Google’s use of AI to power search shows a problematic approach to organizing information

The Conversation
June 14, 2024 

Google’s mission is to “organize the world’s information,” and it’s now using AI to do so. (Shutterstock)

From government documents to news reports, commerce, music and social interactions, much of the world’s information is now online. And Google, founded in 1998 with the mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” is the way we access this torrent of knowledge and culture.

In April 2024, Google’s search engine accounted for 90 per cent of the Canadian search market. For academics, its specialized Google Scholar and Google Books are mainstays of our research lives.

However, while Google Search is essential infrastructure, Google itself is recklessly sabotaging it in socially damaging ways that demand a strong regulatory response.

Re-imagining search

On May 14, Google announced it was revamping its core search website to include a central place for generative AI content, with the goal of “reimagining” search. One of its first rollouts, AI Overviews, is a chatbot that uses a large language model (LLM) to produce authoritative-sounding responses to questions rather than users having to click away to another website.


Google’s business model depends on ad revenue, which affects search results. (Shutterstock)

OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 ignited the generative AI frenzy. But by now, most users should be aware that LLM-powered chatbots are unreliable sources of information. This is because they are merely high-powered pattern recognition machines. The output they generate in response to a query is generated via probability: each word or part of an image is selected based on the likelihood that it appears in a similar image or phrase in its database.

To be crystal clear, LLMs are not a form of intelligence, artificial or otherwise. They cannot “reason.” For LLMs, the only truth is the truth of the correlation among the contents of its database.

Which is why it was both very funny and completely predictable when AI Overview users began reporting that Google was telling them, among other things, to add “about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue” to pizza sauce to keep cheese from sliding off pizza, that geologists recommend that people eat one small rock per day and that there are no African countries with names that begin with the letter K.

These were not “errors” in the sense of reporting back misinformation. AI Overviews was doing precisely what LLMs always do: report back statistically probable links of text or images based on what’s in its database. They do not, and cannot, evaluate truth claims.

Following this barrage of widespread mockery, Google eventually acknowledged the criticisms. Although it claims it will work to improve AI Overviews, the very nature of LLMs as statistical machines likely means, as Wired puts it, that “AI Overviews will always be broken.”

As amusing as these stories are, and despite Google’s reaction, they also raise disturbing issues about our dependence on one company for a service that we used to entrust to public libraries: organizing the world’s information and making it accessible.

Drastic effects

There are two fundamental flaws ingrained in Google Search that are becoming increasingly hard to ignore as their effects become more drastic.

First, Google’s dependence on ad revenue has led it to compromise its search functionality in order to deliver paid advertisements to users. Observers have long noticed that Google’s prioritizing of paid advertisements in Search has made it a worse product for its users, because it prioritizes the interests of advertisers and Google.

This advertising focus also has a knock-on effect on the entire (ad-driven) knowledge ecosystem, since it places Google in direct competition for advertising dollars with the media companies that depend on Google Search to help potential readers find them.

This conflict was a central justification of the Canadian federal government’s controversial Online News Act, which requires companies like Google and Meta to negotiate payments to Canadian news media organizations. This conflict will only get worse: products like AI Overview are clearly designed to ensure users spend more time on Google rather than clicking through to the underlying website.

Less well recognized is that Google’s approach to knowledge itself is driving this reckless disregard for accuracy and truth in its search results. Google, and much of Silicon Valley, subscribe to an ideology that Dutch media scholar José van Dijck calls “dataism”: the belief that data can speak for itself and can be interpreted without reference to any outside context.

As I and my co-author Natasha Tusikov explore in our book, The New Knowledge: Information, Data and the Remaking of Global Power, correlations are equivalent to truth for the dataist. This is an anti-science worldview that ignores fundamental scientific methodological standards of validity (how do we know something is true?) and reliability (can we replicate the results?).


Each word or part of an image is selected by an AI search based on the likelihood that it appears in a similar image or phrase in its database. (Shutterstock)

The idea that correlations are truth is at the heart of Google’s search algorithm. Simply put, search results are not objective: Google Search ranks (non-paid) results based on how popular they are, as determined by which and how many pages are linking to them. Notice how this popularity contest is very different from the expert judgment used by librarians in selecting books for a library and categorizing them in a card catalogue.

