to come out and hear the best culture has to offer. It's a high bar. It's my great pleasure to introduce Michelle Glosser. And I don't know if this has happened to you, if you're members of the online Mormon communities, any of them. But sometimes we see people's names online, and we think, all right, that woman's in Feminist Mormon Housewives, or that one's in the hub, which is the Facebook group attached to Sunstone, and we think of us as just inhabiting this little pond, this little place on the internet. And then sometimes you open your computer and you see Michelle Glosser's name on Yahoo! Glousers, Sue, Sarah, Glouser, on Yahoo! News, and you think, oh, she looks just like the woman that I know from Feminist Mormon Housewives. The person that I know online must think it's really neat that this other woman is doing this thing that's in the news. Then you realize that your little puddle, your little pond is in the news, and that the women of FMH, the women of the hub, and the exponent are out there doing these really amazing things. And I'm so glad that she agreed to come and talk to us about them today so we can be brought into her little pond, too. Welcome, help me welcome Michelle Glosser. All right, thank you, everyone, for coming. This is my talk, I look like an engineer, but my Mormon community hasn't always thought so. I'm Michelle Glouser, as Sarah just said, and I look like an engineer, more specifically, a software engineer. However, if you had told me this 10, 15 years ago when I was in a Mormon majority high school in Salt Lake, I wouldn't have believed you. Looking back, I wish I had discovered the tech industry earlier because it seems like a pretty clear fit. When I was in primary, I loved playing with DOS, and I played Thexter and Tetris and all sorts of games on my computer, and I fiddled around with MS Paint and basically hogged the family computer.   I should use that in my book report. So I convinced the school librarian to teach me how to use it and then I borrowed it so I could show one digital photo of an animal.  And I found a Tamagotchi cemetery. Does everyone here know what a Tamagotchi is? It's one of those Neopet things from 1998 or nine and you feed it and it poops and you're supposed to clean up after it and make sure it doesn't die. So I was so excited to find stuff about that on the internet apparently. After that I got pretty addicted to free-sell and solitaire on the computer and then I ended up teaching my grandma how to play these games so that she could learn to use a mouse so she could do family history. And after that she would call me whenever she had a computer question. And at the junior high, I was in the ex-filers, E-X-E filers club and we learned visual basic and I thought that was pretty awesome. I also got the chance to go to this girls in STEM workshop called Expanding Horizons and I made this my first HTML page called Michelle Glauser's Fun Page. I called it FOMG which isn't as bad as it sounds. It's fans of MG. That was before all of these shortcut words on the internet I think. Anyway, then I signed up for my first email account and I was amazed how it was so cool. Then I realized that I really wanted to have internet at our own house but my mom and my dad said no way. They didn't want it and they didn't want to pay for it. So I sneakily got a disc with Juno on it from my uncle and I got the internet working at home and we hit it from our parents for like six months. Even though there was that dial-up sound at the start we'd put a pillow over it and Juno since it was free it had like this ad that would show up and you could never get rid of it. So you just have to push it to the side and then check your email and it was so exciting. We got print shop and I loved playing with that and once we got a color printer I printed everything you could find on there. And then in high school I was the first person I knew to get a digital camera and when my AP art history class visited San Francisco everyone was amazed that I could take pictures and delete them and check them and they were horrible quality but I still have those pictures and it's pretty awesome to look back at those especially now that I live in San Francisco. So in the tech lab class in my high school which was Olympus High I was the only girl and I didn't think there was anything weird about that. I thought it was quite fun. I think I probably wondered why there weren't other girls there. And then at church I was the only young women who opted to do the family history Sunday school class because I wanted to learn to use PATH. So I was the only non-adult in the class and I picked it up really quick and after that they were all dazzled by me. So once I got into Relief Society after high school I started blogging. This was 2003. This was pre-blogger. I was using Joe user a really old blogging platform and I thought that was pretty awesome that we could blog online. I got my first jump drive. It was 64 megabytes and that was great for all of my essays at college and then I started working at the Family History Library in downtown Salt Lake and while there I realized there were a lot of things that could be more efficient if we use technology wisely and I ended up implementing a plan to use blackberries to have better customer service to get books out of high density. I thought that was pretty awesome and it was the first time I'd been able to look up internet on a phone. So that was pretty awesome. So then after that I moved to Germany and while there even though I was pretty far away from Silicon Valley I was in an early adopter of a whole bunch of Google apps. I had Gmail, I spent 30 minutes every morning reading my scriptures and then I spent an hour reading Google Reader all the blogs I had on there mostly mommy blogs, Mormon mommy blogs. And then I used Google Voice so my American friends could call me and I used Google Docs to work with my fellow students and Google Analytics on my blog. And even though I didn't know much about coding I was able to make a new blog template for my blog and I even finagled a dropdown menu which I thought was pretty awesome because I didn't really know what I was doing. I would just Google things and stick them in and see if they worked and play with them. So I ended up writing my master's thesis on autobiographical acts on the internet. And I now point to that as like my link to technology. I was looking at technology just from a humanities standpoint. But the problem was after my master's I was floundering. I had two humanities degrees but I was rejected by the PhD programs I wanted to get into for digital humanities. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do anyway since I had always had this feeling that I could have these career goals to be a professor but I really would just get married and have kids and that would be that. Because that's all I heard, right? And also I was working at a startup in San Francisco and I wasn't making enough money to pay rent. So I was definitely floundering and this drog that looks like it's floundering is actually the mascot of that company I was working for. I think that's kind of funny. Anyway, so there was this big turning point I was coming up to. I was working with engineers and it rekindled my passion for learning new technologies and then as the person in charge of social media for the company I wished I could build things myself so I'd have content when I wanted it. So I went to Google of course and I Googled how to build a website and I found a way for me to learn software engineering without having to go back to college. And it was Hackbright Academy which is a 10 week software engineering program in San Francisco for women and it was so awesome. It was like I had found my groove. I didn't know what Python was and within 10 weeks I was a Python programmer. I was able to make apps that I had always thought would be cool to have that maybe no one else wanted but they were useful for me and I learned about negotiating. I learned all sorts of things that I had never heard before as a girl growing up in Utah and I thought wow if only I had found the tech pathway sooner and I started thinking there were all these missed connections right so there are no church activities about tech or careers even though I think the boys probably had that and it felt a little bit sad to me so when I was a young women's leader I said let's do a career night. And then my pre-calculus teacher was my dad's best friend and we had dinner with him once a month and he taught a CS course and programed for Texas Instruments but we had never once had a conversation about it and I just thought oh I could have learned that from him but I didn't and then there was a strong CS program at the University of Utah which I did not know when I attended there. So I started asking what can we do to help Mormon girls and women find their paths. I'm a little biased and I like to tell every woman I know that they should become a software engineer but I realized that there are a lot of different paths and mine is different from the one that is usually prescribed by young women's lessons I would say. But there are some other ones as well that might be good for people. So these are some ideas I came up with. I think we need to have more intellectual encouraging conversations with girls and women. I feel like conversations