For decades there has been a tradition of great discoveries in physics taking place in mountains. The creation of quantum mechanics eighty years ago in 1927 is attributed to Werner Heisenberg’s walks in the mountains, his way of escaping hectic city life to find time for contemplation. Those walks earned him a Noble Prize in physics in 1932.

This venerable tradition continues this week in Telluride when 180 physicists gather June 25-29 at the Conference Center for the 18th International Conference on Laser Spectroscopy (ICOLS), with three Nobel Prize winning physicists among them.

The ICOLS group, whose meeting is being organized by two Boulder located NIST physicists Leo Holberg and Jim Bergquist and the Telluride Science Research Center (TSRC), requested that Mountainfilm join the Pinhead Town Talk program because of their own deep connection to precipitous places. Their ICOLS meetings have been held almost exclusively in mountain communities since the first meeting in 1973, in places such as Jasper, Jackson Hole, Vail, Innsbruck, and Font-Romeu in the French Pyrénées.

An evening at the Palm Theater on Wednesday, June 27th at 6:00 pm entitled “Best Shorts of Mountainfilm 2007” and “The Quantum Revolution - a new generation of supercomputers” given by ICOLS participant Dr. Rainer Blatt, will be brought to Telluride free of charge by Pinhead Institute and Mountainfilm, in partnership with the Telluride Science Research Center. The Town of Mountain Village is sponsoring the event and it is hosted by Nana Naisbitt, Executive Director of TSRC, and Justin Clifton, Director of Mountainfilm on Tour.

Three great shorts will be shown, including a film by locals Ben Knight and Travis Rummel.

Heisenberg’s ideas of the uncertainty principle, wave function, quantized motion, and probability that sprung from the quietude of his mountain retreats, are taking practical shape 80 years later, aided enormously by laser technology. “The promise of quantum computing goes way beyond number crunching,” said Dr. Rainer Blatt in a recent interview. “There are breathtaking advances.” Often thought of as magic, quantum phenomenon is being harnessed. “There’s fun stuff,” Blatt says, “like teleportation.”

There are two quantum computers operating in the world, one in Boulder, Colorado and one in Innsbruck, Austria. Quantum computing is a radical, nascent, non-classical resource that can now be exploited, in part, by harnessing weird quantum behavior such as “spooky action at a distant” or the uncertainty of either the position or the momentum of a particle, which cannot both be known simultaneously.

Quantum computing will likely be a resource for teleportation, precision measurements, cryptanalysis, speedy database searches, and modeling of quantum mechanic interactions itself. It is expected to be a boon to physics, chemistry, nanotechnology, mathematics, biology, and much more. In certain operations, what takes a classical supercomputer years to accomplish, will take a quantum computer mere seconds.

“I want the audience to get a glimpse of why quantum systems can be absolutely more powerful than classic computers,” says Blatt. “Quantum computers will have a heavy impact. Not in the next five years. Not in the next 10-15 years. I want people to understand why we’re really excited.” He will walk the audience through the current status of quantum processing and where he believes it is going.

In 2004, Blatt and his team demonstrated the first ever teleportation with atoms. Dr. Blatt is Director of the Institute for Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck, and Managing and Research Director of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Blatt has drawn international attention for experiments that realized a quantum computer based on trapped ions. Blatt has won the 2006 Erwin-Schrödinger Prize of the Austrian Academy of Science and was a 2007 Descartes-Prize Finalist Award of the European Union.

His lab operates one of two quantum computers in the world; his colleague in Boulder, David J.Wineland of the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), runs the other. Wineland, another ICOLS participant, will be in attendance at the Palm.

Learn more about the revolution in quantum computing and enjoy films you may have missed at Mountain Film on June 27th at 6:00 pm at the Palm. Admission is free.

Mountainfilm and Pinhead will partner again at the Palm on Tuesday, July 10, 2007. For more information, please call Nana Naisbitt at 870-708-0004 or email her at nana@telluridescience.org or visit www.telluridescience.org.

June 22, 2007
Contact Nana Naisbitt
970-708-0004 cell