Access to knowledge


The societal damage from having to depend on a corrupted knowledge-organizing process is difficult to overstate. Access to sound knowledge is essential to every part of society. Google’s advertising dependence and dataist ideology have driven it to the point where it is actively sabotaging our knowledge ecosystem.

This sabotage requires a stiff regulatory response. To put it bluntly, Google Search needs to be run by people with the ethics of librarians, not tech bros.

To get there, governments need to establish minimum acceptable standards for Search to ensure that it produces sufficiently high-quality results. These standards should include forbidding links between advertising and search results, as well as the use of search data to fuel personalized advertising.

Further, search companies, and all global platforms, need to be brought under domestic democratic oversight, but remain inter-operable across borders, in co-ordination with fellow like-minded democratic countries.

None of these steps will be easy. But unless we are OK with continuing to delegate the organization of the world’s information to a reckless, profit-driven company that doesn’t see a problem with releasing a product that tells people it’s healthy to eat rocks, we don’t really have a choice but to bring Google to heel.

Blayne Haggart, Associate Professor of Political Science, Brock University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How the recycling symbol lost its meaning

Kate Yoder, Grist
June 14, 2024 

Recycle Symbol (Wikipedia)

It’s Earth Day 1990, and Meryl Streep walks into a bar. She’s distraught about the state of the environment. “It’s crazy what we’re doing. It’s very, very, very bad,” she says in ABC’s prime-time Earth Day special, letting out heavy sighs and listing jumbled statistics about deforestation and the hole in the ozone layer.

The bartender, Kevin Costner, says he used to be scared, too — until he started doing something about it. “These?” he says, holding up a soda can. “I recycle these.” As Streep prepares to launch her beer can into the recycling bin bin, Costner cautions her, “This could change your life.”

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Recycling, once considered the domain of people with “long hair, granny glasses, and tie-dyed Ts,” as the Chicago Tribune described it at the time, was about to go mainstream. The iconic chasing-arrows recycling symbol, invented 20 years earlier, was everywhere in the early 1990s. Its tight spiral of folded arrows seemed to promise that discarded glass bottles bottles and yellowing newspapers had a bright future, where they could be reborn in a cycle that stretched to infinity. As curbside pickup programs spread across the United States, the practice of sorting your trash would become, for many, as routine as brushing your teeth — an everyday habit that made you feel a little more responsible.

What no one anticipated was just how emotionally attached people would become to recycling as the solution to America’s ugly trash problem. When the chasing arrows’ promise of rebirth was broken, they could get angry. One cold winter day in 1991, people in Holyoke, Massachusetts, chased after garbage trucks, yelling for them to stop, after the drivers had nabbed their sorted glass, cans, and cardboard from the curb. Strained by an influx of holiday-related trash, the city had instructed workers to forgo recycling and just throw everything away.

Today, the recycling icon is omnipresent — found on plastic bottles bottles, cereal boxes, and bins loitering alongside curbs across the country. The chasing arrows, though, are often plastered on products that aren’t recyclable at all, particularly products made of plastic, like dog chew toys and inflatable swim rings. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency said that the symbol’s use on many plastic products was “deceptive.”

Recycling rules can be downright mystifying. For years, people were told pizza boxes were too greasy to be recycled, but now many recycling centers accept them. Some cities accept juice boxes lined with invisible layers of aluminum and plastic; others don’t. And do the screw-on caps stay on plastic bottles or not? Recycling experts ask people to do a “little bit of homework” to figure out what their local recycling system can handle, but since households have hundreds of items with different packaging to keep track of, that’s asking a lot.

The resulting confusion has made a mess of recycling efforts. Plastic wrap tangles around sorting equipment at recycling facilities, shutting down operations as employees try to cut it out of the equipment. Huge bales of paper shipped overseas can contain as much as 30 percent plastic waste. “Contamination is one of the biggest challenges facing the recycling industry,” the EPA said in a statement to Grist. It takes time and money to haul, sort through, and dispose of all this unwanted refuse, which makes recycling more of a burden for city budgets. Many cities have ended up cutting costs by working with private waste companies; some don’t even bother trying at all. About a quarter of Americans lack access to any recycling services.