with young women for example, center around looks and dating. I think we can move towards more intellectual conversation. I think we should also expand the focus beyond just motherhood and spirituality so we can feel more fulfilled and find our place in the world I think. And I think we should regularly educate girls and women about different life options and support them in those. Provide challenges and leadership roles all of which can be done in young women's I feel like and give visibility and voice to strong women role models. So after I did Hackbrite ever since then I've been really passionate about helping underrepresented people feel more comfortable in tech or to join tech and I've been organizing workshops. Right now I'm focused on coding workshops for low income women and gender queer adults in the tenderloin of San Francisco. Thank you. But last August my husband's coworker who is a woman's software engineer was on an ad for their company and people started taking pictures of it and writing on social media. She must just be a model. She's too hot to be an engineer. She doesn't look like an engineer. And she so she wrote a medium post about this saying I look like an engineer and I reached out to her because I found out she'd been getting a bunch of negative emails as well and people asking her out just because of this ad. So I said we should do something about this. Let's put up a response billboard just showing a whole bunch of different faces that aren't the stereotypical software engineer. So she came up with the hashtag I look like an engineer. It went viral in a couple of days because I shared it with a whole bunch of women in tech groups and it resonated with people worldwide.   And this is these are some of the faces we put on the billboards. And I yeah I feel so happy to see this. I feel like anyone can look like an engineer. Anyone does look like an engineer and anyone can be an engineer. You just have to have the motivation and you have to work hard and learn. So that's all I have to say and I'd love to answer any questions. This is my contact information if you'd like to reach out to me. Thanks. Yes mostly online from people I haven't directly personally been in touch with and mostly I just ignore those because trolls are going to troll and if you respond it just gets worse. I did go to a Python data science meetup and this guy at the table across from me was like oh I heard about that. That was really controversial and I was like what what do you mean by that. And he just hemmed and hawed and I said I don't think it's controversial. I think people should just be treated as people and be seen for their potential and and he got really quiet. How do those of us who have kids how do we encourage our local communities our local wars how do we encourage them to find a way to to make this thing possible. I mean I can go ahead and have a career with the girls but are there resources I can continue so that they can make that easier. Absolutely. I can mostly speak to the coding side of that. I recently went to a ward in Hayward for their young women's night and we just built a website and I'm going next month and we're just going to have a contest see who can build the ugliest website. And there are a whole bunch of free resources online. If you look up my name on my blog there's an open source spreadsheet for learning to code and there's a kids tab and you can find all sorts of games that kids would enjoy as well as some more hands-on project type things for adults. But yeah as far as encouraging career I would just find a wide spectrum of people to come talk to people to talk to young women or kids. Just let them know what's out there. I had no idea I could use this interest I had in tech for a career and enjoy it so much so. I have a colleague and one of the counselors there for very first conversation with the young girls that come in during high school is a man is not a plane and that starts a conversation. You might also want to check out Technovation. They do high school competitions where girls form a group, decide on an app and they have an advisor and then they have a national competition. So they build this app under the guidance of a mentor and learn a little bit about that. And you can set up at any high school you just need to find a mentor. In Utah there's the Women Tech Council they're on Facebook and they have something coming up soon about great companies for women in tech in Utah. Check it out. You can probably find some good panel members. Inside the church specifically for people to think that this is not the role for women. You know I haven't heard people specifically say anything but occasionally I get the feeling that like either they don't talk to me as if I don't have any career things to talk about and they'll just talk to my husband or they don't really understand what underrepresented means. My brother texted me when I was on I can't remember one of the big news outlets and he said what does genderqueer mean? And he never responded to what I answered and there's just like this lack of conversation like we don't really want to talk about it. Occasionally I will meet a male Mormon programmer and usually it's OK but sometimes it's been a little awkward like I feel if I were to join their company I would be treated a little bit differently. So I stay away from them. Did I face stigmatization or bullying from other girls. I think probably during my most awkward phase. Yes I went to Academy for Girls at BYU when I was 12 and I was just ridiculously nerdy and awkward but I learned really quickly how to fit in and how to be the bubbly Mormon girl. I have to say though I found that that's my default for job interviews now and sometimes that pigeon hold me a little bit because people say oh you'd be great for our customer support engineer and I'm like I don't actually want to talk to people all day but I can't I don't know how to like tone down the bubbly thing so I'm working on that. But yeah I don't think there was a lot of bullying. In fact there was one girl she always sent me emails on Juneau and we would like be so excited to check for each other's emails so we had fun together. Last year my husband in the church in one of the segments we did for the Institute here was on women working and it took a little bit of sleuthing to find people in different occupations, women in different occupations. Anyways last night I shared the example of a woman whose name I can't remember right now but she does, I'm sorry about that, she does genesis work and she talks about it in her paper for blessing telling her she would do something that she now interprets as leading her to this career path. When I shared that it was interesting to have young men say to women, one man said do women look at jobs differently because the message I get in church is you need to go out and provide, this is your duty. I would not look at it the way this man has that this was my calling in line and that God would direct it to you. That women might perceive working in a different way and in a more spiritual way than others. Yeah I forgot to mention something about one of the pictures on here but Carl your password is back up on here. So I don't know if you noticed that one of the pictures next to the ideas I had was just a mother with a whole bunch of children. I purposely put that in there because I felt like that was the only option I ever really heard at church and because there weren't role models I just had no idea. So yeah I think it is hard to find women who are pretty aspirational as far as careers go. There is the aspiring Mormon women Facebook group now which has some pretty great advice. Oh yeah great, cool, definitely, absolutely. In fact I talked to a lot of people about job descriptions and how little words can make women not even apply. Women won't apply for jobs unless they reach or meet seven out of 10 requirements I think a study said and men will do three out of 10. So there's like this big lack of confidence I think a lot of women struggle with imposter syndrome. I certainly do every single day and when I got to the point where I realized that I wanted to have a career and it would make me feel much better to have a career there was this small mourning period where I realized I'm not gonna be at home all day like I have to get up every day and get ready and go somewhere for the rest of my life probably and I'm making this choice and I'm happy about this choice but it's a different direction than what I had imagined for myself. So yeah, I think men and women in the church definitely look at jobs differently. In fact my first job after Hackbrite I was making more money than my husband and we joked that I was the breadwinner and we were breaking norms everywhere but yeah it's been such a relief to be in a marriage where that's okay and we are able to work things out I feel like so I was actually engaged when I was 18 and that didn't work out clearly but I often think if that had, if I had gone through with it that I would have a completely different life and that he wouldn't have been encouraging of me doing something that I felt passionate about. So does that kind of answer your question? Yeah. The story that kind of goes to what she's talking about my home teacher many years ago was in his early 80s and he had, he adored geology. He would plan car trips so they could go and study the sedimentation and he had a huge collection of rocks and books. He kind of educated himself as though he were gonna become a geology professor but what he had done his whole life was sell insurance and I think that might be what you're talking about. He was raised to think you have to provide a practical progression and not what you love doing it. And that's what he thought. Yes, that is what was being expressed by his kids. I can't do what I want to do. I have to do something to provide practically. It appears to me that women have more flexibility if they choose to work to do something they love to do or want to do as a passion because they work program from the time they were young. Interesting. Something they have to do. Yeah, I think there's something to that for sure.  