an awfully early hour to start a DEF CON talk. But I appreciate your being here and let's give it the best we can. Bruce and I just said to me as I was musing about well how much truth can I tell? And he said that's your job, that's why you're back. After 17 years of speaking here your job is to mirror the community and say what you see and tell the truth. Next month I'll be in London for a project and it is called Ironically the Truth and it is about surveillance and the national security state and what we can anticipate in the future. It is run by artists, I'll be speaking in Poland the next month, two curators of art museums because artists are the only ones with the imagination to imagine the kind of future we're going into. Artists and literary people and right brain people who are willing to plunge to the edges of their intuition to grasp that the unpredictable and inelectable life changers and game changers in society are not things we can point to in a linear way. We don't know what's coming and therefore those who synthesize and integrate as I will talk about later might be able to present a picture that has some hope for illuminating what's coming. Now the talk officially is about what I said 17 years ago. Here's the t-shirt, DEF CON 4. When I keynote at DEF CON 4 there were a total of 300 people at the con instead of the 10,000 that are here now and what I said then which I'm going to use as points of reference for what's going on and then what I see coming in the future. I did quote Mudge in my abstract and that's an accurate quote but I said it was called hacking is practice for transplanetary life in the 21st century and Mudge said some of us knew exactly what you're talking about he's at DARPA now and some of us thought you were crazy. Being called crazy is something you have to endure. It's like in the stock market being early and being wrong are very difficult to distinguish. You may see correctly but the timing is important and the information that's delivered has to connect to the cognitive structures people already hold and that's going to be increasingly difficult given the complexity and diversity of the points of view that we will be called upon to hack. My fear is that hacking is not as much an evidence at this quote hacking convention as I would like. This is a conference now about the information security industry. It's about business and there is a lot of theme park modules for hacking which continue to proliferate and be maintained kind of like diverse rings of a circus around that fundamental fact and so I don't know if it's hewing to what Bruce Potter said some years ago in a simple nomad he said I remember a conversation in the hotel bar for the system to work our system it must never grow up and it should always make us smile in other words the heart of a young hacker the duplicity and the larceny in that heart untrained by experience must still be alive on the edges of exploration and passion in order to pursue the art and science of hacking so you have to continue to manifest not merely business related or self-serving related interests but as Wilson said in conciliants all artists all scientists are characterized by passion and obsessiveness and daring and daring means acting differently from those assimilated uncritically into the consensus reality of what I call humplings some of you know this book which came out two years ago it's called mind games there's a story in here called break memory break memory is about the masters of society who see themselves as the 10 percent at the head of the hump curve the bell curve that moves slowly through society in time 80 percent are in the hump there the humplings and then 10 percent of the dregs the masters keep the dregs so the humplings will be glad they're not dregs and be grateful to the masters for keeping them in the hump as they move society forward but the humplings are generally those who are assimilated unselfconsciously and uncritically into the consensus reality which increasingly in the world in which we live is one of spin deception simulation and manufactured consent so how do you do that how do you do all that going forward it's not the same world it was in 1996 hacking simple nomad said and I'm going to quote him because he's not here and he's one of the great wise people in this world and I miss him sorry you're not here nomad he said uh meaning this for the children to whom I'm going to speak on sunday at the defcon kids track uh hacking for those who are older seems to get harder but it's only because we older folks get stuck in our ways and if we don't learn how to hack the new stuff we get lost so learn to see the difference between something really hard and something really hard because all the new things are nothing like what I know and the danger of course is if you're an engineer uh you may become so good at computer science and information security at engineering that you uh have a feedback loop from your own work in life that says this is what I need to get better and better at and you exclude all of those other disciplines and domains that are increasingly being manifest uh in in our in our worlds um I was once asked to speak uh on UFO phenomena which I'll mention briefly later uh to astronomers in Chicago and you always like to know who's going to be in the audience who's how smart are they how educated are they how receptive might they be to interesting but anomalous ideas and uh he said well they work in Motorola and they work here and they work there I said well it's a pretty educated group then and he said well yeah but they're engineers uh now he was an engineer I wouldn't say that about engineers because I love uh and respect engineers but he was one and what he meant was as engineers they were really good at having learned the discipline that they needed to know to be engineers so I go back to what a friend at NSA said are the unanswered and unspoken questions in this domain how do you live vibrantly how do you free the mind how do you live in a world without walls now I'm going to go back to hackers 17 years ago there are a lot of silverbacks walking around who were here 17 to 20 years ago and we need to relearn to see with the beginner's eyes because only the constant reinvention of ourselves is going to be up to the challenges of the times it's not like I said then you need to be able to transform yourself and use personas not only in social engineering ways but in societally beneficial ways you not only need to do that but you need to reinvent yourself again and again and again yes you need to take the red pill but then you need to take the red pill again it's a daily dose like antibiotics that you have to take day after day after day because the red pill discloses what's real at the base of what we believe by consensus and if you don't keep plunging and drilling deeper you won't see it don't forget what Langdon winner said one of my favorite quotes he said to invent a new technology requires a society invent the people who will use it all older practices relationships identities fall by the wayside new practices new relationships and identities take root in case after case computerization and digitalization means pre-existing cultural forms are going liquid they're losing their former shape as they are for computerized expression that was what I picked up on 17 years ago the immense engine of transformation that the it revolution really meant on the cutting edge of which hackers were then what's happened as a result of the it revolution is that the revolution has accelerated the rate of change and that reshaping of social political and economic reality in every domain of human society and that's why it becomes so difficult to get your mind around what is really happening when I'm introduced as a futurist I say that's ridiculous I can't even describe the present but if you live way in the past then the present will sound you like the future now what's happened is a result of the proliferation of the multiplicity of domains of expertise I mean think of it this way the future and this is tricky for 10 in the morning the future doesn't exist when when Alan Kay said the best way to predict the future is to invent it what he was saying in effect was the future is always invented and either you invent part of it yourself or you go into the future that other people have invented for you but you don't see their invention their hand of invention and therefore think it's what we call what happened to happen what merely happened in the course of the events of life itself so if you see the present as a human construction of reality in which using current sense data sensors feedback loops that move information faster and faster into the collective then you can see that the future is a construction of reality to that has to have some cognitive connection to the present we define that way we invent the present out of what we know and create a structure and then the future is that which we hold how we hold ourselves as possibilities for action based on what we see and can possibly for see now what that means when there's so many more domains of expertise is that in your domain of expertise you may be close to the present know almost as much as what there is to know even though no expert today can keep up with everything being published in their own domain of expertise you are behind the line that is a little in the past just a little in your domain of expertise but in all these other domains of expertise which are proliferating and for which we're inventing new names all of the time you are far in the past and therefore we all live in the past in most domains and therefore none of us can have the arrogance of thinking we have a clue unless we surrender ourselves to the collective the collaborative environment which the it revolution created in the first place as a higher level of abstraction for how human beings have to work we've worked in tribes we've worked in teams before but the it revolution transformed the very notion of identity so the things i predicted in the past that have come to true come to be true include generations born successively who are simulated or socialized by the technologies of the time unselfconsciously at the age of five six seven into those things being what is really real and that becomes the background point of reference or benchmark of their lives what's really real when you're seven eight nine ten is what you establish is what's really real everything else you call later uh technology but you take for granted and accept for what it is the things that are present when you are that age that means you have to critically examine the context again and again and again and one of the things i find myself repeating in other places uh as well is that you must turn context into content you must turn what for most people for the humplings is unseen invisible context of life into a cognitive artifact that you can hold in your mind and turn around like a 3d manipulation on a monitor and see and therefore manage and therefore handle and therefore leverage therefore make fundamental use of so when i started writing fiction again where mind games came from was when i was doing some work on ethics and intelligence over a period of a decade with people at the national security agency a few from cia who became traumatized by the executive orders that came into the director's office the during his office from then president bush saying this is what we are now going to do they became concerned because according to the ethical structures of the 20th century which they had believed meant these are things we never do it is unconstitutional and illegal and we don't do it now the executive order said we do these things and to work through and talk about the