The difficulty of recycling plastic can make the chasing-arrows symbol near meaningless, with environmental groups calling plastic recycling a “false solution.” Only around 5 percent of plastic waste in the United States gets shredded or melted down so that it can be used again. Much of the rest flows into landfills or gets incinerated, breaking down into tiny particles that can travel for thousands of miles and lodge themselves in your lungs. Plastics threaten “near-permanent contamination of the natural environment,” according to one study, and pose a global health crisis, with plastic chemicals linked to preterm births, heart attacks, and cancer.

So where did the three arrows go wrong? The trouble is that their loop has ensnared us. If some recycling is good, the thinking goes, then more recycling is better. That creates enormous pressure for packaging to be made recyclable and stamped with the arrows — regardless of whether trying to recycle a glass bottle bottle or plastic yogurt container made much sense in the first place. David Allaway, a senior policy analyst at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, says that the facts just don’t support the recycling symbol’s reputation as a badge of environmental goodness. “The magnetic, gravitational power of recycling,” he said, has led “policymakers and the public to just talk more and more and more about recycling, and less and less and less about anything else.”

In the spring of 1970, an estimated 20 million Americans — 10 percent of the population — showed up for the first Earth Day, taking part in rallies, marches, and teach-ins, calling for clean air and clean water. Pollution had pushed its way into the national conversation. The year before, oil-soaked debris had caught fire in the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, sending flames towering five stories high, and a drilling accident in Santa Barbara had spread an oil slick over more than 800 square miles of water. Smog regularly clouded skies from Birmingham, Alabama, to Los Angeles, dimming cities in the middle of the day.

The idea of recycling seemingly burst onto the scene in 1970. Earth Day organizers educated people about the value of sorting through their trash and advocated for community recycling programs. People would gather up their bottles and cans in plastic crates and bags and drive to designated sites to drop them off, sometimes earning a few bucks in return. “The environmental crisis has come into the public consciousness so recently that the word ‘recycle’ doesn’t even appear in most dictionaries,” the environmentalist Garrett De Bell wrote a couple weeks before the Earth Day event. He pitted recycling as “the only ecologically sensible long-term solution” for a country “knee-deep in garbage.”

It wasn’t long before the concept acquired its signature symbol. At the time, Gary Anderson was finishing up his master’s degree in architecture at the University of Southern California. He came across a poster advertising a contest to design a symbol for recycling, sponsored by the Container Corporation of America, a maker of cardboard boxes. Inspired by M.C. Escher’s Möbius strip, Anderson spent just a couple of days coming up with designs using the now-famous trio of folded, rotating arrows. The simplest of his designs won, and Anderson was awarded a $2,500 scholarship in 1970. The Container Corporation quickly put the logo in the public domain, hoping it would be adopted on all recycled or recyclable products in order to “spread awareness among concerned citizens.”

The Möbius loop he created soon passed from his mind. “I just didn’t really think of the symbol that much,” he recalls. “It wasn’t used very much in the first couple of years.” One day several years later, however, Anderson was wandering through the streets of Amsterdam in the haze of jet lag when he came across a row of oversized bins emblazoned with a beach ball-sized version of his logo. The Netherlands, purportedly, was the first country to launch a nationwide recycling program in 1972. “It just really shocked me into a realization that there must be something about this symbol,” he said.

Refashioning old materials into new things is a longstanding American tradition. Paul Revere, folk hero of the American Revolution, collected scrap metal and turned it into horseshoes. In the 19th century, used rags were turned into paper, and families stitched together scraps of fabric to create quilts. The desperation of the Great Depression taught people to make underwear out of cotton flour sacks, and the propaganda posters of World War II positioned recycling as a patriotic duty: “Prepare your tin cans for war.”

“It was not in our DNA to be this wasteful,” said Jackie Nuñez, the advocacy program manager at the Plastic Pollution Coalition, a communications nonprofit. “We had to be trained, we had to be marketed to, to be wasteful like this.”

One of the first lessons of “throwaway society” came in the 1920s, when White Castle became the first fast-food restaurant to sell its burgers in single-use bags, advertising them as clean and convenient. “Buy ’em by the sack,” the slogan went. In 1935, the big breweries that survived the Prohibition era started shipping beer in lighter, cheaper-to-transport steel cans instead of returnable glass bottles bottles. Coca-Cola and other soda companies eventually followed suit.