I can't remember who that was for you. Okay, because when you don't teach it to any womanism, if you don't teach it to whole sexes, then there's no way to do that sort of egalitarian marriage ideal. So even if you empower women to see themselves in tech and see themselves as engineers, if they get stuck in a marriage where like you said, your husband is fine with it. My husband's been fine with it. I've been able to do my dream career because my husband has no problem with it. But there are a lot of men who grow up in the church and think that women shouldn't work. So you kind of have to be able to appeal to whole sexes in this empowering movement, don't they? Definitely, there's an article this week where this woman wrote that we have to stop victim blaming as far as women in tech goes and that we are helping women instead of confronting the men who are making it problematic for women to be in tech. So you definitely have to work on both sides. I do know there was a little bit of pushback on the I Look Like an Engineer billboards. Some people said, well, how come you didn't include any white guys on there? Shouldn't you include everyone? And I was like, this is about giving face to people who don't usually have one. So yeah, I think I feel a little torn about that because I feel like the boys are gonna get it somehow. There are several guys from my high school who are now computer scientists and I just wonder, how did they get there? How come I didn't know? So, right? Yes. Like teach people as smart as, so instead of just focusing on the women and raising them up, focus on the women raising them up in the context of the larger, like, more women being.  You know, like if you wanna change the larger structures, you have to sort of put everyone in that. Absolutely, I think the idea I had for putting girls in leadership roles would be great, especially for activities that are young men and young women's and they need to learn to work together. I've noticed since living in the Bay Area that it's so much better to work with men now because they treat me like a normal person. When I was working at the Family History Library, there were problems all the time. I had a really great relationship with my boss and one of the employees reported us because she thought something inappropriate was happening. And I was like, we're having meetings, is that inappropriate? So it's, yeah, we need to figure out ways for us all to work together so boys can grow up seeing that girls can do what they can, definitely. Pointless to, besides just in career field within the ward setting as far as anyone who's been in leadership knows that not every calling is extended is based on inspiration, but it's more about a need in the ward. We have, I've found, the time I was in the Bishopric that people are vast on top of resources, mostly women that aren't being used to help fulfill the needs in the ward, often because of this, you know, they don't have a priestess. Well, I don't think the athletic director of the ward has to have a priestess. They just have to be someone engaged in sports and likes to oversee that. And that's a real frustration, I think, where there's just so much potential on tap just to get the basic needs of the ward met. So I know you've talked about doing something for young women is there something that we can do amongst leadership to tell them, hey, how can we allow these people to shine in the ward setting? I actually thought about that last night while I was going over my slides. Because I feel like there's no clear cut way to get women into more leadership roles in the ward until women have the priesthood. Because people just believe that's the only way they can lead. I mean, Sunday school leaders don't really do anything that requires the priesthood, but women can't be in that position. So yeah, that's a tough one. I will see what happens in the future. I do know there have been articles in the last few years of ways to make women feel more included in the ward. And that would be things like make sure the Relief Society president is always called president and make sure the Relief Society president is in ward council and things like that. You can, I'm sure you can Google it and find more of those. We'll see what happens in the next few years. Sarah, how are we doing on time? Okay, wow. Good question, I do not know. Actually, I am one of the leaders. The question was how do you handle children and your career? I do not have children, but I have several friends who have done the Hackbrite program or our software engineers already and they have children. I'm in their hacker moms group just because I'm a moderator and it's tough. They were talking this week about how one of them started looking for daycare when she was four months pregnant and was told there would be a spot by the time her kid was two and it's really expensive. And even though both parents are working, the mom is often expected to do more of the childcare when she is home. So yeah, it's really tough. I think the best way to deal with that is to talk to people who are doing it as well. And that's why I think those strong role models are so important because if you don't know anyone who's doing the same thing you are and you're struggling, who are you gonna turn to? So, and I think those role models can be a really great inspiration too when you get discouraged and worn out because you're running from work to kids all the time. I'm sure it helps to have someone who can relate to that. Yes? There's a code for male software engineers to jump into that role because they're male. How important would it be to have a female that you can do what it matters or would you want to? Make sure you've had the alternates of women, men, women before they're born and have women in these leader roles. I love the idea of having women in the roles. It's kind of what you were saying earlier, right? Because then the boys can see that women can do it too and that they can be leaders and they can teach. But I have to say that when teaching girls I like to keep it separate because I feel like this weird competition and imposter syndrome thing pops up. So maybe I would have women teachers for the girls and then women teachers for the guys too. But there really aren't that many. There are, I think the average now is 18% of software engineers are women. So that means the women who are software engineers are asked to do diversity and inclusion work and their jobs suffer and they get tired of being asked all these questions all the time, right? Yeah. But yeah, that's, it'd be great to have mixed teachers for both groups, I guess. Thanks for bringing that up. I'm not gonna think about that for my next workshop. All right, I think we have time for a few more questions. Yes. Do you get pressure, some of the poor can do job. Do you get pressure from friends and family in Utah? Even though you're successful in engineering and computer work, do you still get, like, oh, that's nice, but you still haven't made it yet because you don't have kids? You know, I have to say that it's been a huge surprise to me that the pressure to have children has been more from the Buddhist Chinese side, my husband's side, than from the Mormon side. So at our wedding, or at our reception or whatever you wanna call it, at our lunch, his dad got up and was like, we can't wait for you to have grandchildren for us. And I was like, what the? I have not heard anything from my parents. I do know one of my nieces has said, when am I gonna have some cousins? And her mom talked to her about how that's probably not an appropriate question to ask. So it's been fine, but occasionally, people will assume that I am almost ready when I may not make that choice at all. And that's something I wouldn't have considered a long time ago, that there's the option of not having children. And I've noticed that even though my husband is much, much better with children, when we go visit family, people will wanna hand their babies to me. And I'll be like, oh, you, over there. So yeah, there's this huge expectation and no one ever asks my husband that question, right? They'll just ask me. Like, it takes two to tango. So, yeah. Anyway, I'm happy to answer more questions via email or in person. So I'll go to the website, early on to the gentleman over here, and I was gonna write it down. Was it the learning to code resources? Yes. If you Google my name, Michelle Glauser, and learning to code resources, it'll be the first thing that pops up. Otherwise, I can give you the link later. Okay.