ethical implications was the point of an ad hoc group that came together for about 10 years that i co-led off site of course i'm always anomalous i'm always out of sight and i'm always on the edges which is how i derive information and it resulted in a little bit of something happening that i can't really address but uh it was a really tough slog uh they were traumatized because according to the reality that had assimilated them in the past something profoundly transformational had changed the very bedrock of their lives and now something else needed to be done that in my talk at def con and other places way back in the early 90s and even in the 80s i said was inevitable because my whole job has been to follow the technology and how is Langdon Winters said it would reshape and restructure our political and economic and social and spiritual and religious lives by creating new structures into which young people would be assimilated without knowing it and without thinking so it's not about president bush's order obama is more bush than bush when you get in the oval office and they hand you the daily briefing and this is what people say you must now do uh you have one response when you're president with the immense weight of responsibility that carries you say what do we need to do and then they tell you what we can do and the only sane response for leadership is to say do it do it all and they have been doing it all this is why the speech i mean i guess it was good public relations for the director of the nsa to be here yesterday and to speak to def con and to get great press someone told me from cnn said it was just a wonderful speech and everybody accepted him warmly but it was complete bullshit it was complete bullshit it's true he did not say one thing that had meaning reality currency or relevance and some things he said were outright lies there's a booth over there recruiting for nsa i love people i've spent a day at nsa recently doing a speech and a panel and and things some of my best friends from nsa i wouldn't want my daughter to marry somebody for nsa but uh i don't want to live next door to someone from nsa but some of my best friends friends are there and on the booth they list the attributes of the agency and one of them was transparency and i said how can you even have the balls to put the word transparency up there is one of the things to which you are committed and he said well ten years ago we didn't know you didn't know who we were well it's not true but he said uh now people know who we are and i said you know this is weasel word straight out of orwell that's not what transparency means and he went into alice in wonderland world where words mean exactly what i mean them to say and say they mean and they don't mean anything else but that at that point you just say uh well people are lining up to be recruited people were warm and respectful about twelve thirteen years ago i i oversaw panel of feds that was facing hackers who hooded at every statement i attended a session where everybody had a pendant that said bullshit on it and whenever a fed said something that was bullshit they waived the pendant like this and those pendants were always waving that's a different kind of dialogue with hackers where has it gone my my the children are assimilated so the task confronts you going forward is to reinvigorate the passion the obsessiveness and above all the daring that made a hacker a hacker but what you're going to be hacking is not just information systems anymore because as i said the proliferation of other domains of expertise especially biological especially biological but also including manufacturing and material science nanotechnology and using like printers to print out manufactured items at point of origin what is that going to do to restructure the trucking industry how is life going to change we don't see how things will change and you take for granted that water just comes out of the tap 19th century not only didn't it come out of the tap the consensus reality was that to bathe was unhealthy and in boston it was considered illegal to bathe without a doctor's prescription until who got a hold of that information where the plumbers and the soap manufacturers and they started their campaign about the day for everybody and then people got into their heads about the day is good actually it's not so good but you take for granted the consensus reality to which you're assimilated and yet things are changing so much faster that it takes that collective work at understanding and a knowledge of counterintelligence to push through the veil itself in order to have a clue as to what is going on and that's going to get worse and worse so they're going to be those few people who do it and the ones who have the capability some will become masters that is go into the agencies or work as contractors with them uh do the do the work and be assimilated and say look you got to compromise the world is gray and and and so on and others will kind of fight to the end like timothy leary or other people who go down fighting for the truth and fighting for their youthful passions and the other people will say you're just never going to grow up growing up means compromise and and just coming to terms with it and and loving it loving big brother not his big brother but there are also so many little brothers that's what dan geer said he was told years ago by an fbi agent actually was a ranking person fbi your choice is between one big brother or many little brothers and now everyone knows we have both so we don't have a choice anymore uh you know that ubiquitous surveillance ubiquitous intrusion uh database is global i had dinner with a dear friend in amsterdam who works with telecom companies to help them adapt policies which will enable them to do what they're going to do in the first place is the way she defined it she works with governments all around the world and i said you know naive will we ever get it back will we ever get back freedom from intrusion and surveillance and she said uh oh richard you know the tone oh richard of course not it's everywhere and it's deeply embedded now we sell everything to do it to the worst people on the planet we being anglo sexes uk northern europe america canada we sell them what they need to do it it's we're never going to get it back in any aspect of life i felt like k and the godfather when she said well michael but but senators don't murder people and he said okay who's being naive now so part of what i'm encouraging you to do is have the willingness and courage to see clearly and say clearly what you see if only to the trusted few on whom you can rely because when you do counterintelligence or try to do a non-type stuff um you don't know how much you're being permitted to do or allowed to do because it's so much easier to let the antelopes go to the waterholes and drink and then follow the antelopes to see who the antelopes hang out with then to try to shut down the waterhole i remember there was a little wave of jihadist websites being taken down by well-intentioned hackers some years ago and i said to a friend of mine isn't it funny how quickly they spring back up they're so resilient and he said okay look we often have to go behind the scenes put in firewalls rewrite the code and put them back up we uh so that they will stay up so we can watch the antelopes go to the waterhole and drink and then see where the antelopes go next the whole point of counterterror is who talks to who relationships communication out to nth degrees of relationship and who knows who so in order to do that level of investigation to provide this the net or oversight of safety uh that means surveillance and intrusion is ubiquitous who side are you are you on and are there even sides anymore so i was disappointed in the director's speech i i redefined hackers to my own taste and satisfaction a few years ago when i said that a black hat hacker is a hacker a gray hat hacker is a hacker who knows when to fudge the truth and a white hat hacker is a hacker who put the truth down somewhere and forgot where they left it well the director of the agency is a white hat hacker in the best tradition so a long time ago things changed a little more slowly lidar da Vinci predicted all kinds of things that came to be in 450 years and then jules verne wrote from the earth to the moon in the 1860s and the 1960s only a hundred years later we were on the moon and huxley talked about social conditioning and genetic engineering in the 20s and 30s in brave new world using a lot of the work of a brilliant guy named hall dame uh whose book from 1924 you can still find in the bowels of the library somewhere uh and then only uh a generation or two later 50 years later huxley's social engineering and genetic engineering is a reality of our lives and it's going to become more and more so and then cyberspace the word was coined by william gibson uh and 10 years later everybody was living in and using the word cyberspace and a couple years ago i did a talk on biohacking and the future of hacking in biology using markers like the president of mit having a background in biology people like bill gates saying if i was starting again today i would be in biology and not in computing because that's where the cutting edge of informatics is in how you we are going to recreate humanity and the identity of humanity and its attributes using enhancements augmentations and biological engineering of all kinds and so i gave a talk as current as i could thinking i was really on the edge and that week my economist magazine came using all the same damn sources and saying in effect all the things i had said a week i had a week lag time not as i had 16 years ago a few years for people to catch up this is why you know for anyone uh not to be confused really means is the physicist said that we don't understand what is going on identity as i mentioned has become corporate it can't help but become corporate here's a quote from a physicist named henry staff an elementary particle he said is not an element independently existing unanalyzable entity it is in essence a set of relationships that reach out and two other things if you get what that's about he's saying that what's primary in the universe is relationship not the things that are related it is the angles of relationship that determine who we are in terms of the multiplicity of communication and energy linear pathways we create in our lives to enhance our understanding of what's happening so if you reduce yourself to someone in solitude uh like those wonderful fictional lone uh hackers who are so aggrandized uh as as the uh the image of hacking itself then you've you've been deceived you have become self deceived that image of the lone passionate rebel hacker is a literary fiction it is a fiction that people like to assimilate because you have all been assimilated into many borgs by now and the question is to which borgs will we relate in order to be assimilated into the structures of possibility and ethos that we value and care about so when they talk about corporate identity what we're really saying is that the individual as it was constructed post renaissance as an identity of self as who we thought we were individuals with boundaries around them that's over that's over uh nation states which grew in the 18th and 19th uh 17th and 20th centuries as appropriate boundaries for the speed of the flow of information into and out of complex systems as an appropriate level of abstraction to organize our social and economic and political and spiritual lives those boundaries as you know have gone down the function of the intelligence community today is de facto to make sure that people know that when they wake up in the morning the world in which they went to sleep