Why Erdős Was The Original Kevin Bacon

This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Dinosaurs walked the Earth 180 million years ago. But you know, cancer was part of their story too. Scientists have found tumors in ancient fossils. Well, that is a part of the reason why cancer is a big part of our story, right? It's the other side of evolution. It's the most complex disease that we face. There are more than 200 types of cancer in total, each with distinct characteristics, challenges and mysteries. And that complexity demands scale. Cancer Research UK is the world's largest charitable funder of cancer research, with more than 4,000 scientists, doctors and nurses working across more than 20 countries in the search for answers. And then, sharing their discoveries beyond borders. And the impact of this collaboration is clear, because over the last 50 years, the charity's pioneering work has helped to double cancer survival in the UK. That is more people who are living longer, better lives. Bossils can show us the past, but research is shaping the future. And for more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org-forward-slash-rest-is-science. Welcome to the Rest Is Science. This is field notes. It's a sort of a podcast expedition, if you will. Where Michael and I are going to trade curious objects, all things that have been occupying our minds. Yeah, that's right. Every week we're going to bring something from our little, you know, the mystery bags of our lives to share with the other and with you. I mean, put it this way, Michael and I are massive nerds and always have been. So over the years, we've collected all the manner of bonkers and bananas, objects and ideas. And that's, oh yeah, we've got at least seven to eight years worth of stuff to go through, Michael, in terms of episodes. Yeah, right. And there's even more than that because we want things from you guys. So send in your questions and ideas to where, well, I know it's the rest is science at GoHanger.gov. What a great email address. Yeah, so you would think that by now we would remember it, but no, it's still remains a difficulty for us. Later on in the set of said, I'm going to be showing you the ultimate nerd trophy. It's the most remarkable and weird thing that I own. Oh, I was coming up in an RF said, but first some questions from you. That's right. From you guys who are out there listening, not from me. I will read this one to you, though, Hannah. This is a question from Haley who asks, who is or was, in your opinion, the scientist with the most peculiar personality. Most peculiar personality. I mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot of people who could be in that kind of square around them. It's all of them. Like, you have to be peculiar to, well, we're all peculiar in some way. Some of us more peculiar than others. It definitely helps, doesn't it? I think if you're willing to completely dedicate your entire life to advancing human knowledge by just the smallest, smallest amount, no guarantee of success, then I think there's usually does have to be something a little bit peculiar about it. I mean, mathematicians, I think are often right up there with the most peculiar of all. I mean, there's Cantor who discovered that infinities can be different sizes. I mean, that in itself is a wild idea. But he, he at one point thought that he was causing the rain by staring his own urine. So, I mean, there's a lot of, wait, really? Oh, that's incredible. See, I don't know anything about him outside of the mathematics that he worked on. I'm going to write that down because I love examples of things like Isaac Newton believing that the world was going in on a specific date and all the SOTeric work that he did, D.H. Lawrence, the author, believed that the moon produced its own light. And it's just kind of surprising when you're like, oh, yeah, it was easier to believe that confidently back then. Yeah, absolutely. I think number one, that number one for me is going to go to a dos. Is that like six degrees of Kevin Bacon mathematician? It absolutely is the six degrees of Kevin Bacon mathematician. Okay, he's explained where there is to our listeners. Okay, so he did a lot of work on graph theory, which it's not about graphs as then x and y axis, it's graphs as in networks. That's what mathematicians call them. But he also was a sort of lived example of this. He published incredible number of papers, but in particular, he published with a lot of co-authors and what he would do actually, he didn't have a house, right? He didn't sort of, he didn't have a kind of traditional life. What he would do is he would rock up at different mathematicians' houses and then turn up and say, my brain is open and sleep on their couch, where they would take on the responsibility for cleaning him, feeding him, laundering his, actually, he didn't do laundry, he trucks his clothes away once he'd worn them. Not because he was ostentatious and rich, just because he didn't care for such things. But while he was there, he would write papers with them. But what it then meant is that over time he had collaborated with such an unbelievable number of people that people came up with the idea of an Erdosh number, which is how many steps away in a network you are from having collaborated directly with Erdosh the man himself. So not only a lot of collaborators, but it sounds like also a very diverse variety of types of papers in mathematics. Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is the one that the most famous idea. So the bacon number is analogous, but the idea is that Kevin Bacon has been in so many different films with so many different people that you can have a bacon number too. So if you have a bacon number of zero, you are Kevin Bacon himself. If you have a bacon number of one, you have a paid on screen with Kevin Bacon. And a bacon number of two, and you have a paid on screen with somebody who has a paid on screen with Kevin Bacon and so on and so on and so on. If you have an Erdosh number of zero, you are. You are. Yeah. Which by the way, until you said it, I thought it was Erdosh. Oh, so that's why it's helpful to do audio programs about mathematicians. Erdosh. I think that's only the additional number of four, by the way. I think mine is four. That's yours is four. I think so. Yeah, let me just double check. Because we haven't published a paper together, which is like the rule, right? But if we did, I would have a number of five. Absolutely. But we haven't paid on screen together. What's your bacon number? I don't know. Is there a way to find out? I don't I haven't really been in enough like IMDB type shows. Oh, it's five. My Erdosh number is five. Oh, okay. Oh, hold on. I've got a bacon number of three. How? I've only done one thing ever where which was drama, but I appeared on screen with Lenny Rush, who is this absolutely amazing actor. He has a bacon number of two. So there we go. I've got an Erdosh bacon number of five two. But that means you're six three at the very least. You think? I have a bacon of six. Adderstift six. We have to publish something together. But off to that. Well, should we come up with a name for the bacon Erdosh ratio? Yeah, go on. Oh, oh my gosh. There's an Erdosh bacon number. It measures the collaborative distance in authoring papers between that person and Erdosh and their bacon number. Oh, no. Go on. It doesn't have a funny name. It's just called the Erdosh bacon number. And the lowest is three. Mathematician Daniel Klitman has an Erdosh bacon number of three because he co-authored papers with Erdosh and has a bacon number of two because he appeared as an extra in Goodwill hunting with many driver who appeared with bacon in sleepers. Yeah, that is impressive. So what was his three? Mine's seven. Pathetic. Pathetic. I need to hunt down Kevin Bacon immediately. Right. I mean, yeah. So, so you could probably collaborate with someone who worked with Erdosh directly. Yeah, not, not, I mean, I've got long to go because this is, you know, he was around in sort of the, he was particularly big in the 1960s. Yeah, you got to do it now, but you could achieve what at most today a Erdosh number of two. Yeah. And then bacon is still alive. That can become a one. So you could beat Daniel Klitman. You could equal him, no? Two and one. Yeah, you add them together. So the best you could do would would be to tie him records that can't be broken. Michael, one of your favorite subjects. Wow. Okay. Yet another tab. I'm not going to be closing. How many are there out of interest? Let's see if I can figure that out. There's too many for me to easily navigate, but on this one window I have it's over a hundred. Can I tell you why I pick Erdosh right as the most peculiar person? Yeah. I mean, this is the Erdosh-breaking stuff is all very nice, but what makes Erdosh peculiar, apart from the fact that he didn't have a house and just turned off his friends' doors, insisting that they take care of him. He also took a lot of amphetamines and some people were concerned that he was addicted to them. He was working like 19 hours a day. And so a friend of his Ron Graham bet him $500 that he could, he wasn't able to stop taking the drugs, right? He couldn't go cold turkey for 30 days. And so Erdosh was like, fine, I'll do it. So he stopped, he immediately stopped, he took the $500 from Graham and you know, didn't touch the drugs at all in that time. And then at the end, he said, look, what you've proved is you've proved that I'm not an addict, so well done you, but what you've done here is you've set mathematics back by a month because he needed the drugs to do math. And he needed the drugs to do the math, which I quite like. The other thing about him is that he at my favorite story about him is that he was totally incapable of feeding himself, right? Just couldn't, didn't understand the most basic ideas of how to construct a sandwich, for instance. So there was one day where he was staying at a friend's house and he was hungry. He went into the kitchen, probably because of all of them and bet mean, went into the kitchen, opened the fridge and found a part of tomato juice. Couldn't work out how to open it. So got a knife from the counter, stabbed it open. Tomato juice went everywhere, drank from the carton, left it on the side and then went off back to work. And his friend came down just to witness what looked like a murder scene in his kitchen. Yeah, just like that's just a dot. That's just a dot. There he is. I mean, that sounds like something I might do in college. Not saying I'm a Rdashi, but I get it. I get it. Yeah, fair. Yeah, what nice, what I mean, what a great guy. He also, he thought that God was the supreme fascist and he would, he would regularly attribute every time he lost his glasses or, you know, couldn't find a book that he wanted to read or whatever he would say, like it was the supreme fascist that did that. But when he found a really beautiful mathematical proof that was, that couldn't be a proof to form, that was essentially perfection, he said, look, that came from the book and the book was the supreme fascist little handbook of perfect mathematical proofs that could only have been created by God. Oh, so it's like a bitter sweet supreme fascist. A bittersweet supreme fascist. That's a sentence I think that has not ever been spoken before and probably never will begin. Good. This is a great question. It's from Francisco from Lisbon. What did be possible to explain to a humanoid alien, bilaterally symmetrical, by a written