Welcome to the original gangsters podcast. I'm your host Scott Bernstein quick hitter. We're going to take you back out to New York and The federal court system where we had a verdict Anthony Rominello aka rom Skipper of the Corona Queens crew in the Genovese crime family was convicted this week by a jury after about three days of deliberations an extortion and racketeering charges tied to The collecting of a $90,000 debt. We talked about it in a previous quick hitter some Albanian and Albanian Steakhouse owner in 2017 Bruno Selamage Whose brother was in the movie hidden gems with with Adam Sandler and as a guy that's been around wise guys his whole life The Rominello slash tough Tony Federici crew hung out a lot of these restaurants Tough Tony is dead right now and Rominello took over his his crew or when tough Tony got up to conciliary allegedly in the in the 2010s and Bruno's nephew and Nephews brother-in-law ran up 90 90 K in sports gambling losses to a bookmaking operation out of Queens and over about a three-month period between March of 2017 and May of 2017 Rominello Federici and their crew Went through a whole process to try to collect this debt a number of visits and altercations culminating with this May of 17 punch that Rominello threw and connected I'm you know in front of a lot of people at his Steakhouse in Lincoln Square Couple days later the debts paid Now Rominello's attorney Jerry McMahon, you know, he's ace is one of the best criminal defense attorneys you'll find and you know, he argued that It was you know, it was a personal issue between Bruno and Rom and the punch had to do with an insult and nothing to do with collecting debt that's clearly not the case and I just want to say that I've been pretty vocal with my condemnation or my Critique of you know taking guys in their 80s for you gambling or Taking monies from shakedowns and wasting kind of resources on those guys to put them away and let them die in prison for Kind of nickel and dime stuff But I kind of feel differently with this Rominello, although, you know, he's 87 years old.  He's gonna be sentenced to probably 40 years He was you know, he had about 24 hours of freedom between the verdict and when he got locked up the next day his bodyguard Joe Celso was also convicted and Locked up interestingly enough He was reprimanded by the judge when he was locked up this week Because when he was waiting for the jury to come back with their verdict, there was a I guess the Genovese Christmas party was taking place this past weekend and Celso was seen by FBI agents there I'm told Cavorting was some some pretty big shot callers But now he's being you know Locked up until the sentencing in March But again, I want to just finish up with with with with rom You know, there's one thing you know with the with the colombo bus from a couple years ago with those guys in their 80s Ben you know, Benji the claw castelazo and andy mush Russo uh, you know, they weren't Physically going to collect debts Rominello Didn't just go confront Bruno Selma Selma's About the debt and just his presence alone would be intimidation. But uh he physically assaulted him and It was caught on tape.  Yeah, but for a guy that's Been pretty clean in terms of his record over the years. He had a some type of criminal case racketeering of some sort in the last 10 15 years go away because of witness recanted testimony, but You know, it's the end of the line for rom. We'll see what happens with that corona queen's crew But, uh, you know, rominello is going to be doing about a 40 piece. He was convicted this week Joe selso has probably got about five ten years coming Down the pike for him. It's it's it's also just want to point out again It's interesting that, you know, the prosecutors and the judge mentioned this genovies christmas party that was going on this weekend You know, these these feds they keep tabs on all those parties And some people can't believe that, you know, crime families have christmas parties just like, you know, a mortgage company or A law firm, but but they do so Anthony rom rominello convicted 87 years old. He'll be off the street We'll try to get you some information on who's going to be replacing them as the skipper with with that, uh, genovies crew out of corona queens scott burns, you know g pod out


have some equipment to give up a way up here so feel free to ask a question and if it's really good or really dumb then you can probably get a piece of equipment here. Can you hear me in back all right? Okay. Use the middle mic. All right. All right. Is this better? Okay. Let's start over. This is Quantum Computing 101 how to crack RSA. This is a change from the printed schedule substituting for the talk that didn't show up. My name is Walter Dougherty. I teach computer science in Texas A&M University in College Station Texas which is the home of the Aggies. I heard a few Aggies here so for those of you who don't know the translation for greets and shouts is howdy and giggum. So howdy and giggum to dark tangent for putting on such cool blackhead and DEFCON conferences. I'm not John Erickson or Super Dave if you've been to previous DEFCONs you already know something about quantum computing. You can read about me on the slides. Here's what we're going to talk about. First of all what is quantum computing? Next how does it work? Why is it exponentially faster than classical computing and by classical I mean the kind of computing we're all doing today. I don't mean using vacuum tubes and how can a quantum computer crack RSA? First we need to define what a quantum is. If you look in just a dictionary or the ordinary English usage a quantum is a significant step. So for example if you're going to mail a letter you have to put one stamp on it for the first ounce and then if it's 0.0001 ounces over one ounce you have to put a second stamp on it. So the quantum is a significant step. We have the phrase in English to make a quantum leap means to make a significant step. In science it refers to something which is a unit or a step. So for example I can charge up a capacitor with seven billion electrons on one plate or seven billion and one electrons on that plate. I can't put seven billion point thirty four electrons on it. You can't put point thirty four of an electron on something. So the number of electrons would be the quanta involved there. Quantum mechanics has been around for about 75 years. Everybody from Einstein to Feynman has agreed that this stuff is really weird and so lots of people didn't believe it. Lots of people have spent a lot of time constructing experiments to prove that quantum mechanics is wrong. All the experiments have failed. So for the last 75 years quantum mechanics has stood up to all the tests that people can make against it. Just let me give you one example of how weird quantum mechanics is and you can do this yourself with a laser pointer and three Polaroid sunglasses. I wish I had a lapel mic. I need both hands. Oh well. Take your laser pointer, shine it through one lens of Polaroid sunglasses. You all know what Polaroid sunglasses do. They basically make the light waves go through in one orientation. So you're going if the beam from the laser is aligned with the polarization you'll get 100% of the light through. If you rotate it 90 degrees you'll get 0% of the light through. Now what about a random beam that is not polarized? The beam coming out of your laser pointer. Now the waves are in all different directions. What will happen when it hits the polarizing filter is that half of them will go through vertically polarized matching the filter and half of them will be blocked. You'll be absorbed to be reflected. So the output from putting in all polarizations is one of two choices. Either vertical or horizontal and gets rejected. So half the light goes through this first pair of sunglasses. Now you put a second polarizing filter behind that. If it's lined up then you still get the half light through. Half was blocked by the first half of what was not close enough to being oriented to go through and you get another half diminution there so you get a quarter out. If you rotate the second filter 90 degrees what happens? No light gets through. So all the light that comes through the first filter is vertically polarized. When it hits the second polarizing filter all of the light is rejected or absorbed. Zero light comes