will pretty much be recognizably persistent so they can get on with their lives it's like uh you know uh men in black right there's always an achillian battle cruiser hanging off the earth and the reason people go about their daily lives and line up at Starbucks and do all the things we do is because we don't know it this is why when you go down the rabbit hole and you go into dark stuff you become traumatized by what you find a therapist never years ago this is a warning serious message and warning told me that I was showing the symptoms of uh of uh secondary trauma she asked me to read about trauma and I said okay and I went and read all the books I uh she had recommended and I came back and she said do you know why I read that and I why I wanted you to read those and I said sure because the people I'm talking to uh have been traumatized and who was they talking to this is before the Washington Post and others outed for the rendition was public I was talking to people who tortured and I was talking to people who were tortured you know this is not trivial I start writing in the nineties as soon as people start writing op-eds about when can we torture you know the jig was up because you will always find justifications for torture and that will mean just like all these people coming out of the innocence project now who are jailed unfortunately that we will sometimes torture the wrong human beings and talking to people who were tortured even if you can justify it you know this is not a TV series like 24 where if you don't shoot them in the kneecap you know you're not going to find the nukes it doesn't work that way that's propaganda and spin she said no I don't want you to read these things so you know about the people you're talking to who were traumatized I want you to read them because you are showing signs of secondary trauma talking to people who more and more and more are filtering into your life anomalous reality was the consensus reality people the humplings don't want to know about more and more and normal talks to normal people I have people say I don't want to know about that or as a guy said a few years ago you stop it you're making me feel helpless and I said great when you came in here you were at minus two you were helpless and you didn't know it I've moved you up to one which is helpless and aware of it you want to go up another notch to ground zero he's what's that and I said taking personal responsibility for doing the relearning and retooling that will let you be responsible for your life in the face of the radical change that we can't make go away now cross someone's face when you say that there's a glimmer of I can do that for just a nanosecond and then it goes back into a life posture of screw you I know no and that's the danger going forward there's a lot of people being manipulated into thinking something so that's not so who feel victimized angry and resentful and when the catastrophic event that is going to come comes whatever its source they will be ripe for exploitation as flocks of digital flocks of real birds in a digital cage because they will have already been assimilated into the mind structure that is intended to make them more malleable so the image of the lone hacker is self deception I wrote a piece about that for the the DVD and it's not about Bush or Obama it's about what's so in the world as a result of the technological transformation of the time and so it's also about what's coming hackers see deeply they see what's happening I mentioned talking to artists study visual art why because most of us just see the picture and don't notice that the picture is defined by a frame and don't see that the frame is defined by a ground of being a wall a structure an architectural space an architectonic level of fractal like abstractions that define the physical space which we think is quote real but which has been created for us into which to walk both visually and actually as if it is real and then we live in it as if it's real and then we create it together as a consensus reality and we call it life we call it what's so hackers see the context they see more deeply they see that the thing can be made to do all kinds of things it wasn't intended to do and so what's coming out of bio the people I talk to artists they talk about cyber war they're not afraid of cyber like they're afraid of bio somebody asked me I think last year what keeps you up at night and I said what keeps me up at night is the head technologist that I know at CIA telling me he can't sleep because he's reading the Pfizer intercepts about what people all over the world are trying to do you know humans being kind of land mammal that we are we will do almost anything for narrow self-interest and short term gain even if it means suiciding ourselves not with a bomb but with a disease look for the unknown unknowns look at how many people crossing borders into this country have exotic or unexpectedly high numbers of diseases see if you can get that data like we discussed years ago did you hear about the train that crashed with a load of chemicals no well if you don't know about it it's not a terrorist act because terrorists attack the mind of society and that means proliferation and exaggeration and amplification by the media which is complicitous with their work because their self-interest converges with that of the terrorists which is to terrify people so that you can keep things going you know we knew what happened in Aurora within 10 minutes right we didn't need five or six days of detailed interviews with every every victim or family of victim or someone who is traumatized by it that traumatizes us in turn like 9 11 did the media amplifying the images of the planes hitting the the buildings over and over again that amplified and created the terroristic event that would have been not nearly so potent in the soul and psyche of Americans as as it became so part of what hackers are supposed to do is see this stuff I mean I I believe futuring is what Dyson said I'm going to quote Freeman Dyson I'm interested in the long run the remote future where qualitative predictions are meaningless the only certainty in that remote future is that radically new things will be happening I have always said go look at the toys people are playing with for one of the domains look at R&D from the intelligence and dark communities I look at the vice industries to see where the money is falling because everybody loves that stuff that's why it's called vice it means it's stuff we like you know secondary sexual triggers what happens to a human a man when he sees a sexual trigger secondary trigger he gets excited and he feels pleasure so what is he going to do he's going to look at that which excites him and gives him pleasure that's a no brainer and so we're going to make it a felony or whatever to do that so that the industry can thrive in the black market of collusion and exchange last year I talked about the banking industry and how complicit it was in the money laundering and drug cartels and all those other things so that I'm not making stuff up this is from subcommittee hearings in the congress that if the money that flows into the US economy from cartels and arms trade and dictators stashing their money abroad if it all vanished our economy would collapse overnight so it's just seeing clearly what's so and trying to find your moral compass in that what those intelligence people were trying to do was wrestle with applying the ethics or ethos based on a prior conception of human identity formed by other technologies in the 20th century and past and trying to apply it to the kind of humanity you are already becoming and your children and your children's children will become because they won't be merely born they will be engineered and hand-stogmented and changed and they will have the reins of their own capabilities and capacities in their own hands now that's what distinguishes people the ones who are going to make it and the ones who don't wonderful book called what successful college students do what do they do when they fail at something and can't learn something then they say how can I learn this how can I approach it they don't allow themselves to know that they can't know something and they find a way to learn it they find a way to advance themselves that's one bunch the others are in that helpless basket that I mentioned they say I can't do it and there's a whole world of people in their 40s and 50s and 60s out there who are flummoxed and blindsided by what is happening and do not understand its sources that in my hometown Milwaukee the leadership refuses to name that the jobs they want will never come back because the world which created them is never going to exist again so kids are one of the things I like to look at kids 15 years ago Defconn four were playing with robotics Seymour Papert's Mindstorms had just come out and you say robotics is the future well now there are robots everywhere and the questions are how can we make them friendly you believe Siri right you believe she's your personal geisha right you love her admit it you love her who love come on raise your hand who who has thank you all right you love talking Siri my car my Prius has a French accent that I prefer to the English accent because that makes her my special friend secondary triggers we are evolved to respond to them as if that's what's so what are kids playing with today kids you're playing video games that are controlled by their minds they have bands around their heads they make balls levitate and move through hoops they levitate objects they are moving toward wearing the beanies which increasingly are replacing the implants which enable the electromagnetic intentionality the human organism organism that you are to do in effect what is telekinesis next of course is ubiquitous always on telepathic and clairvoyant communication among the nodes of the network which is going to be global humanity and the idea of carrying what we used to call a telephone do you remember we call it a phone that will become as obsolete as when my mother would say to me early on I'm on long distance right long distance has disappeared as a contextual category not being always on and connected with one another which older people say oh isn't it terrible they can't live alone no they can't because they've been born into a collective that connects them always and that is going to increasingly be enhanced biologically and with appliances so that you are always on without having to carry stuff type stuff touch stuff and sometimes even say voice is the next big thing for the ubiquitous internet which is in all things and in us in our cars in our clothing in our minds in our brains that's what's right around the corner be careful there's a talk coming up on augmentation pay attention to it because if you screwed up with your computer hacking 15 years ago yeah the FBI might knock down your door but if you weren't 18 you were cool if you screw up putting an appliance into your body or mind because you don't understand the medical consequences go to that talk I mean it's a guy in third year medical school who really knows what he's talking about it's worth it it's worth it how do you handle the anxiety that I'm talking about emerging necessarily from these pursuits on the edges you do it through mutuality feedback and accountability those are always the antidotes to the rigidity and the fear and the isolation that people feel in the face of radical change Feynman the great physicist said with more knowledge comes deeper and deeper and more wonderful mystery running one on to penetrate deeper still that's let me see how we are that's a great watchword to keep in mind but look at what kids are playing with now and see that this is what's going