or spoken message, no direct or visual contact, which side is left and which is right? The alien would have no access to anything on her or a human body as a reference, nor would they be really aware of North and South. Is there a fundamental physical or cosmological real world difference between left and right and can that information be passed on? Great question, Francisco. Oh my gosh. Yes, I love this because I got really obsessed with it years ago. I read Martin Gardner's Amidextrous Universe, which I recommend to everyone. It is a book all about mirror images, symmetries. He poses that same question and goes through all the ways we can't answer it. And so I read the whole book thinking we still don't know the answer. And I'm like, I'm going to make a video about this. It's such a deep mystery. And at the end, he's like, oh, and then in 1956, we figured it out. So to kind of like lay the scene, I think it's good to imagine communicating with aliens through, say, radio waves only. So we can't send images. And we're trying to tell them how to build something that is an adiomorphic, like a coffee cup, a father's day, number one dad coffee cup. All right. So you tell them, all right, it's as easy. You make a cylinder. Fine. They know what a cylinder is, right? There are symmetries in our universe that make that something we can easily explain. We can talk about points and whatever. Now we tell them like take off the top and empty the volume inside, but leave one one side at the bottom. And now they've made a cup. And then you tell them print number one dad so that when you look at it, you see it. And they're like, yeah, we're following and they're doing this. And now you tell them you got to put a handle on it. And you say, now the handle should go since, you know, here on earth, most people are right handed. We tend to put the handles on the right side. So when you hold it, you see the printing. And they go, which one's the right side? Think about it. This is much harder than you might imagine. Was remember, we cannot reference anything in the environment. You can't say, look at, look at number one dad on the mug, look at earth, and the Virgo supercluster is to the right. You can't do that. If you're not allowed to do that, what do you tell them to differentiate left and right? Because you could say, you could say, okay, place the handle along the axis of the cylinder so that it's perpendicular to the base. That would be fine. And then you could say, and now rotate it so that the handle, so it's no longer symmetrical about the central line. That would be fine. But it's distinguishing left from right. Really hard. Yes, because we could tell them to, you know, looking at the handle, rotate the mug. But rotate which way? Which which way is right in which is left? And how do we tell them with words alone and no references to any other models we've ever since at least Kant people wrote about how Gali it doesn't make any sense. Like a right hand floating in a universe all on its own doesn't have a rightness or a leftness. So for decades, we thought maybe there wasn't an answer because of the four fundamental forces. Three of them, we knew made no difference when mirror reversed. Left and right didn't matter. So gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force make no distinction. If you watch them do things in a mirror, it all looks fine. Right. You look at a pendulum in a mirror, it's obeying all the normal physics and it fits all the normal formula and equations. So this was true for these three fundamental forces. But the weak force was hypothesized to not have that same symmetry. And an experiment was devised that essentially looked at the spin of electrons emitted by a decaying cobalt 60. This is called the woo experiment. So in the woo experiment, they use cobalt 60 atoms that are decaying and they put them into both, let's call it regular spin orientations and mirror image spin orientations and found that the electrons that decayed out came out in the same direction. It's not like, okay, you spin this way, the electrons come up and you spin the other way and they come down. In which case, then it's, you can't really know, you just reverse it and it's the same. Instead, they found it didn't matter. The electrons always came out in one direction. So that can be called, you know, your left or right, whichever it is. I don't know enough about cobalt. But that is a way to agree because you'll both see the same thing. So, okay, let me make sure I understand this then. Right. So, you get the mug, you're like, you've got number one to add on it and then the only way to distinguish left and right as innate properties of the universe rather than just some sort of convention that we have decided on is to guess subatomic particles perform these experiments where you are looking at the spin, looking at the direction of the electrons and then that's the way that they can print the handle on the rise. I would say it doesn't matter if they print it on the left hand side. I think it probably, all right. I think if we want them to match, we have to do all of that rigmarole and that is such a cool feature of our universe because it is otherwise so simple left and right. Come on, you know, it's right there and yet it isn't, except the weak force comes in clutch at the end and says, all right, guys, technically, if you're willing to do a lot of work, I can help. There is something really nice about this idea that there are directions. I mean, time is the other one, right. Time faces only in one direction. You know, you can't go backwards in time. There's something really nice about this idea that these fundamental rules are physics. Maybe I don't think about this deeply enough, but couldn't you just say, all right, you've