through. So we've got a light source, two filters oriented 90 degrees, zero light coming out. Now what do you think would happen if we put a third filter in the middle? We say hey, we've got zero light coming out. The best that a third filter in the middle could do would be reduce the amount of light that we're already down to zero percent. So it's not going to have any effect at all. Wrong. If the middle filter is oriented at 45 degrees you will now get light out the third one. Because what happens is a pretty quick polarized beam out of the first filter gets the second filter that's rotated 45 degrees. Now it passes half the light and rejects half the light but the half that it passes has been rotated. So the half that it passes is now at 45 degrees to your 90 degree filter. And so now half passes and half is reflected and now you get an eighth of a light out. So you have two filters that walk all the light you add a third filter you get light out. That's weird. It gets worse. But we'll come to that. This is it's not the slide I wanted. This is the ultimate interdisciplinary area. So quantum computing involves quantum physics, obviously, which I've talked about. It involves computer science, which is my field. It's mathematics. It's chemistry. It's RF electronics. So if you're interested in interdisciplinary areas, this is the great one to get into. We've already talked about what a quantum is scientifically of being some state for example, in the case of our polarizing filter, it would be a photon that was polarized vertically or polarized horizontally would be a quantum state. Mathematically, this can be described as a vector in a Hilbert space. So for your choice of the prizes on the table, who can tell us what a Hilbert space is? Right there. Okay, a complex linear vector space. Come up after the speech and take your paper. So if you're a mathematician, just think of a complex linear vector space. That means that there are eigenstates which can generate the space. They are conventionally called zero and one with these funny little brackets around it. And the brackets are the vertical stroke and the greater than sign or less than sign, depending on whether it's a row or column vector. So this little symbol here that stroke zero greater than all it means is a column vector in one direction of your axes. So you can think of it as being a unit vector in the x direction and a unit vector in the y direction on your coordinates. That's what these represent. Don't think that means zero, it means nothing. That just means one of the states, just like a bit in your computer can be a zero or one. Well, if it's a CMOS gate, then if you say this is at zero, you don't mean there's no charge on it. You mean there's charge on the zero gate and not on the one gate. So these are two distinguishable states. Now, how could we actually implement that? Well, we could take these spin up and spin down of a spin one half particle. Another question. Who knows what a spin one half particle is? Give me an example of a spin one half particle behind you. Yeah. Okay, he's giving me an example of a binary state. I wanted a particle back over there. You spin it 180 degrees. It's exactly the same. Well, no, because you can still distinguish it. You can see whether the spin up or spin down. Name a particle. Electron. Okay, good. You can pick up a prize afterward. Some good spin one half particles are, let's see, electrons, electron neutrinos, muons, muon neutrinos, talons, talons, neutrinos, protons, neutrons, and there are lots of other things. We don't have to stick to spin one half particles. For example, photon is not a spin one half particle. But it does have two distinguishable states of vertical and horizontal polarization. Second principle computing is called superposition. Now what this means is that we can define a state which is in effect the vector sum of the eigenstates. Now where this really gets tricky is that the coefficients are complex numbers. So if you think about an airplane that's going at a bearing of about 70 degrees, so it's a little north of east. And you can pretend that what this airplane is doing is it's going two miles east and one mile north of two miles east and one mile north of two miles east and one mile north so that if you take the track of the airplane after an hour and project it onto the axis, then you say, okay, when 100 miles north and 200 miles east. In the case of a quantum particle, it behaves when you measure it as though it were actually doing this stair step pattern. Because when you measure it, you can never catch it in the in between state. The measurement will always tell you it was either going this way or it was going this way. Even though technically the particle is really doing this. So the amplitude is called conventionally omega. So omega zero and omega one are simply the coefficients. If you were to project a particular quantum state onto the axes, then you'd have omega zero on one axis and omega one on the other axis say I went 200 miles east and 100 miles north. So those are the two base two vectors which I could sum to get the vector that was the track of the plane. The extra wrinkle because these are complex numbers is there can be a phase angle that still has the same size. So if you have a complex number like one plus I, then one minus I is another complex number that has exactly the same magnitude. But one plus I one minus I 180 degrees out of phase. So you have a phase angle in there as well as it. Also, if you take the product omega star, which is the complex conjugate.  If you multiply those two strings together, then you get a squared plus b squared, which is a real number. And that turns out to be the probability. So if we wanted to know what the probability of locating this airplane was, then what we would do is simply project the values on the axis and say okay, for every 200 miles east, it goes 100 miles north. In the case of the quantum particle, when we project and get those numbers, those are amplitudes and you have to infect square them to get probabilities. Now the probabilities all add up to one, which is like it should be. The probabilities can also be negative. Remember, I told you quantum is weird. Suppose the projection of one of these is I. Then what's the probability? The probability is I squared, the probability is minus one. So this is one of the paradoxes. It's called the Einstein Podolski-Rosem or EPR paradox to say that it is possible to come up with negative probabilities to make the mathematics work out. What else could you use for a quantum particle? Well, somebody said that you could use an electron for a spin one half particle. That is, it's a charged particle which is rotating. So it generates a north pole. And if you put a really strong magnetic field on it, then it will flip over and the north pole will be down. And so we can distinguish these two states. We can also use a proton. But what's a proton? A proton is just a hydrogen nucleus. So you can take a molecule like chloroform, which is, let's see, CHCl3, I guess. Then the H is a hydrogen. And so the nucleus of the hydrogen is simply a proton. And you can use that proton as a quantum bit. But you can also use the carbon as a quantum bit. So here in one molecule, it's very convenient to make a two bit quantum register. Because the carbon and the hydrogen are different sizes. They resonate at different RF frequencies. So using nuclear magnetic resonance techniques or NMR, you can put a short pulse of radio, a short radio pulse. And if it's the right frequency, then it will flip the carbon over or flip the hydrogen over. And you can selectively turn them into 000011011 by the pulse that you put on them. Quantum heaters have also been built using an ammonia molecule, IBM in a paper that I'll come back to, custom built a molecule that had seven atoms in it with different resonant frequencies. So they built one molecule that was a seven bit register. And by putting a pulse of a certain frequency and a certain duration on it, they could flip each one of these atoms in the molecule individually. Now my favorite one is caffeine, because caffeine has about 10 atoms in it that can be individually addressed. So maybe one of these days you'll have your quantum computer in your Pepsi can or your coffee cup, that every molecule is going to be a 10 bit quantum register. Yes. Oh, goodness. It's the