All those paper sacks and cans soon littered the sides of American roadways, and people started calling on the companies that created the waste to clean it up. Corporations responded by creating the first anti-litter organization, Keep America Beautiful, founded in 1953 by the American Can Company and the Owens-Illinois Glass Company. Keep America Beautiful’s advertisements in the 1960s looked like public service announcements, but they subtly shifted the blame for all the garbage to individuals. Some featured “Susan Spotless,” a girl in a white dress who would wag her finger at anyone who soiled public spaces with their litter.

The pressure on American businesses didn’t go away, though. On the Sunday after Earth Day in April 1970, some 1,500 protesters showed up at Coca-Cola’s headquarters in Atlanta to dump hundreds of cans and glass bottles bottles at its entrance. Two years later, Oregon passed the country’s first “bottle bill” requiring a 5-cent deposit on bottles and cans sold in the state, incentivizing people to return them, while Congress was considering banning single-use beverage containers altogether. Manufacturers successfully lobbied against a federal ban, arguing that jobs would be lost, as the historian Bartow J. Elmore recounts in the book Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism. But corporations still wanted to relieve the public pressure on them and outsource the costs of dealing with the waste they were creating. Luckily for them, recycling was in vogue.

In New York City, the war on waste was spearheaded by the Environmental Action Coalition, an organization raising funds for its “Trash Is Cash” community recycling program, with the long-term goal of getting recyclables picked up by city workers outside homes. Curbside recycling seemed to serve everyone’s interest: Environmentalists wanted to waste less, and companies could use it as an opportunity to shift the cost of dealing with waste onto city governments. Businessmen who volunteered with the Environmental Action Coalition solicited millions in donations from their colleagues in the 1970s, writing that recycling had “substantial promise” to fend off any legislation to ban or tax single-use containers.

The campaign was a deliberate attempt to divert attention from more meaningful solutions like bottle bills, yet environmental groups embraced it, according to Recycling Reconsidered, a 2012 book bySamantha MacBride, who worked in New York City’s sanitation department for two decades. The New York City Council started its mandatory curbside pickup program in the late 1980s, several years after the first one began in Woodbury, New Jersey, requiring residents to set out their paper, metal, glass, and some types of plastic in bins at the curb. The idea picked up in cities across the country, with the number of curbside programs growing from 1,000 to 5,000 between 1988 and 1992, spreading the chasing arrows along with them.

“It was in the late ’80s and early ’90s that this thing just becomes everywhere,” said Finis Dunaway, a professor of history at Trent University in Canada. America was running out of places to put its trash, a dilemma captured by the story of a nomadic garbage barge in 1987. In March of that year, a barge teeming with 6 million pounds of trash left Long Island, New York, looking to unload its freight where the landfills weren’t already full. States from North Carolina to Louisiana turned it away, and the barge spent months traveling around the Atlantic coast — all the way to Mexico, Belize, and the Bahamas — looking for a place to dispose of the garbage.

In October, the barge made its way back to Brooklyn, where a court ordered that its contents be incinerated — but not before Greenpeace activists hung a giant banner on the boat: “NEXT TIME … TRY RECYCLING.” Annie Leonard, the former executive director of Greenpeace, told PBS Frontline in 2020 that she wonders whether that banner was a mistake. “I think we were overly optimistic about the potential of recycling,” she said, “and perpetuating that narrative led us astray.”

There’s an iconic scene in the 1967 movie The Graduate, in which Dustin Hoffman’s character, Benjamin Braddock, gets cornered at his college graduation party by one of his parents’ friends. “I just want to say one word to you, just one word: plastics,” the older man says. “There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it.” One generation’s earnest advice for a successful career clashed with a new, skeptical attitude toward plastic, which had already become a byword for “fake.”