got some electrons going through a wire. There's electrons are going in, say, one particular direction and they will create a magnetic field that wraps around the wire. I mean, that's the right hand rule, right? Could you not say that it wrapped around clockwise, anticlockwise? Can you, I don't know, is there no way to get it that way? Yes, there is not a way to do it that way and I unfortunately do not know why. I think it has something to do with you need to both agree on which is the north side of a magnet first. Oh, it's something like that. Now, we've since learned that you can use other things besides cobalt. You can use uranium 239, you know, that might help us if the aliens are like, we don't have any cobalt, but still, it's a lot of work. So then if you get the, if you get the the mug to bring the mug in, you say, all right, whichever way the electron goes often, orient the mug so that the axis of the wording of the number one dad is in parallel to that. And then perpendicular, whatever. I mean, that's the way that you do it. That's the way you would have to do it. Yeah. Wow, extraordinary. Extraordinary. By the way, this is my dream father's day gift. I want my daughter to get me a number two billion, five hundred eighty seven thousand three hundred and twelve dad. Why specifically that number? I just feel like that's probably where I am. You know, like I'm not the number one dad. There can't be more than one. But that's all they sell. Number one dad mugs. I want to have a reasonable, I'm probably like, you know, top, top 30% maybe. Like put me there. Make it act like I actually earned this. Anyway, that's the gift that I want. But after the break, Hannah, you've got to get for me. It's a treat. Buckle up. This episode is brought to you by cancer research UK. Radio therapy is over a century old, but it is still changing. Cancer research UK helped lay the foundations of radiotherapy in the early 20th century and has driven progress ever since. Radio therapy remains one of the cornerstones of cancer treatment today. Every year, millions of people worldwide benefit from cancer research UK's work to make it more precise. Scientists are still refining how radiotherapy is delivered. And one example is an experimental treatment called flash radiotherapy, which delivers radiation in fractions of a second up to a thousand times faster than standard radiotherapy. And early studies suggest that speed could make a real difference. Flash radiotherapy may cause up to 50% less damage to healthy cells. But scientists don't yet know why healthy cells seem to be spared. So cancer research UK are working to answer that. Understanding it could be key to reducing side effects in the future. For more information about cancer research UK, their research and breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash The Rest is Science. This episode is brought to you by Thriver. Most of us tend to think of blood as something slightly finical, linked to illness or bad news. But in reality, it has been quietly keeping a record of what's going on inside our bodies, almost like a biological diary. It holds clues about how everyday choices shape our health, sleep, stress, food, movement, and without access to that information, staying healthy can feel more complicated than it needs to be. Thriver is a proactive health platform that lets you check in from home using regular at-home blood testing with clear guidance to help you understand what your body is telling you. That sense of clarity changes how health feels. Instead of juggling advice, rules, and trends, you get a simpler sense of direction, what looks consistent, what's shifted a little, and what's actually worth paying attention to. It just makes health feel calmer and simpler to think about today. Head to Thriver.co to get started. That's THRIVA.co and use code TRIS for 20% off your first test. Welcome back from the break. I've been saving this one, Michael. This is by quite a long stretch of the best thing I own. It's also the most ridiculous thing I own. So, don't judge my entire character based on this. I will. I'm going to. Okay. As I described it earlier on, the ultimate nerd trophy. Okay, so there is a science fiction director called Alex Garland. He wrote the beach he directed eggs. Mackinets, really amazing film about the future of humanity with artificial intelligence embedded in it. He also did this amazing HBO show called Devs, which was about a sentient quantum computer that was able to calculate the position of every atom in the entire universe, and thus all of the future and the past was available to him. Oh, like Laplace's demon. Exactly. Laplace's demon, this theoretical construct that was based on the idea that if the universe is deterministic, then every single thing should be predictable. The only problem is is we don't know where all the atoms are. And that's the thing that's stopping us knowing every single thing. Yeah. So this is the central idea of this show. Now, as part of the show, they made a quantum computer or at least a prop that looked like a quantum computer. And what they made was this very beautiful thing. Oh, yeah. Very beautiful prop that was made for the show. Yes. This is designed to be an accurate representation of what you really see from quantum computers. So, I mean, what we're looking at here is like the Tower of Babel but upside down. Like an upside down tiered cake, but without the cake, just the tiers, a series of platforms like circular discs connected one below the other by thin rods with a big collection of very thin, very ultra-fine wires coming out, but arranged very neatly. Like they've just been so precisely combed and gelled into this arrangement. It's almost like lit from inside as well, very gold and everywhere, gold