to be present in the future I've mentioned this before and I'm if I can find it toward the end because I'm always way ahead of myself I was standing by the museum in Milwaukee not that long ago and I looked at a list of things that they were selling for kids to play with and include thought reactors telekinetic and telepathic objects and extra to rest your life now I think it's time for me to say something about that right since I talked about hacking ufology a few years ago one of the things one of the things that I know will happen in this century is that we will not just know that there's life everywhere but we will know it we will know it and we will know that we know it now most of you already know it but you might not know that you know it nothing has been more effective in managing the herd than the whole subject of UFOs the whole subject why because in 1952 the intelligence community and the military community decided for good reason that it was a threat to the wellbeing of society because the Russians could use it to manipulate us to shut down our communications and people would panic if they knew what was happening and the robertson panel in 1952 created debunking and ridiculing as the appropriate response even with the most ridiculous assignation of causes to things that have been observed by multiple witnesses and that were self consistent in what was reported about the vehicles flying around now granted that that was a passion of mine ever since I was a priest and a colonel told me sitting alone in the basement in 1978 that UFOs were real told me why they chased them told me why they couldn't catch them and told me why it couldn't be our technology or the Russians or anything else that was terrestrial if nothing else we couldn't take the G's when you do a right angle turn and going from zero to ten thousand if you have a body that evolved from an insect life instead of a mammal you can take those G's but I don't want to go to the speculative stuff that's just kind of fun to play with you know what the alien heads look like looks like a fly right big black eyes but that's not what we're talking about what a group of others and myself start doing five years ago was research project a research historical project into how did the military intelligence communities respond to the phenomena we don't make any conclusions that are crazy no speculation we don't decide what the phenomenon is we leave that entirely up to the reader but we use only documents from within the military intelligence community from world war two up to the present found by combing through the archives for years years and decades to find these nuggets of gold that connect to show us what they did and why they did it it was complex it was multifaceted and it was deeply deeply real the result came out last week it's called UFOs in government as historical inquiry and I'm very proud to be listed among the authors of it there are almost a thousand citations I have one book I can sell for the usual price that is it's 30 bucks he's not going to put an electronic form for a long time and I have a few copies of mind games I always carry mind games that's only 20 bucks so it sounds cheap the point though of bringing that up is that we spent years researching and combing out and eliminating anything speculative from what we present as historical scholarly academic research into the phenomena and how it was treated from the 40s forward and why and when you understand how the national security apparatus works it makes perfect sense for the decisions to have been made but they did it wrong and it resulted in a lot of blowback and besides they can't control the phenomena which is not us or ours and continues to show up and therefore has probably been researched why because things that were seen and documented in the 40s and 50s were thought to be impossible then stealth technology not on radar invisibility cloaking electromagnetic pulse weapons particle weapons beams lasers and a list of other technological advancements which we now take for granted exist because we made them but which were thought impossible when they were trying to speculate on where could the things come from and they thought mars because we hadn't been anywhere in the solar system much less the galaxy on the edges right on the edges being called crazy being ridiculed it is the fate of anyone who hacks the truth and reality seriously but refuses to be taken in by all the subterfuge and craziness of those who would spin you into other assembled and constructed worlds in order to make you less potent it takes discernment it takes mindfulness it takes vigilance and it takes a lifelong passion and commitment to simply finding out what's real and what we can do to make reality do the things that we want it to do when we got one minute one minute q and a and we'll do more q and a in the q and a room for anyone who wants to know i mean you i joke about it but it's true i had about 20 pages and i made it to page four because i got exercised about how the dirns spoke i thought it was an insult an embarrassing insult to us and our intelligence to treat us like feeble sheep anybody bang um any questions microphone for questions you were talking about uh like alien technologies and giving a list of uh things that were science fiction in the past but are now realities today uh are you insinuating that we have like reversed engineered some of these technologies from um see that's the trouble that's the trouble everything i stayed with was really just solid and grounded and i said now this is speculative let's think about how we got there that's all i'm saying it's all i'm saying no i'm insinuating nothing i'm not even saying they're extraterrestrial or that we know what they're about i don't know our conclusion in 500 pages with a thousand citations is that part of the problem was that the intelligence military community certainly in the 40s and 50s didn't know they knew they had something real they knew it was doing things that were astonishing and that's where we start our story in world war two with food fighters and then the waves that began 47 uh with arnold and then progressively well into the 70s 80s and we have experts from other countries uh who wrote chapters in those countries um sweden uh chapter on france chapter in spain uh we talk about belgium we talk about brazil uh it's global phenomena and other governments have done other things france made it a major priority and they have again because they say out loud at the top levels of government this is a real phenomena and it's doing things we need to learn from so all i'm saying is it makes sense that there was at least some people certainly who are paying attention to the capabilities i could suggest hearsay about that but that's not that book is not about hearsay that suggests at least we knew things were possible toward which we moved but am i saying there was uh serious research and development based on the saucer they got at raswell or whatever no yeah i know that um our understanding of space travel is is currently running up against the wall uh like uh the theory of relativity and um how years passed in space over distance and um i can't i can't really address those from here that's a big question about a sidebar and i'd like to stand the main themes if anybody else has a question i'll talk to you in the q and a room about that stuff okay one one more question by the nature of parallel contexts aren't we all humplings in a certain way absolutely absolutely but some are more humbling than others but i mean some people are utterly unselfconscious and uncritical about how their ideas came into their heads whether it was talk radio or whatever it was they don't know how they got where they were they don't see the structures of insinuation complexity and and device that create ideas and move people in the direction they're intended to go in all kinds of domains uh when they changed the name of medil school of journalism to journalism and public relations you knew the jig was up it meant that manipulation and spin and all the things we know about which started with eddie bernet's and others in the early 20th century it's great history of how propaganda and spin came to be the dominant means of communication yeah i used to work in advertising and actually i used your eddie bernet's uh analogy to talk about uh context and you know the i'm glad i didn't use it again then okay uh he saw me we got a quit i do have a few books that somebody wants one i'm really just a few um and this ufo book check it out online go to my website and just click the link and read the discussion of it just see with an open mind that the history of the subject is worth investigating at the depth and in the detail that we did it because the compelling conclusions are important for the 21st century thank you very much


I ended up spending about $7,500 with this agency and getting absolutely nothing in return. Now I can tell you this agency was very good at reporting. They were very good at client communication. They made me have twice a week meetings with them to make sure that I was up to date and they even sent me a gift in the mail when I signed up with them which actually really pissed me off and I'm going to tell you why because this company was great at all the things they needed to be good at except for the one thing that actually mattered and what was that getting results and it's because they were so mired in their systems and their process that you couldn't just talk to a human being and say listen these ads sucked and they're not beating our control ads so what am I even paying you for? We're paying for all this support stuff for all these useless meetings and for this ad copy that won't even outperform my own.


the International Olympiad Medalist, a function which is held by the Homi Baba Centre in collaboration with the Infosys Foundation Bangalore and the TIFR Endowment Fund. So as is the norm in this function, which we hold every year on this day, 22nd December, this is actually the birthday of Srinivas Ramanujan. I'm sure all of you know his name, the famous Indian mathematician. So this function is always held on this day, on 22nd December. So according to the tradition that we have been following, there are two lectures before the formal function, which will start at 12 noon. Before that we have two lectures today by two eminent speakers and it's my pleasure to welcome now the first speaker of today, Professor Rupa Manjari Ghosh, the Vice Chancellor of Shivnodar University, Uttar Pradesh. Professor Ghosh is a professor of physics with special interest in quantum optics and laser physics. Professor Ghosh obtained her MSc degree in physics from the University of Calcutta in 1980 and PhD in physics from the University of Rochester in 1987. She was at the Jauhar Lal Nehru University from 1988 till 2012, where she held many important academic and administrative positions, including Dean of School of Physical Sciences. She joined the Shivnodar University in 2012 as the founding director of the School of Natural Sciences. Later she held several other leading positions at Shivnodar and became its Vice Chancellor in 2016. She has also served as the chief advisor for the National Council of Educational Research and Training, NCRT, science textbooks for Class 9 and 10. Besides her contribution to science research and training from university to school level, she is also well known for her stand in efforts to bring in gender justice and environmental consciousness in the higher education system. Her research interests are in experimental and theoretical quantum optics, laser physics, non-linear optics, magneto-optics, and quantum information. She has made pioneering contributions in quantum optics and quantum information, particularly in the creation and use of sources of single photons and entangled photon pairs. Professor Ghosh was awarded the Sri Shakti Science Samman in 2008. And today she will speak on light and atoms. So welcome, Professor Ghosh. Thank you very much. It's a real pleasure and honor for me to be with you this morning. This is my first visit, believe it or not, to this center, though, you know, to TIFR and other places I visited many times. And I thought when Anvish commanded that I come and talk about experimental physics a bit, I thought I would get recharged by all the energy that I see in this morning in this room. So let me get started. This is not a very, very formally structured one, but I will talk about a bit of our research, but hopefully some points would get through. So feel free to interrupt me if you do not understand something or you want some clarification. So I started the very basic kind of a definition that NCRT textbook writers are often tempted to give. So often people ask me what is really physics and in NCRT textbooks you would find. This is what we wrote in one of the introductions that physics is a systematic attempt to understand natural phenomena in as much depth and detail as possible.  