And here we have the Lord of Love, a card of bliss, deep joyous love reciprocated fully and with great enthusiasm, a card of reconciliations and new growth! Here we see harmonious and contented exchanges of emotion, which vibrate with an ecstatic undercurrent of passion and heat.
Because this card is a reflective and receptive one, there’s an issue that people sometimes forget when reading it – to be truly loved, deeply treasured, valued highly by others, we must first and foremost strive to feel those things for ourselves. When we work toward loving ourselves, we hold our inner nature in high regard, treating it with deference and proper respect. When we see ourselves in that light, other people cannot help but respond to our personal sense of value.
Furthermore, when we work to love ourselves, we release so many areas of self-doubt and uncertainty that we become infused by a new energy – and this we can lavish on others. The Two of Cups is about engaging in a caring and tender fashion with our own needs, first and foremost.
It isn’t so much about achieving self-love, as about, in every single day of our lives, striving towards self-love. That action leads us into a positive, self-supportive and accepting approach to life. And also, when we stop wasting energy telling ourselves what’s wrong with us, we have lots more energy to enjoy being who we are.
When this card comes up in a reading, if it relates to the inner journey, then it tells you to put your attention in the moment, to leave the past behind, and to let yourself be free to enjoy everything that comes your way.
If it relates to outer events, it may point to a forthcoming reconciliation in a relationship where there has been pain and disappointment – this need not be a love affair, it can cover many different types of loving relationship.
It might point up a new relationship which has recently begun and which will grow into a deep and lasting friendship or affair.
And finally, it may reassure you that the meaningful relationship in your life will strengthen and grow, developing into exactly what you need it to be!!
Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Based on his own experience and the stories of his patients, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. At the heart of his theory, known as logotherapy, is a conviction that the primary human drive is not pleasure but the pursuit of what we find meaningful. Man’s Search for Meaning has become one of the most influential books in America; it continues to inspire us all to find significance in the very act of living.
While understanding the psychic structure of pleasure and desire might seem to be unrelated to grasping our current political crisis, Todd McGowan argues that the intrinsically excessive nature of enjoyment is critically important to this effort. In a world that appears completely divided between right and left, McGowan calls for a universal form of enjoyment that unites people in an egalitarian project. Todd McGowan’s previous books include Emancipation After Hegel , Capitalism and Desire , and The Impossible David Lynch , among others. He teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont.
American Toy Companies, Led by Mattel, Have Entwined Marketing and Entertainment for Over Half a Century
It’s a Barbie world, and we’re all buying in. Columnist Jackie Mansky traces how the 2023 Barbie film (above) fits into the larger Mattel playbook to sell us on the plastic life. Courtesy of Warner Bros.
by JACKIE MANSKY | JULY 21, 2023 (ZocaloPublicSquare.org)
The year was 1997.
“Un-Break My Heart” by Toni Braxton dominated the radio waves. Wallet chains and JNCO jeans were red-carpet staples. And plastic? It was fantastic.
Cool Shoppin’ Barbie wasn’t just made of plastic, she was the first ever doll to come with her very own piece of it. She came equipped with a cash register, bar code scanner, credit card reader, and two credit cards—a life-sized cardboard Mastercard, and a doll-sized plastic one.
In a year where a record 1.35 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy, and the director of the nonprofit Consumer Federation of America was warning Americans in the red to “consider spending only what they can afford to pay off in a month or two”—or better yet, “make purchases by cash, check, or debit card”—Mattel, the toy company behind Barbie, used her to sell consumers on the fantasy of limitless shopping. Push a button, and the doll could say the magic words: “credit approved.”
“It’s so a child can really pretend,” said a spokesperson for Mattel at the time, in defense of its partnership with Mastercard International. “We thought it would be fun for her to run the card through the scanner.”
Cool Shoppin’ Barbie had a short run, which now makes her, among a certain set, a collector’s item. But today, the doll best serves as a particularly blunt object in the long history of Mattel’s marketing strategy to sell not the doll itself, but the lifestyle she promises.
In the lead-up to the first-ever live-action Barbie movie, Mattel has drilled this message home again and again, partnering with over 100 brands to sell us everything from Barbie burgers to Barbie toothbrushes. Life, Mattel wants to remind us, is better in Barbie pink. But the biggest way Mattel is signaling this message is through the high-profile summer tentpole itself. The first of Mattel’s new film arm, which can be seen as a feature-length commercial for Barbie, is a big gamble for the toy company. But it’s one that it has made before. From the very beginning, Mattel has made its name, and Barbie an icon, by selling her lifestyle to us directly on the screen.