and silver are the big notes of color. It's very blingy, isn't it? It's very blingy, but very delicate, like a fish skeleton. These very thin bones arranged so purposefully. So they are indeed made with this incredible amount of gold. All of this wiring, this is all very accurate. I mean, it's sort of like slightly fancified for the purposes of production. If you've seen photographs of quantum computers, that is exactly what they look like. These great golden structures with wires all over the place, they're very beautiful. Would make, I think, a very nice chandelier. That's what I think about it. That's what it looks like. That is exactly what it looks like. Very beautiful. Anyway, so they made this show and a little while after it was made, they still had this beautiful prop. The problem was that after they finished filming, they had this object in a storage unit. How big was it? It's hard to imagine. I mean, it's a bit scale. Big. We're talking sort of from top to bottom, maybe 10 feet. Oh wow. Okay. Right. Giant. Okay. So they have these giant crates, this big storage unit, and these storage units were costing an absolute fortune. So a couple of years after production ended, Alex Garland and his team were, they were like, we don't want to throw it away. We spent an absolute fortune making this incredibly beautiful model of a quantum computer. So they were ringing around the different museums and places which might take it. And it just so happened at the time I was doing at my house. I have in my house this big sort of hole that's cut in the floor, kind of a big void. And I was looking, I just so happened to be looking at that moment in time for something that I could hang in that void. And so I basically rescued it out for skip. So it's hanging from the ceiling. It's hanging from ceiling. Like a big chandelier. Like a giant chandelier. Oh Hannah, that is incredible. No, isn't it? I mean, you can, Michael can see the picture of my house and he can confirm that my house is not massive. He basically takes up quite a lot of my house. Every time someone, I mean, the postman comes in, you can see it from inside the front door. They wonder what it is because it sort of looks like a spaceship if I accidentally leave the curtains. I mean, it can pass as a chandelier, as a piece of artwork. How is it lit up? Is that the way it was lit up in the movie? Or did you have to add the lighting, the bulbs? The light panels were in there from the movie. Real quantum computers, by the way, do not have a rope. They wouldn't lie on that house. This, you can see sort of like a scan of it in position. We replaced the LEDs that they could be, they would last much longer. Also, what I did is I made it so that each individually controlled. So I have put a little computer in there, Bluetooth, it's connected via Bluetooth. And one of my projects for a summer when I have some time off, what I want to do is program it so that when I play music in the house, the quantum computer sort of twinkles in time. Visualizes the music. Exactly right. But what I really wanted to do, I wanted to show you this image because I sort of actually wanted to talk a little bit about the way that these things work. Okay, but first of all, I'm sorry. How did you get it? Did you reach out to them? No, so I have my very good friend Adam Rutherford was the scientific advisor on the series and is a very good friend of Alex Garland. But I just so happened to be in the right room when they were like, we're going to have to throw it away. We're going to have to basically sell it for scrap because nobody wants it. The museums didn't want it because it wasn't a real quantum computer. Yeah, I mean, where else would you put it? You know, who would be crazy enough to have one of you know, it's a very interesting thing because it's it's beautiful. It's a piece of like science fiction history. It's a part of the history of human ambition. Exactly. And storytelling and storytelling that is something that is also this piece of art, this really stunning piece of art. So this is the real thing. Here's a picture of the real thing. This is IBM's quantum computer. This is a system to this is I mean, one of the most sophisticated objects in the entire world. The inside of these, the guts of them, they really are made of real gold partly because it's such an incredible conductor. Also, these things need to be unbelievably cold. My favorite thing, by the way, about going to visit the proper one in Boston with IBM is that I mean, you're standing there next to these machines that are worth quite literally hundreds of millions of dollars, right? That the research project itself, probably billions. These are the most sophisticated machines in the entire world at the absolute cutting edge of technology. And then you go around the back of them and they're still using USB 2.0. They haven't upgraded to USB-C yet. Oh, I love that. So how you connect your computer to them, old school. Just USB. Yeah, just USB. Yeah. Like even the most amazing places in the world, once you peer under the surface, it's all still Gaffer type and WD40. Well, I love that it's like this progression of more and more sophisticated from the USB and the laptop all the way down to this like creedled chip. What you notice is that the physical design of this, I mean, basically what you're looking at here, the guts of quantum computers, just a fancy fridge. I actually know basically nothing about quantum computing. I have to attack the things I'm interested in one at a time. And so I literally don't know what a quantum computer is. How much of it is real? How much is sci-fi? How is a qubit different from and better than a bit? I mean, just give me like the for a kid version. Oh, yeah. Okay. So the thing is that there's