117774b3 QuTech - https://qutech.nl/person/stephanie-wehner/ Quantum Internet Alliance - https://quantuminternetalliance.org About The Quantum Economy Podcast A series exploring quantum theory, quantum tech, AI, and the evolution of intelligence, and how these forces redefine the economy, value creation, and the future of human systems. Learn more: https://thequantumeconomy.com Contact: [email protected] YouTube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnjrEO3TF1lUTutnqlfA3x88Rp0gVkOmD Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6pepc2PaCd06FHlf1pzDOg Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-quantum-economy-podcast/id1828917980 About Anders Indset Anders Indset is a business philosopher and author of seven international bestsellers, including The Singularity Paradox: Bridging the Gap Between Humanity and AI and Ex Machina – The God Experiment. As founder of tomorrowmensch, he invests in early-stage science and technology and convenes scientists, investors, and entrepreneurs working on what comes after the current paradigm. NEW BOOK: The Quantum Economy https://andersindset.com/shop/The-Quantum-Economy-p803754261 Website: https://andersindset.com tomorrowmensch: https://tomorrowmensch.com LinkedIn (personal): https://www.linkedin.com/in/andersindset/ LinkedIn (tomorrowmensch): https://www.linkedin.com/company/tomorrowmensch/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andersindset Substack: https://andersindset.substack.com/ X: http://x.com/andersindset Support & Share Subscribe for more conversations with the people shaping the quantum economy.

Q-Day was supposed to be 2035. Arm co-founder Hermann Hauser says it is now 2029 because the qubits needed to break RSA-2048 have fallen from a million to as few as 10,000, according to recent research from Google and Oratomic. If he is right, RSA-2048, which still protects much of the internet, has about three years left. Hauser co-founded Acorn Computers, where two engineers designed Arm's processor on almost no budget, and he now invests across several quantum modalities. Anders Indset sits down with Hermann Hauser, co-founder of Acorn Computers and Amadeus Capital Partners, at the Austrian Embassy in London to ask what the Arm story teaches about quantum, why Europe produces startups but loses them at scale, and how far computing, biology and physics can go before they run into the question of what a human being is. In this conversation, they explore: Why Q-Day moved from 2035 to 2029, and how the qubit estimate dropped from a million to 10,000-26,000 How two engineers with no money built the Arm processor, and why "less is more" put 350 billion chips in the world Which of the five qubit modalities could win, and why the measure of progress may shift to operations per second per dollar Where quantum advantage already exists, and how better error correction and AI-discovered algorithms could widen it Whether quantum computers will leave the data center for phones, drones and robots Why Europe has plenty of startups but loses its scale-ups, and what the Scale Up Europe Fund is meant to fix Why Hermann says Arm added $200 billion in three years, about what the German car industry took a century to build Why a pendulum can compute with no energy, and what the Landauer limit says about the cost of a bit Whether a brain can be simulated, and what Penrose's quantum-consciousness idea adds How Constructive Bio built virus-proof bacteria, and whether reality itself could be a simulation

Most quantum computers being built today chase more qubits and better error correction. Marta Estarellas's company Qilimanjaro went the other way: an analog system that lets physics do the computation, unlocked with fluxonium qubits that hold record coherence times. The bet is that the future of supercomputing is not one machine but a multimodality of digital, analog, and classical systems working together. Anders Indset sits down with Marta Estarellas, CEO of Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech, the Barcelona full-stack quantum company behind Europe's first analog quantum computer installed at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, to ask what quantum computing looks like when you stop treating the gate-based machine as the only future. In this conversation, they explore: Why analog quantum computing lets you skip gate decomposition and let the physics compute directly

How much do we really understand about life? In this episode of The Quantum Economy Podcast, Anders Indset speaks with Dr. Nirosha Murugan, Canada Research Chair in Tissue Biophysics, founder of Helioflux. In her research, she investigates the physical principles that underlie living systems. In this conversation, they explore: Why biology may need to move beyond a purely biochemical understanding of life How energy and information shape living systems Whether consciousness emerges from the brain or from more fundamental physical processes What slime mold can teach us about intelligence, AI, and distributed cognition How quantum biology could transform medicine and our understanding of health Whether reality itself could be a simulation, and what that would mean for free will Why philosophy is becoming increasingly important as science pushes the boundaries of life, intelligence, and longevity This is a conversation about quantum biology, consciousness, artificial intelligence, regenerative medicine, and one of the biggest scientific questions of our time: What does it actually mean to be alive? About Nirosha Murugan LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nirosha-murugan/ Murugan Lab: https://themuruganlab.com/ Substack: https://tseenergy.substack.com/

What if some of the most important questions in physics are still waiting to be properly asked? In this episode of The Quantum Economy Podcast, Anders Indset speaks with Chiara Marletto, physicist at the University of Oxford and co-developer of Constructor Theory alongside David Deutsch. Constructor Theory is one of the most ambitious new frameworks in fundamental physics today, going beneath the laws of motion to ask a deeper question: what is possible, what is impossible and why. In this conversation, they explore: What Constructor Theory is and how it offers a new way to think about physical reality, from information and thermodynamics to the physics of life and the mind Why time may be more fundamental and more difficult to explain than current physical theories suggest Why physics is not only a technical discipline, but also a deeply creative act of imagination and explanation Why both the education system and the funding system increasingly struggle with forms of knowledge creation that cannot easily be measured or categorized Why many of the most important research questions today do not fit existing institutional frameworks and therefore often remain underexplored Why progress in science depends on creating environments where difficult and foundational questions can still be pursued