As the story goes, after World War II, husband-and-wife team Ruth and Elliot Handler and their friend Harold “Matt” Matson began building doll furniture, and then toys, from scraps of leftover wood from their picture frame business. Early on, the company, a fusion of Matt and Elliot’s names, gained a reputation for selling musical toys, like the Uke-A-Doodle, a plastic ukulele. But Mattel really took off in 1955, when it had the opportunity to buy advertising on a new national children’s program, Walt Disney’s The Mickey Mouse Club. No one had used a major campaign to speak right to kids before. There had been national ad pushes, with the Erector Set becoming the first to get a major newspaper treatment in 1913. But unlike today, where companies spend nearly $17 billion a year marketing to kids and young adults, postwar marketers were only just beginning to treat children themselves as consumers. Becoming a commercial sponsor for a year would cost Mattel $500,000 upfront, but it meant directly reaching kids all across the country. It was a pricy gamble, but one that paid off big. That October, children tuning into ABC to watch “M-I-C-K-E-Y-M-O-U-S-E” were hit with advertisements for Mattel’s new Thunder Burp toy machine gun. The frenzy that followed created an epoch shift.
The first of Mattel’s new film arm, which can be seen as a feature-length commercial for Barbie, is a big gamble for the toy company. But it’s one that it has made before. From the very beginning, Mattel has made its name, and Barbie an icon, by selling her lifestyle to us directly on the screen.
As Sydney Ladensohn Stern and Ted Schoenhaus put it in Toyland, their history of American toy companies, “Mattel’s decision to advertise toys to children on national television 52 weeks a year so revolutionized the industry that it is not an exaggeration to divide the history of the American toy business into two eras, before and after television.”
Were it not for The Micky Mouse Club, Barbie herself may never have become a phenomenon. Buyers had expressed little interest when Mattel brought its prototype to the 1959 American International Toy Fair. But the response was completely different when Mickey Mouse Club viewers got their first look at the 11-inch doll. As ad footage of Barbie and her accessories paraded across the screen, a woman’s voiceover said, “Barbie, beautiful Barbie, I’ll make believe that I am you.”
From the start, Barbie, in particular, was selling children not on a doll, but on an idea: You, yes you, could be Barbie. Kids demanded a Barbie of their very own to play out their fantasies, and Mattel sold more than 300,000 dolls that first year.
Mattel continued to find new ways to use television to reach its target demographic. In 1969, Bernard Loomis, a toy developer and marketer at the company, had the idea of looking beyond regular advertising and turning Mattel’s newest toy, Hot Wheels, into a Saturday morning cartoon. The strategy was an early attempt to channel what Loomis later famously referred to as “toyetics”—a media property’s power to create and sell toys.
Loomis understood that companies would one day sell toys through branded, popular entertainment, but he was ahead of the times. After the Federal Communications Commission received a complaint from a rival toy company against the Hot Wheels animated show, it concluded that it was a “program-length commercial,” under the rationale that the programming was woven “so closely with the commercial message that the entire program must be considered commercial.” The FCC required ABC to log parts of the show, including the theme song and audio and video references to the words “Hot Wheels,” as commercial advertising, and the program was soon canceled.
It took until the 1980s for toyetics to be fully unleashed when FCC deregulation opened the doors for what one member of Congress termed the “video equivalent of a ‘Toys-R-Us’ catalog” to hit TV screens. The term toyetics was, at this point, already in circulation. Loomis is said to have coined it while discussing merchandising rights for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He’d decided to pass because he said the film wasn’t “toyetic” enough. What was toyetic enough? George Lucas’ new space opera.
Extending the Star Wars experience out of the movie theater and into the toy store opened the door for intellectual property to march its way into Hollywood. And now, with the launch of Mattel Films, Mattel is hoping to use Barbie to try and write the next chapter of this history.
From the dizzying heights of ’90s Barbie mania (Cool Shoppin’ Barbie, incidentally, came out during the year Barbie sales were at their zenith), Barbie’s cultural capital sagged in the 21st century. Like with The Mickey Mouse Club gamble, Mattel is hoping the new Barbie film will directly reach, and sell, a new generation on her story. But this time around, the company is hoping not just kids, but also adults buy into the idea of Barbie. In the long list of promotional collaborations, Mattel has been going after older age groups, partnering with brands such as the dating app Bumble to expand its customer base. The movie, too, is being marketed for all ages. “Everybody can have their own experience, and that’s the beauty of it. It’s kind of for everyone,” Ryan Gosling, who plays Ken, told Reuters, during the L.A. world premiere.
