Dr. Vinton Cerf - Internet, Infinity and Beyond - Page 10

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Now I don't have time to go through all of these examples, but earlier today people asked about the wine cork bit so let me explain those of you who are electrical engineers or computer scientists are ineligible for the Nobel prize; these disciplines are considered to be branches of mathematics and Mr. Nobel refused to allow the Nobel prize committee to award anything for a branch of mathematics, and before you say what about the Nobel prize for economics which is often for mathematical equations like the NASH equilibrium equation, that's actually funded by the Norwegians and not by Nobel.

So I got to think about how to fix this problem for the computer scientists and electrical engineers and then I got to thinking about the quantum particles in physics and I know that there are Nobel prizes for that. Some of you will remember Schrodinger trying to explain to people how a quantum particle can have more than one state at the same time and that we use this in quantum computations and he tried to explain this by having a little thought experiment he said suppose you had a box and into the box you put a cat and you also put a capsule of cyanide and inside the capsule of cyanide is a piece of radium. Now if the radium emits an alpha particle it will break the capsule of cyanide is released and the cat will die. Then you screw the top down on the box, now no cats were damaged in this its a thought experiments so cat lovers don’t get too upset.

The question is what's the state of the cat after you seal up the system and a reasonable practical answer is you don’t know and the cat is both dead and alive you simply don’t know until you unscrew the box and look to find out whether or not the capsule was broken.

I submit to you that a bottle of wine is a giant quantum particle, because you don't know what state the wine is in before you open it up it could be awful or could be spectacular or everything in between and so I'm going to write up my theory of quantum wine bottles and submit that to the Nobel prize committee in hope that they will recognize the brilliance of this analogy.

What we could do of course is put a memory stick in the cork and we can record where the bottle was filled by which winemaker and we could keep track of the temperature and humidity that the wine was kept at on a periodic basis and then we might get a clue about the state of the wine we can interrogate the cork and that up to discover that on July 4 the temperature had got 40°C when the air conditioning failed. That's the bottle that you give to a friend that you don't particularly like. You don't know what the condition of the wine is but there's a high probability it isn’t so wonderful. I'm going to skip over the other two items so if you want to get back to that during the Q&A you're welcome to, but I’m conscious of time passing.

Let me go back now to what we were observing about how the Internet is being used and why it’s important to understand how things are changing. Users are really more in charge now of their information access and use than they ever have been in the past. They initiate searches, they are the ones that look for and discover information, they are the ones that initiate transactions, they announce their interest, they announce content that they are willing to share, they collaborate with one another. They produce information.

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