You do this so that you can use this knowledge to predict, modify and control phenomena. Now that is an important part. When you understand, then only you can try to control. And that itchy feeling is with all physicists. There are two qualifying remarks I have put in here that in physics often you find people as segregating themselves as theoretical physicists and experimental physicists. The area I work in is possible to do both. And it is important to remember that physics is actually an experimental science and theories are constructed to explain experimental facts. The way if you look at the title that I have put in is actually the evolution of physics happens when theory and experiment go hand in hand. And beautiful offshoots in terms of applications often come out. It is also important because of the kind of implications that I will talk about today that physics tries to answer the question how things happen in nature. And it does not bother going into the details of why it happens that way. For example, you heard that I work in quantum optics or quantum mechanics. If you ask me why that works and nothing else works, I do not have an answer. Believe in God if you wish to. But the idea is that we separate it out through methodologies that we call scientific methodologies into the domain of what science is or physics theory is all about and what the domain of belief or philosophy etcetera are. So I think it is very important for us to keep that distinction in mind when we approach the scientific domain through methodologies devised by ourselves sort of to protect. And remember that we try to answer the question how things happen in nature and not get into why it happens that way and no other way. So I can go on and on but let me just get started with one example of what I just said that once you start understanding phenomena you would be able to control it. The domain that everybody in physics talks about is non-linearity, non-linearity, non-linearity you must have heard some bit of it. But essentially let me confine myself to optics. Now what is meant by a non-linear optical phenomena in a very general way first let us understand what we mean by a linear system. So think of a pendulum and I kick it depending on the strength of the kick. If I kick it harder it displaces more. So the response of the system is proportional to the strength of the kick. Now in optics you talk in terms of the response which is given as the polarization which is the induced dipole moment per unit volume. So I shine in light or shine in electric field E and the system response that is my stimulus system response by getting polarized. In a linear system the relationship between P and E is linear. So if I draw a curve I will get a straight line. So the constant that is sitting in in front is known as susceptibility and if I depending on the kind of unit I use I put in this epsilon naught or not that is not really important. Point is for the linear system the relationship between polarization and electric field is linear. So what is non-linearity? Non-linearity very easily you can imagine that when I am talking about this pendulum if I kick it really hard it is not going to just get linearly displaced it is going to do funny stuff and one way of representing all the funny stuff it does which is the reality really is to put in higher order terms. Keep on putting square E cube before so and so forth and the if I put in anisotropy that is not everything is directionally symmetric then I can write one component of the polarization as linear term, square term, cube term and so and so forth. So what you understand is that this could be a convergent series so I can say that I approximate the system by its linearity when these terms are really really small very tentatively speaking but that happens because these constants that are sitting in here are actually really small in a magnitude. A small number multiplied by fact electric field somehow can make it still substantial. When for example I use a laser the electric field residing in the laser could be quite large as a result a small number multiplied by the square of a large number roughly can give you a response which is almost as good as the linear term.  So one more thing you can actually see that the second order term which is should have been the first common non-linear term is 0 in the bulk of a medium which has center of inversion symmetry. If I reflect one electric field and make it e to minus e then you can see that the term if you have center of inversion symmetry would remain the same making the second order susceptibility the same as minus of itself. So essentially that says that that constant is actually 0 provided you have center of inversion symmetry. The most common non-linearity you see is actually this chi 3 the third order susceptibility. So this is really one way of looking at non-linearity this is not the only way remember I said that this series has to converge and in phenomena that are extremely exciting that we call resonance sometimes these extra terms can be not so extra be the dominating one I will not get into that. So with this general thing what I want to talk about is how in this domain actually seemingly with the use of a medium light can talk to light. So normally in Maxwell's equation if you have seen those they are linear I mean you know light crosses light without interacting but if I put a material in there I can make light interact with light and one common example of this would be like a spontaneous photon fission when one photon goes into the material splits into two or I put in two photons I combine them and so and so forth. So this could be done either mediated by another light field or so and so forth. So from this very general introduction let me move to the crux of the matter for today for my task. So essentially what I am talking about is that if I have an intense electromagnetic field it induces a non-linear response in the medium because as a reaction the medium modifies the optical field. So so far you have actually thought of bulk constants as constants I put in electric field and there is a chi term sitting in there chi which is a constant multiplied by e gets you the polarization. What I am talking about now chi is no longer a constant it is actually field dependent because as light propagates it modifies the medium that medium in turn is modifying the propagation of the light. Very simple physical picture this is what non-linear it is all about. So what I am going to talk about is one such phenomenon actually a little complicated one but very very exciting that we have spent ten years probing and this also talks about bulk quantum mechanics at room temperature normally things that you do not associate with quantum mechanics. If you have heard of it you know this is a little different from Newtonian mechanics I will not talk about the mechanics mechanics part of it but I will actually use I will not get into the details of this either but essentially tell you that there is a system which we have probed to prove the kind of things we are talking about. So what is it that we are talking about it is about manipulating atoms and the nice thing about people who work with lasers is that you know these changes the manipulations I am doing are not permanent. So as long as the control laser field is on these changes you see and as soon as the control laser field is off you are back to your normal self. So they are actually quite interesting for many many applications and two kinds of effects normally you talk about when you see atom photon interactions of that kind one is what we call dissipative or absorptive effects right. I shine in light with an intensity I naught it traverses a particular distance the intensity that comes out is actually diminished. So you are familiar with such dissipation effect is normally described by a complex susceptibility. So it is an imaginary part of the complex susceptibility and even in the absence of any field this would lead to a broadening of the atomic energy levels and so on and so forth this is sort of known for some time. A conjugate part of it which is causally connected is the reactive or dispersive effect this is denoted by the real part of the susceptibility as in a prism you see dispersion effect and which is really connected always to imaginary part of the susceptibility this should lead to the other one lead to broadening of the energy level this would lead to actually a shift of the atomic energy levels and very famous Nobel prize winning work fall under understanding this real part of the susceptibility. So what am I talking about I am talking about a particular phenomenon that is called electromagnetically induced transparency in short EIT as the name implies this really transmission of a resonant light through otherwise opaque medium. So the medium was opaque I am shining light nothing was coming out I use a control to make it transparent so the original light sort of comes through and that would happen as long as the control is on. So this is something that I am going to use today and to illustrate the control that I was talking about earlier that you understand. So very basic understanding of what absorption is all about a very crude model is that suppose I concentrate on two energy levels inside my atom the energy levels are separated by energy of h bar omega naught and I shine a laser with a frequency of omega that is shown in red and omega omega naught may not be the same. You see an absorption when delta is 0 the difference between omega 0 and omega naught is nothing then you have maximum absorption corresponding dispersion curves look like that. These are very standard dispersion curves for absorption through a two level atom. So essentially when I shine in the laser light I actually lift this electronic or whatever population upstairs and it all gets absorbed so nothing comes out of it. The light does not come out because light has actually lifted the population upstairs and done its job so there is nothing left to come out. Now if I add a third level and use a second laser there is these profiles get drastically modified and this leads to what we call a transparency window where I had maximum absorption there I now have a depth in absorption that means maximum transmission. So where this one was actually just lifting the population up and getting absorbed now I have the red light actually coming out so transmission happens and this profile which is the conjugate of that gets dispersion profile gets modified with