Early reports seem to suggest that Mattel’s bet will once again pay off. According to box office estimates, Barbie is on pace to take in at least $130 million over the weekend. Even in a moment when Americans are spending less, it seems Barbie is still able to sell us on the plastic life.
Printed Farms is is currently building a horse stable, a horse walker, and a manure shed that will cost a total of $3.3 million.
Printed Farms is building and 3D printing a $3.3 million luxury horse barn, horse walker, and manure shed.
When complete in August, the horse barn will be the world’s largest 3D-printed building.
This barn will house multimillion-dollar prized horses in the “Disney World for horses,” Wellington, Florida.
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The next world’s largest 3D-printed building isn’t going to be a home, school, or office. Instead, it’s going to be a luxury horse barn in Wellington, Florida set to be completed in August.
If you’ve been following the 3D printing construction industry, startup Printed Farms’ decision to develop a horse facility may seem like a random idea. After all, proponents of the tech say one of its main benefits could be its ability to quickly alleviate the (human, not horse) housing crisis.
But for those who know the startup’s founder Jim Ritter, it’s an unsurprising endeavor: This horsey project is the perfect marriage between Ritter’s company and his previous passions.
Before diving into the construction-tech world, Ritter was already in the horse industry developing and renting out multimillion-dollar stables.
He founded Printed Farms in 2019. In 2020 and 2021, his startup printed projects like a tractor shed and a home.
Printed Farms is based in the same village where the luxury barn is now being built: Wellington, Florida.
Wellington is a wealthy suburb about a 30-minute drive from West Palm Beach, Florida. Emphasis on “wealthy” — the median listing price of homes is at nearly $1 million according to data from Realtor.com.
If you aren’t deep in the equestrian world, you might not be familiar with Wellington.
But if you are, you may know of the small town’s glitzy and horsey reputation. As Ritter says, “Wellington is the Disney World for horses.”
These aren’t your average horseback riders.
“Most horse people don’t work or spend money at the level of Wellington,” he said. “It’s the top of the horse sport.”
The larger facility Printed Farms is now building in this prestigious location will include three units: a horse barn, a horse walker, and a manure shed.
Only the 13-foot-tall wall systems were printed for this project.
Most of what’s left are the finishing touches like plumbing, dirt around the landscaping, and stuccoing.
Printed Farms ran into several issues throughout the construction process, although most were out of its control.
Ritter initially ordered another printer to supplement his COBOD. But this printer was delayed by nine months and didn’t arrive in time, slowing the build time. Then, hurricane season hit. Then, inflation and difficulties with supplying its initial concrete mix further delayed the building timeline.
This string of bad luck turned what could have been a two to three-month project into a nine-month process.
And it didn’t help that two people on his four to seven-person crew suddenly couldn’t work because of unrelated medical problems.
Proponents of 3D printing construction believe the tech can generally build homes cheaper, quicker, and safer while using less materials and physical labor.
In this luxury horse barn project, using a printer did save some cash.
Ritter says traditional builders constructing this style of barn would have charged between $200 to $250 a square foot.
His team charged around $200 a square foot which he says is low “because for what we build, most people would’ve charged $250.”
The building is “almost” flood and hurricane-resistant, Ritter says. It could have been fully resistant if they had included a cement roof but the buyers opted for roof trusses instead.
This concrete construction and a higher level of durability compared to traditional construction could make building and investing in this new tech worth the risk.
“If you’re getting a concrete building that can withstand climate events so you don’t have to rebuild after such an event, why not spend that money?” he said.
With how durable Ritter says this concrete printing material is, these horses could be living out the rest of their lives in this 3D-printed barn.
The Lord of Peace is a friendly Sword, which comes as something of a relief when we have spent so much time dealing with his more belligerent cousins. However it must be noted that the card often comes up to indicate that a conflict has been resolved or a breach healed, so there will have been trouble earlier on.
It indicates that a painful and difficult situation is being reconciled. Friendships are rebuilt, old wounds are healed. However in this context it is very important to look carefully at the cards which follow it, for there is often a feeling that a relationship will never be quite the same again as it was before the conflict or quarrel. If the Four of Swords comes up nearby, this is a clear indication that one should remain cautious and thoughtful, not giving too much in the way of trust, for some time. If the Moon was up in the reading, we would be forced to consider the possibility that all is not as it seems.