J frequency. It's like several hundred megahertz, like 200 megahertz. It's standard NMR stuff. So if talk to your friendly neighborhood, chemistry physicists who does nuclear magnetic resonance, and you can get that stuff. There's also work being done on embedding quantum dots in a silicon substrate, because we know an awful lot about building stuff in silicon. So if you can take a slab of silicon and put some quantum bits in this slab of silicon, and then put some gates on top of it, they would do things like make a shift register out of it, read things and read things out with a group in Australia and one in Maryland who are working on doing that. The problem they're having right now is in keeping the bits from migrating. So when you get down so small and deposit it someplace, then it's basically an impurity in the silicon and it can migrate through the lattice. Okay, now, third principle upon computing is interference. You're all familiar with interference. If you take a bath in a bathtub, and you have a uniform illumination from the light, you'll notice that there's a certain intensity of light on the bottom of the bathtub sitting very still, that is. Now you take a handful of water and start dripping it, it'll make ripples. As it make ripples, the pattern of light on the bottom of the bathtub will change into a ripple pattern. Some of the ripples will be dark. And some of the ripples will be brighter than the light that was eliminating it. What's happening? What's happening is that the surface of the water as a wave is forming lenses. If the light hits two parts of the ripple, and is refracted to land at the same spot on the bottom of the tub, in phase, it reinforces and makes a spot of light which is brighter than the illumination. If they are out of phase, then it makes a dark spot. So there's an example of interference. The classic experiment in physics is called Young's Double Slit Experiment. So if you want to look that up, that is a more technical demonstration of it. If it's constructive, it reinforces, if it's destructive, then it reduces the intensity. Now, here's an example of superposition. This is from IEEE Spectrum article. The bottom bit is pictured as a top at the spinning on the tip of the person's finger. And you'll notice that the top has a purple side and a red side. So the purple side up, let's say is our state zero, spin up. And when the RF pulse hits it, that gets resonant to it will flip over and it will continue spinning, but it's now spinning upside down with the purple down. So we change the zero to a one by applying an RF pulse to it. What happens if we apply a shorter pulse? If we apply a shorter pulse in the bottom picture, what will happen is that this bit doesn't get turned all the way over. And if we time it just right, we can turn it halfway over. So now the bit is still rotating on its axis, but it is precessing and doing this. And so as it's going around and precessing, it's halfway between the zero and the one states. Again, like the airplane going at an angle, it is a convenient fiction to treat this intermediate state as a superposition of those zero and one. And that's what the middle part of the bottom picture shows is that you can pretend that this state is actually simultaneously a zero and a one. Another important principle of quantum computing is called entanglement. Basically, what entanglement is, is two mutually dependent qubits, which have a joint state. That is, you have two qubits and you can tell what the state of it is. They are zero, zero, or they are one, zero, or whatever. You can tell what the joint state is. However, if you observe one of the bits, the other bit is forced to be in a particular state. So think about a teeter-totter out in the playground. You say, if I see this end up, I know this end is down. If I see this end down, I know this end is up. Even if the other end is hidden behind the tree. So if I see this end of the teeter-totter up, I say the other end is down. If I see this end down, then the other end is up. Another famous example that quantum physicists like to give, there was some grad student named Bertelsmann, who was either colorblind or not very fashion conscious or both. And he never wore matched socks.  But you always knew that the socks would not be the same color. So now you're sitting in a class you got there a little before Bertelsmann did. And when he comes into the class and sticks his first foot in the door, you see he's wearing a pink sock on his right foot. You already know that the other sock is not pink. So that's an entangled state. Here's an example, a two qubit system, zero one, which means one bit is a zero and the other bit is a one. Superimposed with the state one zero, dividing by square root of two is to make the probabilities still come out to one. It's just a normalization factor. You can't factor this into two individual qubits. You can't say the first bit is either a zero one and the second bit is either zero one, because that would give you all four combinations. And the description of the joint states has only two combinations exist. So in this case, if we read the first bit was a zero, we know the second bit has to be a one. And if we read the first bit is a one, we know the second bit has to be a zero. You can create these particles by sending a photon through something called a birefringent crystal. And then what will come out is two entangled photons, where their polarizations are dependent on each other. And if you reserve one, you know what the other is, you can send the other one. And this has been done through a fiber optic pipe 30 kilometers long. And then observe what its orientation is at the other end. And you will know what the orientation of the first photon was. This is how quantum teleportation and quantum cryptography work. Quantum teleportation is reproduces a quantum state at another location. That's the good news. I can take an arbitrary quantum state any combination between zero and one any phase angle. And I can reproduce that state at a remote location. So the good news is I can reproduce the state. The bad news is the process of reading it destroys the original state. So this is the great subject of all the 2am Star Trek movies of if we teleport someone and something breaks, then is the person destroyed or not? Is it murder if you kill your car and all of these interesting things? And here's how teleportation works. You can look at the slide on the website. Quantum cryptography relies on Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which says if you had one coordinate system for vertical and horizontal, and another for 45 degrees and 135 degrees, you can't do both measurements simultaneously. The result of that in quantum cryptography is that you can detect eavesdropping to an arbitrarily high accuracy. So by observing one bit of one quantum bit of a chosen message, you can have a three fourths chance of detecting eavesdropping by observing two bits, you can have a 15 16th chance and so on. And so you can make a system which is provably secure. That is, eavesdropping is guaranteed to be detected to arbitrarily high probability. Quantum operators are analogous to logic gates, but they're reversible. If you think about an AND gate or the AND operator in C plus plus or Java, if I say x and y, and I tell you the result is a one, then you know x and y are both one. If I tell you the result is a zero, you don't know what x and y were. It might have been zero, zero, it might have been zero, it might have been one, zero. Quantum gates are always reversible. So you can take the results of the quantum gate, apply the inverse of the operator and tell what arguments applied it. You can build up a quantum computation from a small set of universal operators.  