By the early 1970s, scientists had learned that whales, turtles, and other marine life were getting tangled up in plastic debris, a problem that was killing 40,000 seals a year. They knew, too, that small plastic fragments were making their way into the ocean, and that plastic residues had entered people’s bloodstreams, presenting what an official from President Richard Nixon’s Council of Environmental Quality deemed a significant health threat, “potentially our next bad one.” The more people learned, the more plastic’s reputation transformed from all-purpose, indestructible wonder into something that maybe shouldn’t be trusted in your new microwave. Between 1988 and 1989, the percentage of Americans who believed plastic was damaging the environment rose from 56 to 72 percent. Larry Thomas, the president of the Society of Plastics Industry, warned in an internal memo that companies were starting to lose business, writing, “We are approaching a point of no return.”

Beverage companies and the oil industry hoped to advertise their way out of the PR problem, laying out plans to spend $50 million a year to tout the polymer’s virtues with slogans like “plastics make it possible.” They also turned to recycling. Lewis Freeman, the former vice president of government affairs at the Society of the Plastics Industry, an industry group, told Grist that he has a vivid memory of a colleague coming into his office, saying, “We’ve got to do something to help the recyclers.”

Freeman tasked the Plastic Bottle Institute — made up of oil giants like BP and Exxon, chemical companies, and can manufacturers — with figuring out how to clarify to recycling sorters what kind of plastic was what. In 1988, they came up with the plastic resin code, the numbering system from 1 to 7 that’s still in place.

Polyethylene terephthalate, or PET (1), is used to make soft drink bottles; high-density polyethylene (2) is used for milk jugs; polyvinyl chloride (3) is used for PVC pipes in plumbing, and so on all through 7, the catch-all category for acrylic, polycarbonate, fiberglass, and other plastics. The Plastic Bottle Bottle Institute surrounded these numbers with the chasing arrows logo, giving the public the impression that they could throw all kinds of plastics into recycling bins bins, whether there was infrastructure to process them or not. The Connecticut Department of Environmental Conservation warned that the confusion it would cause “will have a severe impact on the already marginal economic feasibility of recycling plastics as well as on recycling programs as a whole.”

Once the symbol was operational, Freeman said, “then everybody started putting it on everything.” Companies worked to make it official: Starting in 1989, the Plastic Bottle Institute lobbied for state laws mandating that the code numbers appear on plastic products. Their express purpose was to fend off anti-plastic legislation, according to documents uncovered by the Center for Climate Integrity. The laws eventually passed in 39 states.

By the mid-1990s, the campaign to “educate” the public about plastic recycling had succeeded: Americans had a more favorable opinion of plastic, and efforts to ban or restrict production had died down. But recycling rates — the share of materials that actually get reprocessed — had barely improved. Instead, the United States started exporting plastic waste to China, where turning old plastic into new materials helped meet growing demand from manufacturers. Polling conducted for the American Plastics Council in 1997 showed that people who worked in waste management were losing hope that plastics could be recycled, while the public, journalists, and government officials believed they could be recycled at unrealistically high rates.

The problem was, fulfilling what companies called the “the urgent need to recycle” wasn’t as easy as the advertisements made it look. For decades, industry insiders expressed serious doubts that recycling plastic would ever be profitable, with one calling the economic case “virtually hopeless” in 1969. There are thousands of plastic products, and they all need to be sorted and put through different processes to be turned into something new. The way packaging is molded — blown, extruded, or stamped — means that even the same types of plastic can have their own melting points. A PET bottle bottle can’t be recycled with the clear PET packaging that encases berries. A clear PET bottle bottle can’t be recycled with a green one.

The plastics that do happen to get sorted and processed can only be “downcycled,” since melting them degrades their quality. Recycled plastic, it turns out, is more toxic than virgin plastic, liable to leach dangerous chemicals, so it can’t safely be turned into food-grade packaging. It’s also more expensive to produce. The result of this morass is that there is virtually no market for recycled plastics beyond those marked with 1s and 2s; the rest are incinerated or sent to landfills. Only 9 percent of the plastics ever produced have gone on to be recycled.

As plastic waste piled up and public frustration mounted, the Sustainable Packaging Coalition — backed by corporate giants including Procter and Gamble, Coca-Cola, and Exxon Mobil — launched a bigger, more specific recycling initiative in 2008 called “How2Recycle.” It came with new labels that appeared to provide clarity about which elements of a product could be recycled, distinguishing between plastic wrap and coated trays, sometimes qualifying the recycling logo with “store drop-off” labels for plastic bags and film.