At an inner level, the Two of Swords really comes into its own, for it marks the period of tranquillity and calmness that can arise when we have finally made difficult decisions, and acted upon them. Often it will come up to show that, now we have got to grips with our confusion, we can rest and recover.
The card will also come up to show that we have let go of old fears or anxieties that were holding us back. It’s a still card indicating a time to rest and recuperate.
PODCAST: From Einstein’s initial disbelief and Bell’s test to the 2022 Nobel Prizes, quantum entanglement has matured into a pillar of physics. Physicist Nicolas Gisin explains why it took so many decades.
Adam Levy: What does quantum physics tell us about the nature of reality? Could distant particles hold an influence over each other? And is the universe really spooky? I’m Adam Levy, and this is Knowable.
This season we’re investigating just how and when ideas in science develop. Each episode looks at how one text changed the way we think, and in this episode we are looking at one text — in fact, one phrase — that’s stayed with physics for some 80 years: “spooky action at a distance.”
This is Einstein’s memorable choice of words for something that he felt was deeply wrong with the emerging ideas of quantum physics. In this episode, we’ll take a look at what Einstein found too spooky to accept, and the Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell, who devised a way to finally test the universe and find out whether Einstein’s skepticism was well-founded.
But before we get to that, we need to talk about the revolution that was taking place in physics in the early 20th century. It became increasingly clear that the universe didn’t work how physicists had classically described it.
Classical physics describes the world with deterministic laws which govern waves such as light and particles like electrons, but this couldn’t describe a host of phenomena that experiments had unveiled. And so this classical view of the universe was gradually being replaced by quantum mechanics, which described bizarre properties of the very small.
Nicolas Gisin: At the beginning, it was really what people call wave-particle duality.
Adam Levy: This is Nicolas Gisin, at the University of Geneva, who has worked his entire career on applied physics and quantum physics, having spent decades reflecting on quantum physics applications to communication.
OK, but wave-particle duality?
Nicolas Gisin: So you have a particle, an electron, or an atom, and all these particles will sometimes behave like a particle, so like a little billiard ball, but sometimes [they] will behave like a wave. And so this dual nature of these particles was really what kicked off everything, all quantum science, let’s say. Until the ’60s that was, and probably even later, that was really the main concern.
Adam Levy: The notion that the building blocks of the universe weren’t either waves or particles, but somehow behaved as both, turned physics on its head. But while this may have been the main concern, it was far from the only concern about the strange implications of quantum physics.
Quantum physics predicts that particles can become entangled. This suggests that two or more particles can be brought together and become fundamentally linked so that even when they’re separated, even by great distances, it’s no longer possible to describe them independently of each other. And observing one apparently affects observations of the other.
Nicolas Gisin: Entanglement has the following implication: If I now measure or do something on the first particle, somehow the second one gets affected, or the second one “shivers.”
Adam Levy: Such an idea challenged the core of Einstein’s idea of the universe, that messages could only travel through the universe at the speed of light or slower, and so no object could instantaneously influence an object separated from it. But here was quantum physics suggesting that measuring one entangled particle could cause immediate effects, or shivers, on the other.
Nicolas Gisin: Yeah. So Einstein, like many people at that time, realized that if now you do measure on one side, it has a kind of effect on the other one. One of these particles could be, let’s say, in Geneva where I’m sitting, and the other particle could be, I don’t know, in the US somewhere at a far distance, and nevertheless, these particles have this property of entanglement so that you cannot describe them just separately. And Einstein just couldn’t believe it, so he concluded entanglement is impossible.
Adam Levy: Einstein actually in 1947 wrote a letter to Max Born in which he nicknamed what we’re talking about, this non-locality, a “spooky action at a distance.” This phrase is still used to this day, but at the time, was Einstein kind of out there on his own in rebelling against these ideas, or was there a real active discussion among physicists at large?
Nicolas Gisin: Yeah. So I think Einstein several times was very accurate and inventive in coming [up] with sentences like, “God does not play dice,” or, “spooky action at a distance.” So this “spooky action at a distance” really reflects this idea that you touch the particle here in Geneva and the one in the US is shivering. So there is a kind of action at a distance. And Einstein said, “This is a spooky, it cannot really be a real one. It has to be a spooky action.”