a very steep slope right here. Earlier you are never bothered about this region because everything was getting absorbed so nothing was coming out so light when it does not come out you cannot really probe. Now that I have made this little transparency window I can actually probe this region and come out with some really exciting physics. So what is the real excitement in the dispersion curve if this extreme positive dispersion can lead to slow light. If you look at the group velocity expression how a profile would transmit through such a material is given by the free space light speed divided by the index n. You are all familiar with that for example for air for glass for water 1.33, 1.5 would be typical range of n semiconductors may be 3, may be 6 maximum that is what you have seen. I am talking about an ng of 10 to the power 5, 10 to the power 6, 10 to the power 7 close to 10 to the power 8. So real real slow light moving at the speed of a cycle inside my material so not going that fast. So can we actually use it and can we actually ask the question if I could really slow it down can I actually stop it. If I stop it what would I achieve I would achieve storage of information may be if it is coded in that light. So this is the excitement in this phenomenon called EIT. The moment I have this laser on this you know this change happens the moment I turn this off of course I go back to my original two level system. So this is really is the idea. So yes so I think what I am going to simplify this so this is the probe that is going to come out and this is the control that I am using to induce these changes in the profiles. So this would always happen when the control is on. So I will simplify this further so the physics of EIT would always have this probe laser this is the one I am looking at whether it is coming out or not and this is the one I am using as called controller coupling and essentially you would always have this capital lambda kind of a configuration so it is called a lambda system. Now there are many ways of understanding what the hell is going on because when this is on resonance you would always have absorption if I did not have this coupling beam. So on resonance I am not having absorption anymore I am having perfect transparency. So there are many ways of understanding it you can solve the full problem which I will not get into but a very basic physics way of understanding is this that like in interference if I you know let me take a break it a question yes no. So let me show you what let me just answer one would be a direct one that through B to A I think the one animation got killed probably and there is a way of going from B to A straight or you go B to A via this coupling beam and come back to A. This is a second order process normally you would not bother about it but these two things together actually having the cancellation effect. So if you if you are familiar with double slit experiment young's double slit I have a slit I have just made two holes and I have a source of light I am looking at the interference pattern on the other side suppose I close one hole and let light go through on a particular spot I will actually I am receiving light and then I close the other one I am also receiving light at the same spot now I suddenly open both the slits it could so happen depending on where I am looking that I get no light at all. So light plus light can be no light at all so if you think of it normally you do not bother about it when you see two headlights of cars crossing you do not see such effects but suppose I keep on dimming the light source and I get to the level of say one particle of light photon I mean very loosely speaking at a time that I am shooting from the source one photon going through the slit A hitting the screen one photon going through slit B and hitting the screen both are happening the moment I open both both of them go together but they cancel each other. So our eye is a sensitive two things that we call intensity or power they are square of amplitudes kind and they are only positive definite the minimum possible value for that is 0 when you are in a perfectly dark room intensity is 0 nobody has seen negative light so when two positive definite quantities add up to give you 0 it tells you the way you are adding is not correct right so physics is happening so opposition is happening at a level which is below the sensory power of our eyes okay so that is the electric field electric field is positive in this may be negative in this two of them canceling each other 0 square is 0 so that is what you are seeing you are seeing a dark fringe. So when you go down to very very low light levels dark fringes are actually explained by saying that there are two possible paths of one photon to go through to reach that spot one through slit A one through slit B and these two paths interfere canceling each other. A similar thing is happening here there are two possible ways of lifting population from B to A one directly one indirectly through the coupling these two paths are canceling each other under certain conditions and that is really is the physics of EIT electrolyte yes yes and then reabsorption so it is a third order that is why it is actually the third order process very correct so this is really the indirect path and the direct path combining together essentially canceling the probe absorption along this okay and this happens because this is actually more powerful than that otherwise this order effect will not actually contribute. So this is really the physics of it and essentially as in all interference effects there is some kind of coherence you talk about in Young's level slate very wrongly actually we talk about the coherence of being a condition for seeing the interference a stable interference fringe here also these fragile quantum interference effects are wide as long as you have Raman coherence between the two lower levels or the spins as we call. So roughly that is the idea and we have actually done you can solve this problem I am not going to get through this the real issue is that if I solve the problem solving the problem would mean don't look at the equations not meant for you so for example you do the hydrogen atom problem if you are in first year undergraduate you know then you solve the bare atom problems here the atoms are actually dressed by an optical field so you solve the full problem what is interesting I want to point out is that when you solve that you get an Eigen state which is called the dark state so on two photon resonance this has a zero probability to be excited so even though it is on resonance the system has a state that is always dark it does not see light and as I many descriptions for that and we really don't need to get through that the general EIT scheme is as I said is a lambda system like that and the EIT condition would be a two photon resonance when this delta R is actually zero and when this capital delta is non zero I will consider mostly zero then this is not a very very efficient system so what is the idea if I want to really do this the idea is that can I switch it's like a switch that turns things dark and light dark and bright dark and bright so we can actually do many mixing of that so switch between transparency and absorption at multiple frequency create logic gates and so because it depends on in quantum interference effects it could be constructive or destructive at different frequencies and can alter dramatically so again the control because you have understood it and depending on the control frequency and its power I can actually shift this EIT the way we like to do an experiment of course the first trick is to select a simple usable atomic level configuration I talked about a lambda system no real life system is that simple okay so for an experiment is the best thing is to really look for one and we had one idea and that's what I am going to talk about this is the entire work was done in collaboration with my friends in Orsay in France in a group and very Indian looking friends of mine who were my collaborators for last 10 years what we do is look at metastable helium it's metastable because if you look at this is not the ground state of helium 2 3 s 1 has a lifetime of 8000 seconds as good as you know not decaying at all so it's almost a stable metastable as we call it and we select a lambda system using a transition which is in the infrared 1 micron little above 1 micron and there are tricks up our slaves by using things called polarization circular polarization we turn this into actually a simple lambda system by using right circularly left circularly polarized light in the respective arms so there are many good things about helium for the metastable helium for you can actually use extremely low low power diode lasers that are available of the shelf and there are many nice things about collisions in such helium because when I first started talking about the system many experts have actually told me that this will not work room temperature systems cannot show quantum coherence effects because there will be collisions that would actually kill everything that we wish to do and we did not want to go into low temperature systems because they are not they are expensive I will be always lagging behind the best of labs in the Europe and America and also because they cannot be taken to the field if you wish to work with gadgets that are applicable you can't possibly you try to avoid such sophisticated equipment because essentially you will not be able to carry it in a suitcase and go so this we managed to do and it turned out things that people thought were going to affect it adversely came to our rescue it actually became quite nice and collisions when they do not destroy coherence they help to increase transit time so because rather than having a ballistic motion of the helium atom through the laser beam it does exact like a in like a diffusive motion and therefore the time it takes to cross the laser beam increases therefore your interaction time works so I will not get into the details in velocity changing collisions have a very positive effect this is a tabletop setup that you see the helium beam helium cell actually is only 5 centimeters inside the shield and is a tabletop experiment that you can actually do to set up EIT and lo and behold actually you get to see this is actually shown in transmission so a transmission peak when delta is 0 this is inverse of this absorption that you that you see and you can make it very very narrow you know the width was about 10 kilohertz or so even in a room temperature system this of course we publish there is a lot of excitement then we had to get into the domain of doing the modeling of it because nobody knew how to actually work this out with all the relaxation processes we have and the nice thing about this modeling is that you are not filling with numbers numbers are already known so actually you are fitting the data with all known constants and trying to figure out them excellent understanding came out of this analysis that we did of this EIT the results in the first go I will just show you is something very nice I talked about this transmission but remember the conjugate effect where dispersion also had a very strange looking curve and if I instead of shining a laser which is continuous suppose I now send beams like that I can look at what is the speed at which is going remember I talked about slow light indeed if you do that you will find even in a system which had nothing it was a tabletop experiment with initially was a very very short helium cell we could achieve a group velocity of around 3 kilometer per second remember the free space speed of light 3 times 10 to power 8 meters per second from there we got into 10 to power 3 per