And one of the most common ones is called a controlled NOT. All it is is an exclusive OR. So you'll notice there are two columns here. On the left side of this picture at the top, we have an input one and a control one. What this is doing is an exclusive OR with the result on the left hand bit. So if you go down to the bottom, you'll see the output is a zero and the control is still a one. So one x OR one at the top comes out with a zero at the bottom. The control bit didn't change. However, on the right hand half of this picture, if the control bit is a zero and we have an input of a one, then the output still stays a one. So zero x OR with one, the output is still a one and it didn't change. Where does the exponential speed up come from? The exponential speed up comes from the fact that in quantum bits can hold two to the nth values in superposition that is simultaneously. So for taking about our two bit register, if we put both of them in the intermediate position, then the first bit is both a zero and a one and the second bit is both a zero and one and we can play like this register represents all four values, zero zero zero one one zero one one. And every additional bit that we add doubles the number of values that can be superimposed. The good news is that a single operation, suppose you wanted to take the square root or the sign of the number in this register, now it takes a certain amount of effort to do that computation. A single function evaluation on that register actually evaluates all two to the nth values. So it calculates the sign of zero zero, the sign of zero one, the sign of one zero and the sign of one one. And in the amount of effort it would take to calculate one sign. So that's the good news is that you can calculate two to the nth values and the times it would take you to calculate one. The bad news is you can't get all of those answers out. Because when you do the readout, when you do the quantum measurement, it's going to force it to an eigenstake. So the trick in a quantum algorithm is to adjust the algorithm so that the answer you want out of all of these superimposed answers gets a higher probability. That is by rotating its vector so that it's closer to an eigenstake. So when you read it out, you're more likely to get the result. They said I could run over a little because of the, I spot the fit. So I'm going to try to wrap this up in another five, 10 minutes. What's the application to cryptography? I will not take the time to review this conventional encryption that is symmetric key like DES where you use the same key for both. There's an encryption function e that takes a message what m and your key k and the result of that computation is a ciphertext c. That's what you transmit to the receiver. The receiver has the complementary function d crypt which takes the block of ciphertext c and the same secret key k and returns the message block. The security of conventional encryption depends on several things. One of which is that even with many plain text ciphertext pairs, that is we've intercepted the message that was sent and we've intercepted the message that was transmitted that doesn't help us to decrypt the next ciphertext that we intercept. And the sender and receiver need to obtain copies of the secret key securely and keep it secure. So the key is secret even though the algorithm is not. How hard is it to guess the secret key pretty hard? The best known algorithms, if you're just guessing, then for in values the expected number of guesses would be one half in. And so that's where these numbers come from. So if you could check a million keys a second, a 32 bit key would take you 35 minutes on average. That is it would take you 70 minutes if it was the last key you tried. He would take you one microsecond if it was the first key you tried, but the average would be half of that 56 bit key DES would take 1142 years. You say, okay, that's too long. I'm not going to be around to make use of this result. So I'm going to take a million computers each checking a million keys a second. And that's the right most column. Now you can try. You can expect the cracker 56 bit key in 10 hours. Okay, we'll make the key longer. 8 bit key now it takes 10 to 18 years. So before exhaustive search isn't going to work on guessing the secret key. You all know why we want to use public key geography. One of the key reasons that I referred to is the need to distribute keys securely. And you can also use it for method message authentication. Next few slides just go through the general public key and RSA and I need to skip through these rapidly to get to cracking it with the quantum computer. The sending key and the receiving key are different in public key cryptography. This is the public history of public key encryption. Now that the official secrets act of 20 years has expired, the British have admitted that they did this before 1976. Just they couldn't tell anybody. RSA Corporation, which was founded by Rivers Jamir and Edelman, that's what the RSA stands for, have posted challenges with longer and longer keys. And so they posted a challenge with 129 decimal digit key that was cracked in 1994. A challenge of 140 decimal digits was cracked in 1999. 155 bit key was also cracked in 1999. The current challenge is 174 decimal digits. You can go to RSA.com. If you want to sign up for the current challenge, it has not been cracked. So this is a 576 bit key that RSA people have not been able to crack. Consequently, RSA recommends you use 1024 bit keys or if you're really paranoid 2048 bit keys. I should mention that the way that it's being cracked is also going up exponentially in time. That is adding one more bit more than doubles the amount of time it takes to use the method because even though you can distribute sitting a block of the possible keys, all of the results have to be put together in this huge matrix that grows super linearly to do the final cracking of it. And so it's going to get harder and harder as you can see from this history to crack RSA. Here are the mathematical details of RSA. The key one is that it starts out with two large primes. So if you say, hey, I want a 300 digit key, then you pick two primes that are roughly 150 digits long, multiply them together. That's your end. Go through the rest of this process. The bottom two lines will tell you what public key and private key you should use. You'll notice they both include N. So the public key is a number E that's calculated according to this and the number N. The private key D is calculated according to this and the number N. So the key in cracking RSA is to factor in and get the primes P and Q back. If you do that, then with P, Q and E, then you can determine what it is. Here's an American example. You can go through that. So here's how we crack factor N, which is public, get P and Q, calculate the Euler-Totian function phi of N. We know what E is, so we calculate D, which is the modular inverse mod phi of N, and now we've got the private key. So the key is in factoring in to get P and Q. Here's an example corresponding to the previous numbers that I used in creating an RSA code. So how hard is factoring? The best known factoring algorithms go up something like E to the two-thirds times the number of bits. So it's exponential, as you can see from these times. So factoring 129 decimal digit number takes about 5,000 mip years. A mip is a million instructions per second. So if you've got a computer running a million instructions per second and run it for 5,000 years, then you can expect to be able to factor a 129 decimal digit number. If you went to a 2,000 decimal digit number, it would take you roughly three billion years at a billion a second. Now here's the killer app. Back in the middle 60s, Bennett and Deutsch at IBM came up with the idea of how you might actually do some useful computation with a quantum computer, purely theoretical, nice mathematical curiosity. Nobody was really too much taken with it outside of very small community. And then Peter Schroer at MIT in 1994 came up with an algorithm that you could use a quantum computer to factor large numbers in a much smaller amount of time. Here's basic of the way it works. You pick a Q with small prime factors. It says nothing to do with the Q that you're looking for. That's just the letter that he used. Choose an X at random. Calculate a table of X to the a mod n. Now what this does, the mod n means that the values are going to repeat. So if you know something about random number generators, you know what you want is as many random numbers as possible out of the algorithm before it repeats. It's eventually going to repeat because most random number generators have a mod in them. And so what you want is something that will not repeat. Well, when it does repeat, what that means is this calculation of this table of X to the a has the same values over and over and over and over. So if it's a small number of values, it might be 1, 4, 3, 7. 1, 4, 3, 7. 1, 4, 3, 7. 