At that time, I would say, surprisingly, physicists didn’t pay much attention to that … the very, very vast majority of physicists at that time did not at all pay attention to these questions and issues. It was also at that time impossible to turn it into, let’s say, an experiment. And some people were even thinking that this is really pure philosophy and has no physical consequences. We’ll see later that these people were completely wrong, but that was the dominant view.
Adam Levy: It wasn’t until actually after Einstein’s death, [that] in 1964 John Stewart Bell proposed a test that could potentially settle the matter. What’s the essence of this test, which we now call the Bell test?
Nicolas Gisin: So imagine now that you have your two particles, they are maximally entangled, very highly entangled, and for the sake of the explanation, think of them as coins. And so you get two possible results. If you toss your coin, it can be heads or tails. Now if you throw them the same way on both sides, the two coins, they will always both end up either both heads or both tails.
Adam Levy: This is the spookiness that quantum physics predicts, and Einstein found so unbelievable. The idea that if two particles are entangled and you separate them, you’ll get the same result if you measure a property of both of them, like being guaranteed to get the same result when tossing two separate coins. It’s as if both particles instantaneously agree to both show heads, for example.
But there could be a non-spooky explanation. What if, before you separated them, the particles made a secret plan deciding what they’d show for the coin toss. Then there’d be no quantum entanglement, just the particles putting their plans into action.
Proof of quantum entanglement has come in a handful of experiments completed in the half century since John Stewart Bell first devised a way to test just how spooky it is. Bell, a theoretical physicist, is shown here at CERN in a 1982 photo.CREDIT: CERN
Nicolas Gisin: Also, this genius idea of John Bell was to change a little bit the way of tossing the coins. So let’s say now one coin is tossed the usual way, but the other one is tossed a little bit differently.
Adam Levy: In other words, what if we measure the two particles but in subtly different ways? Will they both then still agree with each other, metaphorically both showing heads, for example?
John Stewart Bell, a theoretical particle physicist who found time to work on quantum theory on the side, realized that these slightly different coin tosses could settle the matter, deciding whether the particles really were entangled or if Einstein was right to reject this quantum spookiness. If Einstein was indeed correct that there was no entanglement, and instead the particles had agreed a secret plan in advance, there was a limit, an upper bound, to how often the two particles could have the same result if physicists repeated the coin toss experiment many times.
Nicolas Gisin: While with quantum mechanics, you can violate that bound, so the bound is what we call a Bell inequality.
Adam Levy: So if quantum physics were right, and the particles really were entangled and there really was “spooky action at a distance” going on, when repeating the experiment, you’d end up with both particles showing heads together or both showing tails together more often.
That’s because the particles really would be linked, and so really able to instantaneously influence the result of each other’s coin toss experiment. In other words, this Bell test was a way to test which was right: the quantum prediction of entanglement, or Einstein and his skepticism of such bizarre behavior.
Nicolas Gisin: So this is really what Bell proposed, and turned this entire discussion into a potential experiment.
Adam Levy: Now, Bell didn’t actually carry out his own test, he proposed it. But when did someone actually come along and make an experiment that could apparently show where the particles were indeed entangled in this spooky way?
Nicolas Gisin: Yeah. So John Bell was a theorist and he didn’t know how to do the experiment. We had to wait almost 10 years, into the ’70s, to have the first experimental demonstration of achieving this large probability of identical results when you measure slightly different measurements, and this was done by John Clauser.
Adam Levy: John Clauser’s approach to the Bell test was to manipulate calcium atoms to create two apparently entangled photons, particles of light. These photons could then be tested with those metaphorical, slightly different, coin tosses, which in this case meant measuring the direction of the light’s polarization, which direction the wave was wiggling. Clauser could then see how often the two photons produced the same result. And indeed, the experiment showed a violation of the Bell inequality, indicating that the photons really were entangled. Einstein’s assumption appeared to be wrong.
Nicolas Gisin: And this was an absolutely marvelous result. The problem of John Clauser…. Actually, he had two problems.
First, there was another guy at the other side of the American coast who also did the experiment just a bit after John Clauser, but he found a different result. So obviously one of them was wrong, but how do you know which one was wrong?
Moreover, in the ’70s it was still believed that all that is not serious physics, and John Clauser actually was never promoted in any university to any professorship. So his career was actually damaged, strongly damaged, by having been the first to perform a Bell test.
And then came another experiment, but that was now already in the ’80s. So each time, you see, it’s almost 10 years, one after the other.