But environmental advocates say that the How2Recycle labels, used by more than a third of the companies that package consumer goods, may be even more misleading than the resin code. For example, plastic yogurt containers made of polypropylene, number 5s, are considered “widely recyclable” under the system, yet only 3 percent of all the polypropylene containers produced actually get recycled.

The plastic resin code with the chasing arrows certainly confused people — 68 percent of Americans surveyed in 2019 said they thought anything labeled with the code could be recycled. But the How2Recycle labels “put the lies on steroids,” said Jan Dell, the founder of the nonprofit The Last Beach Cleanup. It’s not just a tiny triangular indent on the bottom of a container anymore, but a large, high-contrast recycling logo that “stares you in the face.”

Given the dismal state of plastic recycling, it might seem like the best thing to do is throw the chasing arrows in the garbage. But not all recycling is a failure. “Metals are the true success story,” said Carl Zimring, a waste historian at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. As much as three-quarters of all the aluminum that’s ever been produced is still in use, he said. Paper is also relatively easy to process, with more than two-thirds making its way into new products in the U.S. Even for a recycling standby like glass, though, less than a third gets broken down into fragments for new jars and bottles.

The recycling logo still gives anything it touches — whether feasible to recycle or not — a green aura. Surveys show that a majority of Americans believe recycling is one of the most effective ways they can fight climate change, when experts say it’s unlikely to make much of a difference in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That’s a credit to the iconic triangle, which has had 50 years to entrench itself in our culture. “It’s easy to bash on the image, or bash on corporations, without seeing this as something that is very powerful,” said Dunaway, the environmental historian. So is there a way to give the recycling symbol meaning again?

When recycling started taking off in the early 1990s, there was no definitive, agreed-upon definition of what it meant. “Anything is recyclable, at least theoretically,” one lawyer pointed out in a legal journal in 1991. The effort to impose some sort of order came from California, often the national laboratory for environmental protection. The state passed the country’s first restrictions on green claims in 1990, prohibiting advertisers from using terms like “ozone-friendly” and “recyclable” on items that didn’t meet its standards (though that stipulation didn’t survive a challenge in court).

Wider efforts to restrict the symbol, however, lacked strength and enforcement. In 1992, the Federal Trade Commission told advertisers they could call a product “recyclable” even if only 1 percent of their product was recycled. Not much else happened on that front until 2013, when the group that administers the plastic resin code, ASTM International, announced that it was replacing the chasing arrows with a solid triangle to reduce public confusion. It didn’t require manufacturers to rework their labels, though.

Today, that might finally be changing. When China banned the import of most plastics in 2018, it revealed problems that had long remained hidden. The United States had been shipping 70 percent of its plastic waste to China — 1.2 billion pounds in 2017 alone. States set about finding ways to fix the recycling system, with some focusing on the confusion generated by the symbol itself. In 2021, California — the world’s fifth-largest economy — passed a “truth in labeling” law prohibiting the use of the chasing arrows on items that are rarely recycled. To pass the test, 60 percent of Californians need to have access to a processing center that sorts a given material; on top of that, 60 percent of processors have to have access to a facility that will remanufacture the material into something else.

Though the bill faced opposition from companies right until it passed, the idea resonated with legislators, said Nick Lapis, the director of advocacy at Californians Against Waste. “It was pretty easy to understand that putting the chasing arrows symbol on a product that is not ever going to get recycled is not fair to consumers. Like, it just made so much intuitive sense that I think it kind of went beyond the lobbyist politics of Sacramento.”

Across the country, public officials in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, Minnesota, and Washington state are considering similar legislation. This spring, Maine passed a law to incentivize companies to use accurate recycling labels on their packaging. New rules around the recycling logo are also brewing at the national level. Last April, Jennie Romer, the EPA’s deputy assistant administrator for pollution prevention, called for the FTC to put an end to the “deceptive” use of the iconic chasing arrows on plastics in its upcoming revisions to the Green Guides for environmental marketing claims. “There’s a big opportunity for the Federal Trade Commission to make those updates to really set a high bar for what can be marketed as recyclable,” Romer told Grist. “Because that symbol, or marketing something as recyclable, is very valuable.”

