Da Vinci and quantum entanglement

Da Vinci is one of the most significant figures in the history of art and science. In fact, from a time when the two were not trying to be separated! Einstein was passionate about music and was interested in politics. Newton dabbled in alchemy and was passionately religious. And the inventor of the Western world, Aristotle, as well as his teacher, Plato and his guru, Socrates, spoke as deeply as possible about all the topics of their time…

Michelangelo lived at the same time as Da Vinci. Or should I write the sentence backwards? Detail, care, perfectionism, but, basically, belief and faith along with immense conviction led him to say, “Speak, Moses,” after completing the statue of Moses. Perhaps that iconic finger of God in the Sistine Chapel is the answer to such boldness: finding divinity in a small touch!

The fact is that this week we had the Nobel Prize ceremony. For many that I know and live with, research and science are our cachaça – and we are fulfilled when we see a great researcher raised to the top, to Olympus, to the so-called heavens – although in fact there have been cases of throwing fellow great Svaant Pääbo into the pool. He won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work on the discovery of the DNA of Homo Neanderthalensis.

But I have been following three of them, especially those who won the Nobel Prize in Physics, for several years. Maybe a decade or more. They are a reference in the field of quantum mechanics and have certainly been rewarded after companies like IBM, Google and the remarkable Chinese have shown the reality of quantum computing.

ALRIGHT. I’m going to risk you leaving this article right here. But the beauty of what Frenchman Alain Aspect, American John Clauser and Austrian Anton Zeilinger did was extraordinary! Honestly, pure magic! For several reasons: the first is obviously scientific, and the second is a human journey fighting doubt and prejudice.

As announced by the Swedish Academy, the prize was awarded for “experiments with entangled photons, establishing violations of Bell’s inequalities, which are pioneers in quantum information science.” Basically what they did was confirm that there is something very similar to soul mates. Two things so closely related that, despite one being on Mars and the other on Pluto, they act the same way, at the same time: if one leg is up, the other is too. If one spins, the other spins too. It’s synchronized swimming physics!

This is called “quantum entanglement”. Here in the Northeast we might call it a stick, someone who mimics another so much that they end up being a shadow or a clone… what the researchers did was use that property to create quantum computers. Of course, it is good to say that they are in the 14BIS plane phase. There is still a lot of road – or sky to fly.

Alain Aspect faced a monumental escalation when he addressed the subject. Clauser, on the other hand, never received a permanent position at a North American university (no public exams). It was a field that was considered bad science at the time. But it was the sixties of the last century.

Let me talk a little more. It is not just about practical applications like computers or quantum communication. Entanglement has deep philosophical implications. For example, we get dizzy when we hear from Einstein that when we fly at the speed of light, time lengthens and objects shrink…

Two objects in quantum entanglement appear to be one! Einstein never accepted this idea, but the Irish physicist John Bell, whom Alain Aspect visited while he was still a postdoctoral fellow, proposed an equation according to which, if the value exceeds a certain amount, it proves that there is entanglement—a phenomenon that Einstein called “spooky action long distance”…

The struggle for affirmation was great for the three Nobel Prize-winning scientists, even though they had to face the overwhelming disbelief of the class. It is worth briefly mentioning that as the director of the ANP, back in Lula’s government, I was invited to speak about our country at the Swedish Academy, together with the Brazilians Ivo Piaget and Christina Oiticica. One of its members accused Brazil of deforestation in the Amazon for cattle ranching. He just didn’t expect me to take the data on Brazil’s extraordinary ethanol program, except to show that it was completely fake news, as they say today. But those were ideas in 2010.

Last Tuesday, at the Secretariat for Economic Development, we had a presentation of SENAI Cimatec, with the participation of FIEMA and the academic sector. Cimatec is a reference in industrial education, research and innovation and one of the most advanced technological centers in the country. Place? Bahia!

Google it and look at wingspan and size. According to what was presented to us by Dean Leone Peter, the fundraising for projects amounted to about R$ 500 million, ranging from a submarine to research Pre-Salt, gene therapy, vaccine production and projects in artificial intelligence (AI) or communication quantum . The idea of ​​Secretary José Reinaldo is to have them as a model that integrates industry and academia in areas such as green technology or Equatorial Edge research.

I’m saying this because I’ve said it here before, but I want to say it again: Brazil was making airplanes when they weren’t even making bicycles. He made ethanol of the second generation – unique in the world today – when the world challenged him on the ecological flag and found presalt when no one imagined that there would be oil in waters 4 or 7 km from the surface of the sea – the so-called deep water.

Da Vinci was devastating, daring. Either in painting or in the daring inventions of machines that we only see working today. I wonder if he had the computer tools or artificial intelligence to make the Mona Lisa speak, that is, to intrigue us with her silence. By the way, I used an AI algorithm to automatically reconstruct Salvatore Mundi, a work that a Saudi prince bought for $450 million for the Abu Dhabi branch of the Louvre. Today it is estimated at R$ 2.6 billion. The result is there at the beginning of the chronicle.

*Allan Kardec Duailibe Barros Filho, PhD from Nagoya University, Japan, professor at UFMA, former director of ANP, member of AMC, president of Gasmar.

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