second and without having to do much so this was quite remarkable that you can do this so what I am going to show you again a cartoon yes please yes no no I think you need much higher power we are actually not using that kind of power we are using a trick in in the steepness of the dispersion curve so even low power is capable of doing it because we are very close to the zero window it's a very narrow window but yeah if I could put in more power and have a way of looking at it more power would also have some effect on collisional things that I have not talked about but yes it is in that domain but I am not seeing it okay so let me show you a very brief cartoon of how what I mean by quantum memory so how do I store and retrieve information based on such NEI protocol supposing this is the material one atom inside that material is shown in this three level structure and this material when the probe comes the probe is all over okay sorry the control comes the control is all over this is a powerful control now comes a very weak probe pulse which is goes from a to b and it's coming in it's coming in going in and at this point if I now turn off the control the blue one that was there then the state of light is stored in the Raman coherence of the two lower lower states nothing comes out of this material I turn on the control then the retrieval starts happening the probe pulse comes out in the original with all the original parameters now of course there are many many issues in here how slowly can you turn off on the control field what is the impact of spontaneous decay and can we actually apply it in a single atom trapped in optical cavity we try to address all of these things in subsequent papers but the excitement was that starting in 1999 so it's quite old nature cover had this that in an ultra cold gas this was really really the coldest spot in the universe kind of a gas of sodium atoms you people showed 17 meters per second of velocity okay it was not completely stopped and a lot of work had happened after that in sodium and rubidium system we are talking about the helium but essentially what I'm talking about sophisticated light switches that control not just light but information suppose I have coded some information in my incoming light and that can be changes a modulation frequency amplitude phase what have you normally we play with these three so when the light stops that information is stored just like information stored in electronic memory of this computer right so it's a stable state unless like a switch it's by stable on is on off is off it's a basic coding device right till I actually disturb it it remains that memory okay so essentially these are very complicated light switches that I'm talking about and to access the information you turn on a control laser and off it comes so this is essentially the idea of stopping a restarting light so we talked about this and then some really crazy things came out of it and I'm going to today I'm just telling you the story I'm not going to the details of it but there are many offshoots that are puzzling very very fundamental questions so in the interest of time I'm just going to go through this giving you the idea and then we can talk later I talked about this expression whether you understood or not this has some approximation in it I've assumed only first order second order dispersion theory first order dispersion theory right now and what we have seen is that the group velocity is given by the free space speed of line given a by the group index okay very simple now so you can understand what I talked about that this group velocity will be much smaller than C if this one is much larger than 1 okay just about 1 about 3 about 6 you are familiar with now I'm talking about much larger than 1 that is 10 per 6 10 per 7 of that order now what happens if I have this one is less than 1 then Vg would become greater than C or I can actually have a backward light where group velocity would become negative okay now when you saw it there is nothing that we have done here that violates Maxwell or anybody essentially talks about fast light not just slow light that a counter intuitive but it does not violate Einstein's causality you know I say special theory of relativity of comes that that speed of information cannot be greater than the speed of light if that happens then I can go to my past till my grandfather and so I would not be born so you can actually violate all kinds of principles of causality that we believe in in physics if you could transmit information faster than the speed of light because then you can go to the past alter things in there so your present would be affected so causal cause and effect relationships would all get violated and that's sort of something that we do not allow there's no first proof of principle I believe you know the experts would correct me to prove this so time and again you find mostly Italian papers try to violate causality and showing some experiment where you would find always something wrong in the explanation saying they're violated causality so here the point is that when I was in high school I was told nothing can move faster than the speed of light by the time I was in the US to do my PhD people have actually shown experimentally very nice experiment that phase velocity that is the velocity of a frequency component of an envelope can be faster than speed of light nothing was violated even then now I am saying group velocity can actually exceed the speed of light and textbooks should be rewritten because group velocity does not contain information a smooth profile Gaussian if you look at a packet which extends from minus infinity to plus infinity the problem of how we define speed you need to think of in quantum information domain and always information is coded by turning something on so if there is always a discontinuity that you find in that front velocity that is what contains information and not the group velocity this needs little bit more thinking leads a lot more debate and clear understanding of what we actually mean by that but what I am showing here does not violate anything when you have such sharp discontinuity this expression breaks down this is a conjecture actually because what I'm talking about is that when you have such discontinuity the first order theory breaks down right that you need to take care of higher order terms which you are not doing and the entire definition of I'll show you just one reference to our word entire definition of group velocity you have to look at so we did this experiment the same experiment I showed by continuously varying the capital delta which we have not talked about and in one case we could actually go from a group velocity of a plus 10 to power 4 to group velocity of minus 10 to power 4 meters per second so this was never looked at before as I said this near to the 0 of the Raman detuning there was always huge absorption so nobody could actually probe this area now we have made it EIT that is transmitted transmission around that area and we can look at the dispersion curves which have these really sharp kinks and it's possible to see this so essential there is a whole lot that we published on this talking about how this concept of group velocity when you are doing this kind of stuff sort of breaks down so we I was invited to actually do this review on this so there is some details that are given in there and more or less now it's accepted that what I'm saying is that your concept of the decay rate for different frequencies and therefore the group velocity breaks down when you're playing with such kinks and information so I think a separate one that I once discussed with Professor Ray also there's a separate thing should be all quantum information the speed of propagation the entire concept is really crazy is not the way it should be formulated and I think that's where the problem lies that if you believe in the old concepts then what it's saying is negative group velocity is what we saw is that before the beam enters is actually come out of the medium already so essentially says this propagation description that we are giving is actually faulty so again I know I have sort of bombarded with some concept but these are all falling logically from known physics when you have understood we can actually try to use it to control it got us interested in looking at this transmission resonances of different kinds I talked about phase related or coherence related such altered resonances there could be even population related resonances I would not get into the details of it but essentially here they're known atomic coherence in more then it goes by the name of coherence population oscillation so this is also something that we have probed very very deeply in in this helium atomic system having done a three-level system we got excited to talk about what looks like a tripod it's like a double lambda if you like and a double EIT when you have phase distance working for you it's easy to do these kind of calculations because it's much more complicated you're talking about now a four-level atomic system three classical fields and so three Raman coherence is two dark states so lots of complication but it's more fun because now you have more controls in your hand and actually you can play with this thing very very interesting physics and many theoretical papers were there but experimental results were not there and again there's a lot of application you can think of in magnitude optic switches now not just with laser light but using a magnetic field and for quantum information storage we use the helium the same metastable helium but a different transition to go to the upper level and again it's a matter of detail they're all published work you don't need to worry about it very very simple experimental setup again the only thing that's different here is that we have actually put some homemade rectangular coils around our helium cell to be able to control a very weak magnetic field that was needed in this case very simple experiments were done with depending on the configuration of who is being shared in the double EIT in this one is this is the shared one that is shown and then there was nothing exciting in this particular case but when you actually have the coupling beam in on the two arm and the major one is the probe then they're interesting interference effects that you could see and something that was shown as black that was fully transmitting suddenly became an absorption dip and now this is being controlled by the field as well as the magnetic field a lot of what we have done in playing with this funny stuff and essentially you know went on and on and on doing some so the system again be useful as a polarization dependence which in the presence of a magnetic field and recently we have actually done some storage experiments looking at whether we can do light storage what is the capability of these things because the main concern for us was also that when I am using a room temperature system and decoherence because of velocity in collisions are happening then can I really store light for a long enough time for us to use again we worked it out and then came to some applications which again for want of time I would not get into that details but to give you an idea when I am coding some information into the line the information that I am coding can also have very many parameters in it as I said normally you modulate the frequency or the amplitude or the phase or all three or combinations thereof is possible to actually code it with highly non classical highly quantum information into the light one such thing is what we call squeeze light and it is to do with the fact that classically you know two quantities like the position and the momentum of a harmonic