Magic in Technology

Mike Handwerker
Jul 26, 2017 · 4 min read

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

-Arthur C. Clarke

We’ve been talking a lot about magic lately with our progression into Rails programming, and while there’s no question that it’s a ridiculously helpful tool, it’s still just that: a tool. Let’s take a step back.

Human beings began their evolution from primates a couple million years ago, and probably the most significant difference in our biology is the shape of our skulls that significantly reduced jaw muscles and increased the available space for our brains. That physical difference was facilitated by our ancestors learning to cook their food. Maybe it happened from a lightening strike that cooked a buffalo and they realized they wanted more of that, but however it first happened, it made us who we are today. There’s a reason that cooking food smells so good: we evolved to know it.

Primates spend on average nearly half their time chewing. Literally. Human beings spend about 5% of our time doing the same, despite wanting to do so much more of the time. Think of how much less you’d get done if you HAD to spend half your time cooking. So what probably started as throwing an animal on an open fire, probably evolved to a spit, then a grill, then an oven, then a microwave. Each of those steps is a layer of abstraction, not SO dissimilar to software progression.

I do see magic when using Rails, but, to me, it isn’t going from Ruby/Sinatra to Rails. Rather, it’s going from transistor logic gates to operating system. Transistors store or amplify an electrical signal to bring meaning to energy. Everything we do all day is predicated on billions of transistors being on or off. The science of converting the movement of subatomic particles to an interactive platform that can compute and store data is absolutely magic to me. I’ve read a fair bit on the subject, and I’m not sure I’m more knowledgable.


So since I barely understand conventional, why not try to learn a little something about quantum computing. This is too much information to talk about in one post, so this will be the first of several. Like before, let’s take a step back. This time to the double slit experiment, which is really the beginning of quantum theory. Scientists fired electrons at a screen that registers where energy hits.

While they expected to find something like this bullet pattern, because at that point, they believed electrons to simply be particles, they found the above pattern instead. The above pattern shows wave interference. But how could an electron behave like a particle sometimes, and a wave other times. It’s all about probability.

Schrodinger, of cat fame, came up with an equation that describes electrons behavior as a probability wave. Firing a single electron at a time produces wave interference patterns. This only makes sense if the electron wave was interfering with itself. But how could a single wave interfere with itself? Because that wave pattern is actually the probability of where the electron would land. It essentially calculates the probability of where it would hit the screen and hits the screen with that amount of energy. So if it were 33% likely to hit the middle area, 33% of the probability wave would hit the screen in the middle area.

This behavior is about as basic as quantum physics gets. Next time, I’ll talk about quantum entanglement and how quantum bits or qubits could use it to process information. But one last thing that I’d like to discuss before then is Schodinger’s Cat. This is perhaps the single most misunderstood thought experiment in history. While it is commonly used to describe the quantum phenomenon where the act of observing a particle changes its behavior, it was actually him giving an absurd hypothetical that could never happen, because quantum physics and macroscopic objects behave by different rules of the universe.

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