sometimes presenters that they're better and I think that that's the wrong way to think about them. But definitely different. It's a completely different paradigm. And the way to think about it is that bits normal computers are ones and zeros, right? It's like a switch on or it's off. And what you can do with that is you can program things in a very deterministic way. There's no sort of extra probability that's thrown in there. There's no randomness. Everything ideally is like very controlled. You run the same program twice. You get exactly the same answer. That's sort of normal, traditional computing. The quantum computer is based on a qubit, which you can think of instead of it being like a one and a zero, like a yes or a no, it's much more like a distribution. It's much more like a even like a dial, if you like. So instead of dealing with like absolute facts, yes, as a no, you're handling everything in probabilities. My favorite analogy to describe this, although, you know, all of the analogies eventually break down if you think about them too hard. But I think that this is a good illustrative example. If you wanted to solve a maze using a traditional computer, the only way that you can do that is you start at the beginning and you try one route and it fails and you go back to the beginning and you try again and you fail, so with the quantum computer, because you are handling probabilities, you're handling sort of numbers that take on more than one value. What you can do is you can chuck a bucket of water in at the top of the maze and what that will do is flow through all of the various possibilities simultaneously and give you a sort of probability distribution at the end of what happened across all of those different routes. And this is like both the incredible potential of these quantum computers because it means that suddenly we are in a quantum world, right? We can handle probability and uncertainty and quantum effects actually. You can now model things down at the level of atoms in a way that's really, really hard to do with a traditional computer that only deals in absolute certainty. Right. But it also simultaneously means that all of our encryption essentially, which is based on this idea that you have to do things one after the other after the other after the other, that it will take too long for you to try all possible routes. It means that that is now out the window. It means that the way that we send secrets online, the way that you keep your bank information to yourself or the way that I don't know, even like national security ideas transported around the world without being completely open to anyone who's listening. A lot of that falls apart because as soon as a quantum computer can check every possible variation, our traditional encryption methods are no longer secure. Wow. There are ways where maybe we'll talk about that in a different episode. Yeah, I would love to because I want to learn about this. It's an unbelievable how little I know. So they aren't necessarily better at you know, finding the square root of a three-digit number. A regular calculator can do that just fine, and abacus can do that just fine. But these contactal problems that were literally so hard for other types of computers that that's how we make things safe. And and their paradigm is so different that it's a whole new world. It's a whole new world exactly. And there will always be things that traditional computers can do that quantum computers are rubbish at. The key difference is that vice versa, things that have always been hard to do on traditional computers like searching vast, vast, vast number of options. I mean, that in particular or trying to model what happens in the deeply complex intermolecular forces of the quantum realm, all of that stuff which has been so hard to get computers to do. I mean, AI sort of manages to do a little bit of that. But all of that now is suddenly suddenly open and available to us. So the real hope is that once you have quantum computers, things like drug discovery, you know, understanding how molecules interact with each other and proteins, you know, to the point where you can actually design something at the level of atoms, suddenly become way more available or you know, battery design, right? Like, imagine how different the world would be if we could design better batteries. This is another one on the list of for for quantum computers once we get this sort of up and running. And I do think it is coming, you know, there's a sort of a joke about how far away it is. Quantum computing has always been 30 years away, a bit like fusion. Right. Right. But I think that we're really starting to see genuine progress. You've got not a quantum computer, but our like hopes and dreams as shown in a show, you're home. I absolutely do. You can next time you're in London, Michael, you can come and have a glass of champagne underneath my Laplace's demon, my imagined version of a future with scientific advances. I should just tell you in the show itself that quantum computer did not lead to good for humanity. So maybe be careful what you wish for. But nonetheless, yeah, I can cheers to that. Yeah. As soon as I turn it on, I'm going to get it to calculate how to pay its own electricity bill. That's that's what I'm going to bring. There you go. If you have any questions that you would like us to answer or objects that you would like us to discuss, then you can send them into the rest of science at gohanger.com. Yeah, please do that. I cannot wait to hear from you. If you want to hear from us even more often, join our newsletter at the rest is calm slash science. We're going to be back next Thursday with another edition of Field Notes. And on Tuesday, with our normal episode. Yep. See you then. Bye.