oscillator you can measure with absolute certainty nothing says that you know if I know X for sure I cannot know V for sure but for a quantum particle these two conjugate variables you can never measure simultaneously with absolute precision so if I am a quantum particle if I know if you know my position very very accurately then my velocity would be a completely fuzzy one you would not be able to do so what we understood is that there is an uncertainty principle that's about the product of these two uncertainties right it says that must be greater than a certain fundamental constant okay what we realize that the uncertainty principle is about a product it doesn't say anything about individual uncertainties so can I be smart enough to squeeze the noise out of one at the cost of course increase noise in the other maintaining Heisenberg but using the one that has less noise for all optical measurement purposes and that's what squeeze lines try to do and we have actually shown this to also be a nearly perfect squeezer in this system so essentially you do by creating quantum sources that are like twin brothers so one has noise of this kind the other one would be nullifying it all the time if I use them together I can actually create nearly perfect squeeze like in this so this is a very very involved experiment that we did last year and this year I don't know whether you have seen earlier this year you have come up with a theory and come some nice names of popular return new kind of quantum excitons that you can think of in a system of this so I I stop here and just quickly go to the summary saying that a room temperature system which is in the bulk I'm not talking about effect with one helium atom I'm talking about the bulk and I'm actually using it in the room temperature gas it's an attractive system even to do such quantum coherence and quantum mechanical effects and we designed a very very clean lambda system thanks to polarization selection and then been able to talk about slow light and very interestingly backward light group velocity of few thousand meters per second was actually seen even in a cell that was only 2.5 centimeter long we have increased it now and we have actually done further so quantum storage experiments based on such a electromagnetic induced transparency and coherence population oscillation actually could be demonstrated matter of principle right now but it would it would be quite robust if you could use CPO and not EIT because EIT is essentially very very sensitive because it depends on quantum coherence effects so quantum information system of course what people have been thinking about for a long time is that photonic qubits you use appropriate for communication over distance you want to send an information qubit is quantum bit bit is binary digits that zeros and ones that you use in a classical computer a qubit is a quantum computer which is combinations of zeros and ones more like not yes not no but may be and it has infinite information content in them and so if I can transfer those over a long distance without knowing what it is normally use photonic qubits and to store you use atomic systems these photons are difficult to localize and that's why I talked about this particular experiment so the information is getting stored as memories in atomic qubits so when I transfer from something that is carrying the signal to something that is going to store the signal and again take it out this would mean an atom photon network and at every level when you transform in information from the photon to the atom atom to the photon information that is quantum information that you don't know what it is you know it's a combination of zero and one what are the amplitudes of the two and this work you don't know so this is information transfer problem that we have worked heavily in our group to look at how do you actually transfer this quantum information and make an atom photon network that's the future of quantum information system must acknowledge most of my work was funded by DST a lot of this exchange programs could happen because of generous funding from CEPRA in France I was an invited professor and then my students were supported by CSIR I end with the moral of the story what I'm talking about is that evolution of physics and physics is the theory of science you know it happens when theory and experiment go hand in hand and very naturally some applications come out right but if you are always concentrating on market value of the research and think of what is going to come out tomorrow then you are going to kill this evolution and if you kill this evolution then this would die its natural death so when 1960 the laser was invented probably you know everybody said oh great fundamental tool what is the use by the time I landed in the US that question was never asked every supermarket had a laser for a reader and so if there is a time scale which biotechnologies and information technologies normally do not understand because in instantaneous transfer to the technology domain but in physics and most of science there is a time lag from when you are doing this necessary gambling of theory and experiment you're actually excited about probing a question and then trying to find out why is an and actually as I said how things happen in nature as a result these applications come out and will it be that one day we all would know all the secrets of nature and this is to become jobless I doubt that would ever happen we'll keep on pushing the frontier of knowledge using the methodology that I talked about as scientific methods and that would continue so I am thrilled and I must extend my personal congratulations to the winners and to all the participants and to the we have a center for doing such a wonderful job of bringing in people who would just keep on celebrating what I call scientific methodology for want of a better name and this celebration should continue for years to come so thank you again very much for your kind of attention thank you some questions yes please yeah the questions from the audience the students maybe I will start myself so can you tell us of course this is contrary to the spirit you just described about the applications but I understand that quantum information quantum computing is very much in the news nowadays and so can you explain in a language that all of us can understand about how these things can actually lead to computation or storage and transmission of information yes thanks you know the quest has been on the the major problem here well first of all for quantum information processing the kind of quantum computers we are thinking of they are not going to totally replace your classical computers this gadget uses many things that are quantum mechanical but the algorithm it uses is classical okay so quantum computers based on certain quantum algorithms would be able to solve certain kinds of problems that you would be unable to solve or take zillions of years to solve in a classical way okay and a factorization being one that was talked about which is essentially the security key for all your transactions including atm so it depends on your inability classical computers inability to factorize a huge number so the way this system works is that the system is if it is essentially quantum mechanical it works under quantum dynamics so it has its own thing and all the qubits I'm talking about should come under the same kind of framework of dynamics that's the major problem actually for an experiment list to make sure they're all subjected to the same dynamical transformations now having done that if the result could be the result is when you observe the moment you observe a quantum bit it becomes a classical one okay so if it is a combination of unknown combination of zeros and one the moment it's like the schooner cat how many of you have heard of it so I'll just give you that example if you don't know it's a nice story I mean I'm an animal lover I don't like this much but anyway the story is the following that Trindy knew this and he talked about this as a post-mortem physics or some such thing that supposing in a box I put a cat and a radioactive nucleus okay and assume both of them are quantum mechanical so if the radioactive nucleus decays it triggers a poison and the cat dies something like that okay and if it doesn't decay then the cat is alive so before I open the box the cat is in a state of being dead and alive together okay in our real life we have never seen a cat which is both dead and alive but the moment I observe it collapses to either the dead state or the other life state okay so it's like atom being excited electron in of an atom being excited by the laser beam the electron could be either upstairs or downstairs if I could single out two levels okay in between it could be spinning between the two so the state of the system is not upstairs not downstairs but a mixture of up and down anything any mixture okay so this is what we exploit in a quantum dynamics but the moment you observe it loses its charm of being quantum so it's very very fragile it collapses being a classical information either dead or alive either upstairs or downstairs okay so this is really the catch and this is where people have been looking for systems of not just one qubit but you need and I mean millions of qubits to to do the processing that you'd like so there are many candidates for this now and what I'm talking about is more on the global level of the platform of decoding it in a in a from a photonic system to an atomic system and then recovering that system without knowing which combination of dead and alive the photon is so that's really is the trick and so there been many success stories recently using silicon the people could get a huge number of such quantum dots to talk together but the idea of manipulation still beats you know what we need to do so I don't know whether I'll see a quantum computer in my lifetime I hope so at least you know some bits three qubits to seven qubits to some more have been actually demonstrated in the labs already but we need of course to scale it up much more questions yeah yeah I think this is probably a little provocative question this is about again group velocity being faster than speed of light so I understand that you don't we don't expect quality to be violated but one is not just using method equation here they're quantum mechanics at play and we really don't understand quantum mechanics that well so what I wanted to ask is that though while there are attempts going on to understand the meaning of group velocity and what it means to transfer energy and things like that but as an experiment list once this is there you have group velocity that is it like are there any attempts to actually try to see if experimentally you can communicate information faster and fit like yeah actually yes I think that's what we did and that's what my conclusion in that paper was essentially there will be so much of distortion in the information because we have not done the theory properly so the group velocity definition here to be looked that's the point really the definition of group velocity is breaking down when you go group velocity essentially have many frequencies in it in a cavity when you are talking about the decay rates are all different so when you superpose all such exponentially decaying rates it it's a different beast altogether so and that's what people have to look at and so we had a meaning of this but it's nothing to do with the coding that we had done so students either it is very clear or totally unclear or you're too sleepy after a heavy breakfast all right I'm available I mean you can you can write to me later if you feel too shy today too are there any questions okay let's thank Professor Ghosh for