And that third experiment was carried out in Paris, in France, by Alain Aspect and his coworkers. And they made an experiment — much higher quality, a much better experiment, also it took longer. And they kind of settled the question in favor of quantum mechanics. Hence, entanglement is certainly a real feature of nature and not only a theory.
Adam Levy: So settled in favor of quantum mechanics and against Einstein’s disbelief. These experiments suggested that, “spooky action at a distance,” was a real phenomenon. But I understand that that wasn’t case closed, that there still were some loose ends that needed to be tidied up, which are often referred to as loopholes.
In particular, the idea that instead of having instantaneous influence on each other’s coin tosses, the particles could somehow have a trick up their sleeve allowing them to still make a plan in advance and somehow cheat the test. Physicists call this possible particle trickery local variables. Can you explain efforts to close such loopholes and determine for sure that entanglement is a real feature of nature?
Nicolas Gisin: The major loophole in Alain Aspect’s experiment was that to carry out this experiment you need to produce these photon pairs.
OK, you don’t send them to Geneva and to the US, but you send them to the two ends of a big laboratory which is about 10 meters long. So the photons were 10 meters apart, and then you have to measure them.
However, in the real experiment, when you perform these measurements, the most frequent outcome is that you don’t get any results, just because the photon got lost on its way, or also the detectors are not a hundred percent efficient, so the detector very often just doesn’t see the photon. A photon is — it’s very easy to lose it or not to detect it. So indeed you could now imagine that these hypothetical local variables would decide when the photon gets detected and when the photon would not get detected. You could explain the results of the experiments, although everything would be guided and driven by local variables.
So this was something that still had to be tested. And this additional test came actually only in 2015, so almost 30 years after Alain Aspect. It took a long time to have good enough single-photon detectors.
Adam Levy: And this test effectively used a combination of photons and electrons to get around this problem of detection, also allowing the measurements to be carried out on an entangled pair separated by over a kilometer. And since then, there’ve been a host of other Bell tests closing other types of loopholes, and pushing the limits of the field, using everything from satellites to computer games.
But isn’t all this checking for loopholes a bit paranoid of physicists to think that somehow the particles are conspiring to trick the test, and make us think they’re behaving in a spooky way?
Nicolas Gisin: It is certainly paranoiac. However, the result of a Bell inequality violation means that this feature of quantum theory is not just a feature of a theory, it’s a feature of nature. So it changes the worldview that physics presents us. And so this is such a major change, it’s such a conceptual revolution, that it makes sense to pay attention, even to this hypothetical local variable that would decide when the photon should get detected or not.
So I think it makes sense really to go down to the bottom, remembering that actually physics is just an experimental science and it’s not enough just to contemplate the theory, you have also to really do the experiment. So I think it made a lot of sense, but I agree that almost no one, I think also none of the experimentalists, none of them believed that they would falsify quantum mechanics. Nevertheless, it made sense to do it.
The Knowable Magazine Podcast from Annual Reviews explores the limits to what’s knowable — and how thinking about big questions in science and technology evolves over time. Listen now!
Adam Levy: Now, has this all been theoretical, or has learning about the quantum world in this way and how to do these experiments led to any applications for the more mundane everyday world?
Nicolas Gisin: Indeed. So when it started with Einstein, that was kind of purely philosophy, then John Bell turned it into a possible experiment, John Clauser made the first experiment, Alain Aspect the first, let’s say, really conclusive experiment. And then suddenly in the ’90s — so [in the] 1990s, people realized that actually this kind of very abstract thinking had practical consequences, because indeed, if you get between the two particles always, or almost always, the same result, and this result is random, so you get randomness at a distance. And nonlocal randomness is very close to being just a cryptographic key.
Cryptographic key, you can think of it as a password. What is a password? It has to be the same on both sides, let’s say on your side and Amazon, or your bank, whatever, whoever you want to talk to in a confidential way. And it has to be random.
So here we have it already. Moreover, something that we also now understand in physics, with this theory of entanglement, is that if two particles are very highly entangled, then they cannot be entangled with anything else. They cannot be entangled with a third particle.
And consequently, that also guarantees the confidentiality. So if you and the bank are entangled, you can obtain the same random password on both sides. Moreover, you can be sure that there is no one else who has a copy of that password, and that’s then just exactly what you want. And so cryptography is actually very close in spirit to the violation of a Bell inequality.
But this was a complete revolution, suddenly realizing that these strange quantum correlations, Bell inequalities, potential or absence of local variables, actually are cryptographic keys. So they are very useful in an information-based society like ours.