1, 4, 3, 7. Okay. What we really want to know is how far apart the ones are. The one way of doing that is to do a Fourier transform. So by doing a discrete Fourier transform on that, we can transform this periodic waveform into something that has peaks at multiples of the frequency. And the frequency is going to be 1 over the period. Every time we do this, when we read the quantum bits, we're going to get something that is close to the period because the Fourier transform, if it were perfect, it would just be like this. Period twice the period, three times the period. It's not quite perfect because it's discrete. So what you get is something like this with peaks. And now every time you read it because the probability is roughly speaking the square of this, you're much more likely to read a value that's on one of the peaks. If you get enough of these values, order log q times where q is this first number you started, then you can figure out what the period must have been. So if I tell you I measure the frequency of 200, 400, and 800, you don't know what the fundamental is. You don't know if it's 100 or 200. But if I tell you the multiples are 200, 300, and 500, then you say the fundamental must have been 100 because that's the only result I could have gotten. So by doing this experiment, a small number of time, a small number of repetitions, you can put the results together, come up with R, which is the period. We're almost there. Having taken R in the second line, plug it into this formula and take the greatest common divisor of x to the r over 2 minus 1 and plus 1 within. And we are guaranteed by Schroer's algorithm to get two factors of n. That's the good news. The bad news is that the factors might be one and in. The algorithm might tell you here are your factors and the answer is one times in. And you say, well that's nice but I really would like to do it again. And so you do it again and in a short number of repetitions you'll get the P and Q. Key features are that the discrete free A transform that's equal amplitudes and unequal amplitudes so that measuring the quantum state is more likely to yield a result close to some multiple of one over r and this period can be quantum computer efficiently because we can do all of the steps simultaneously by doing them on a superimposed register. Three or four years ago there was a published prediction that by 2000 it is expected that a quantum computer will factor 15, a 4-bit RSA key into the numbers 3 and 5. They didn't make it in 2000. They almost didn't make it in 2001. But in November of 2001, IBM with their seven Q-bit custom designer molecule register successfully factored 15 using a modification of Schor's algorithm and came up with the factors of 3 and 5. Scaling up for larger numbers is theoretically unlimited so that if you can build a big enough quantum computer and there's a big gap between the theoretical and the if you can build because if you're working with an electron you have to shield it from all magnetic and electric fields that might disturb the bit state or put in some redundancy and error correction. Yes. Can't hear you. Oh, okay. To factor the U7, U7 Q-bits to factor a 4-bit number in IBM's case. All right. Let me get on my crystal ball. I predict that in the next five to ten years we're going to begin to see quantum effect memory. So as each RAM chip gets denser and denser at some point they're going to have one bit stored on every electron in the chip and to store two bits on one electron they're going to have to start using a quantum effect. So it's not going to be a quantum computer. What it's going to be is a quantum effect memory that is far denser than any memory that we have now. I predict that there will be special purpose experimental computers, translation, free letter government agencies will implement Schor's algorithm, commercial availability. Everyone knows that Hitachi has a secret project. Oh, I wasn't supposed to say that. I guess it's not secret anymore. Hitachi has a secret project to build a quantum computer. They have patented a quantum optic, a quantum dot, which uses an optical phenomenon. And so that's a published patent that Hitachi has. NTT, the usual suspects, IBM, Zeeman's, NTT are all working on building quantum computers. And maybe 20 years from now, here's what you'll see on your computer. Anybody know what the cats refer to? Schrodinger's cats. This is a famous quantum mechanic thought experiment for all the animal lovers. He didn't actually kill the cat. So I have a radioactive particle that in some unknown time is going to decay and emit something that I can detect. When it decays and the particle is detected, then a pellet of cyanide will drop into the acid, produce poison gas and kill the cat. You don't know how long this is going to take. So what is the condition of the cat in the box? Is the cat dead or alive? And the quantum mechanical answer is it's both. It's a superposition of the dead state and the live state until you actually perform the observation. And once you actually perform the observation, then all of the other possible states collapse and there's only one state left and the cat is no longer both alive and dead. It's either alive or it's dead because of the particle. So that's what that refers to. For further information, here's some sites I like. Again, you can get these off of my web page. I'll go back to that slide at the end. Lots of work going on at the usual suspects. Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Berkeley, University of Cambridge, Oxford. Let's see Los Alamos National Labs has a very active quantum group. Here's some reference sites. Some of them are kind of professional and some of them are actually student term papers. So some of these I thought were good collections of links. So you can use these as kind of metal links to find out some more stuff. Finally, if you want to know more about this, you can come to Texas A&M and sign up for my course this fall. Thank you.


Welcome back to Kids Fun Science, my name is Ken and today's experiment is the Impossible Balancer. As always, adult supervision is required. What you need for this experiment is the Impossible Balancer. If you look in the description, I'll show you where I've got mine. Possible Balancer comes in a nice little box. I picked it up in London while I was over there visiting last week and I got it for about 8 euro. I'm going to have a link in the description where you can get it. The Impossible Balancer spins just like a normal top before flipping over upside down on its stock. So when it flips over, it begins to rotate the opposite direction, which I show you on the last experiment I do. As you can see here too, it also comes with instructions, you know, spinning the Impossible Balancer takes some practice, it did take me a little while to get it down pat. So how does it work? Well, the Impossible Balancer may seem like a simple, ordinary top, but it's carefully designed. This important feature of the center of the mass does not sit at the geometrical center of the top, right? So as soon as the top begins spinning, therefore it balances not at the center, but the point just off the center. It is at the point of the top that actually contacts the surface on which it spins. As a result, the top does not spin at a single point, but on the sides of the small circle of the surface which it spins. Rotation is now perpendicular to the stem. As the stem contacts the surface, it also experience friction. This applies to more torque. The torque provides the force that lifts the round mass to the top up. Remember the rotation of the stem actually stops while it's horizontal. So in this experiment, I've marked the top with an arrow and I'm going to spin it from the left to right, so I'm going to pull it backwards. And so it's going to go counterclockwise and you can see here in slow motion that the arrow is going counterclockwise while the top is spinning right side up. But as soon as it goes into spinning on the stem, right here, I go back into slow motion and you can see now it's spinning in the opposite direction, which is pretty cool. See the arrow is facing the other way. So because of this design into this top, the Impossible Balancer is able to rotate an opposite direction when it gets up onto its stem. So I hope you enjoyed this video. Remember to click thumbs up and to subscribe and thanks for watching.