Adam Levy: So the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics was actually awarded for work to realize the Bell test. What is the significance of this acknowledgement of this work with this honor?
Nicolas Gisin: Well, this Nobel Prize of 2022, I think is not only a recognition to the three laureates [John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger], it is also a recognition that this entire field, which was so much dismissed during so many decades, is now recognized at the highest level. I have to say that the Nobel Committee made a huge mistake not to give a prize, the Nobel Prize, to John Bell. He should have got it, but he passed away too early, or let’s say that the Nobel Committee was too slow, or whatever.
So I’m personally very happy with this prize, because again, of course it goes to these three individuals, but beyond these three individuals it really recognizes a field that was criticized so heavily. And the best illustration is John Clauser, who was the first, who did a good Bell test and never could even get a position in any university. So much of these activities were dismissed, until 50 years later he got the Nobel Prize. So that’s really remarkable, I don’t know how often it happened that any field in science gets dismissed for such a long time, for really many decades.
When I started myself, I mean, it was impossible to work in this field except, let’s say, after 9 o’clock in the evening — you could not make a living out of that. And now the Nobel Committee recognizes it. That’s nice.
Adam Levy: Is it now case closed? Can we now say with certainty that the universe really is spooky and that there are no loopholes, no conspiring particles to trick us in these Bell tests?
Nicolas Gisin: Yes, except that I wouldn’t use the word “spooky,” I think that there’s nothing spooky here, but on the contrary, this is very, very real. I mean, this is now done routinely in the labs, you have even students doing that, those exercises in the lab. So it is something extremely well-established.
Adam Levy: How do you feel about how far we’ve come in our understanding of quantum behavior in the last, well, I guess in the last hundred years, really?
Nicolas Gisin: I would say in the last 30 years essentially, because for me it really started, the understanding started really with this understanding that these nonlocal quantum correlations produces naturally cryptographic keys, so something useful. And you can see the change.
Initially everything was about wave-particle duality, and nowadays almost no one talks about wave-particle duality. People are talking about entanglement. Entanglement is really what changes, what makes quantum mechanics so particular. While today, I think there’s no paper in the field, there is no book in the field, there is no lecture that doesn’t mention entanglement. So entanglement is at last understood as being the essence of quantum mechanics.
Adam Levy: And indeed, today, entanglement, this, “action at a distance,” that Einstein found so inconceivable is at the heart of many of our quantum technologies, whether that’s new forms of encryption, ensuring secret and safe communication between you and your bank, or the long-running quest to build a quantum computer with real-world applications. And to this day, it’s common to find physicists and journalists alike referring to quantum entanglement as quantum spookiness.
It took a long time for physicists to reflect on Einstein’s complaints about quantum physics, and even longer to prove him wrong, and show that entanglement is a fundamental way of how our universe works, with some kind of synchrony between separated particles. But today’s physicists are wasting no time at all putting “spooky action at a distance” into action.
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This show is produced by Knowable Magazine, a journalistic publication that seeks to make scientific knowledge accessible to all. Knowable is published by Annual Reviews, a nonprofit publisher dedicated to synthesizing and integrating knowledge for the progress of science and the benefit of society.
This episode was written and produced by me, Adam Levy, with editorial contributions from Eva Emerson and Rosie Mestel. Thank you to my cohost, Charlotte Stoddart. And a special thank you to Nicolas Gisin for speaking with us.
Adam Levy is an atmospheric physicist who realized they preferred talking about science to researching it. They spent over three years cohosting the Nature Podcast, and cover the breadth of science with a focus on climate change. Twitter: @ClimateAdam.
Director Christopher Nolan (center) stands behind actor Cillian Murphy (far right) on the set of “Oppenheimer.”Universal Pictures
Although President Harry Truman, the man who made the final decision to drop the world’s first atomic weapon on Hiroshima, appears for only a few minutes in “Oppenheimer,” his scene is a memorable one. (Minor spoilers ahead, if you want to go into “Oppenheimer” completely blind.)
In it, Cillian Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer meets with Truman in the Oval Office after the bomb is dropped. Truman, played by Gary Oldman, is initially excited to meet the man in charge of the Manhattan Project, but his delight soon turns to anger when a nervous Oppenheimer says he feels he has “blood on my hands.” The meeting ends with Truman coldly offering his handkerchief and calling Oppenheimer a “crybaby” as they part ways.
But is that what actually happened when Oppenheimer met the president?
Remarkably, it really did go that poorly. In the weeks after Hiroshima, the reality of how the world had changed weighed heavily on Oppenheimer. On the recommendation of an acquaintance, Oppenheimer asked for a meeting with Truman. On Oct. 25, 1945, Truman was introduced for the very first time to the man who had headed the Manhattan Project.
The meeting was convivial at first, but the tone shifted when Truman asked Oppenheimer when he thought the Soviet Union would have its first nuclear weapon. Oppenheimer replied that he didn’t know. “Never!” Truman boisterously responded.
Reporters gathered in the Oval Office on Aug. 14, 1945, to listen to President Harry Truman’s announcement that World War II was over. Historical/Corbis via Getty Images
This did not go over well with Oppenheimer, who was sure that scientists in other countries could certainly figure out what the Americans had. (Neither Oppenheimer nor Truman yet knew that spies at Los Alamos had already given the Soviets the critical information they needed for their nuclear weapons program.) Flustered, Oppenheimer then made a mistake.
“Mr. President,” he said, “I feel I have blood on my hands.”
Oppenheimer’s biographers in “American Prometheus” recounted how Truman would later retell the incident: “Over the years, Truman embellished the story. By one account, he replied, ‘Never mind, it’ll all come out in the wash.’ In yet another version, he pulled his handkerchief from his breast pocket and offered it to Oppenheimer, saying, ‘Well, here, would you like to wipe your hands?’”
Ultimately, “American Prometheus” posits the most likely response Truman gave to Oppenheimer was a bit less dramatic. “I told him the blood was on my hands — to let me worry about that,” Truman allegedly said to a colleague.
However it went down, the exchange destroyed any collegiality the men might have formed. Truman stood up to signal the meeting was over, and Oppie walked out defeated. “Blood on his hands, dammit, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have,” Truman was overheard saying afterward. “You just don’t go around bellyaching about it.”
“I don’t want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again,” Truman reportedly told Secretary of State Dean Acheson. In a letter to Acheson the next year, Truman referred to Oppenheimer as a “cry-baby scientist.”
FILE: Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer is shown at his study in Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J., Dec. 15, 1957.John Rooney
The failure was not just an interpersonal one. Oppenheimer “had the opportunity to impress the one man who possessed the power to help him return the nuclear genie to the bottle,” wrote Oppenheimer’s biographers, “and he had utterly failed.”
Instead, Truman and the presidents to come would rely on the advice of Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller (played by Josh Hartnett and Benny Safdie in “Oppenheimer,” respectively). Unlike Oppenheimer, who came to believe the government should stay out of scientific study, these two Manhattan Project physicists believed in the union of government and nuclear weapons research. In partnership with the Truman administration, Lawrence and Teller continued nuclear weapons development under the oversight of the U.S. government.
Shown at the White House in 1957 are, from left to right, Dr. Ernest O. Lawrence; Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss; Dr. Edward Teller, “father of the H-bomb”; and Dr. Mark Mills.Bettmann/Bettmann Archive
While Oppenheimer cautioned against the creation of the H-bomb, Teller went on to become the so-called “father of the hydrogen bomb,” a weapon far more destructive than the ones dropped on Japan.
The Lord of Debauch is a deceptive card and can bring in some difficult influences when it’s about. We will always be tempted to do things that we will later regret, and we will find ourselves weak-willed when it comes to choosing what we know is the right course of action.
For instance, we might be faced with some sort of sexual temptation. This kind of situation can arise whether or not we are committed to another person – a one-night stand can have as many complications for the single as it can for the person in a partnership. Such an offer, when marked by the Seven of Cups, is going to have consequences that far outweigh the pleasure that might be fleetingly gained.
And again, the Lord of Debauch might come up to indicate that we are placed in a situation where we can make easy money, or obtain things in an inappropriate and unethical fashion – though it would not cover actual theft. But, for example, buying stolen property, or engaging in trickery to obtain money and possessions would come up here.
We might find ourselves showered with apparently great opportunities and have no idea which of them is valid and which is not – then we become children gazing in wonder at the treasure chest of jewels and wondering which one to take first! Perhaps the answer is that if we don’t know what to choose, we should consider leaving them all alone!!
And finally, the most serious influence that can be indicated by this card is the challenge to our ethical code. We may be faced with something that goes against our principles, and yet still be tempted to take advantage of it, or to do something that we will later think was sneaky, unkind, immoral and nasty.
The Seven of Cups is always indicative of a temptation which will cost much more than it gives, if we fall for it.
(via angelpaths.com and Alan Blackman)
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