Once California’s law goes into effect next year, state laws will clash with each other, since many states still require the resin numbers on plastic packaging. “The question on everyone’s mind is, who’s going to win out?” said Allaway, the Oregon official.

Talk of truth-in-labeling legislation has coincided with another trend — states trying to turn the costs for dealing with waste back on the manufacturers that produced it. Laws requiring “extended producer responsibility,” or EPR, for packaging have already been approved in Maine, Oregon, California, and Colorado. It’s already led to problems in California, since the EPR bill refers to the state’s truth-in-labeling law to determine which materials can be recycled, creating incentives for everything to be labeled as recyclable, Dell said.

Even if the Federal Trade Commission updates the Green Guides to prohibit the deceptive use of the recycling symbol, it doesn’t change the fact that the guides are just suggestions. They don’t carry the weight of law. “The FTC itself has never enforced a false recyclable label, ever, ever, on plastics, not once,” Dell said. One of Dell’s favorite metaphors: “It’s the wild, wild West of product claims and labeling, with no sheriff in town.”

So Dell has appointed herself de facto sheriff, suing companies over their false claims. In 2021, her organization reached a settlement with TerraCycle, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, and six other companies that agreed to change labels on their products. Dell recently filed a shareholder proposal with Kraft Heinz in an attempt to force it to remove recyclability claims from marshmallow bags and mac-and-cheese bowls destined for the landfill.

Another promising legal push is coming from California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who has been investigating fossil fuel and chemical companies for what he called “an aggressive campaign to deceive the public, perpetuating a myth that recycling can solve the plastics crisis.” Despite mounting awareness of plastic’s threat to public health, oil and chemical companies around the world make 400 million metric tons of the polymer every year, and production is on track to triple by 2060. It’s the oil industry’s backup business plan in the expectation that wealthy countries will shift away from gasoline in an effort to tackle climate change, since petroleum is the basic building block of plastics. Exxon Mobil, the world’s third-largest oil producer, ranks as the top plastic polymer producer.

Stricter enforcement around the use of the chasing arrows could lead to more accurate labels, less public confusion, and better outcomes for recycling centers. But it’s worth asking whether more recycling should even be the goal, rather than solutions that are much better for the environment, like reducing, reusing, refilling, and repairing. As Anderson, the symbol’s inventor, says, “I don’t think it’s really fair to blame a graphic symbol for all of our lack of initiative in trying to do better.”

Correction: This story originally mischaracterized Samantha MacBride’s position.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

SPACE

China and France launch satellite to better understand the universe

Agence France-Presse
June 22, 2024 

An artist's illustration of two neutron stars merging, creating a gamma-ray burst (A. Simonnet/AFP)

A French-Chinese satellite blasted off Saturday on a hunt for the mightiest explosions in the universe, in a notable example of cooperation between a Western power and the Asian giant.

Developed by engineers from both countries, the Space Variable Objects Monitor (SVOM) will seek out gamma-ray bursts, the light from which has travelled billions of light years to reach Earth.

The 930-kilogram satellite carrying four instruments -- two French, two Chinese -- took off around 3:00 pm (0700 GMT) aboard a Chinese Long March 2-C rocket from a space base in Xichang, in the southwestern province of Sichuan, AFP journalists witnessed.

Gamma-ray bursts generally occur after the explosion of huge stars -- those more than 20 times as big as the sun -- or the fusion of compact stars.

The extremely bright cosmic beams can give off a blast of energy equivalent to over a billion billion suns.

Observing them is like "looking back in time, as the light from these objects takes a long time to reach us", Ore Gottlieb, an astrophysicist at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Astrophysics in New York, told AFP.


- 'Several mysteries' -

The rays carry traces of the gas clouds and galaxies they pass through on their journey through space -- valuable data for better understanding the history and evolution of the universe.

"SVOM has the potential to unravel several mysteries in the field of (gamma-ray bursts), including detecting the most distant GRBs in the universe, which correspond to the earliest GRBs," Gottlieb said.


The most distant bursts identified to date were produced just 630 million years after the Big Bang -- when the universe was in its infancy.

"We are... interested in gamma-ray bursts for their own sake, because they are very extreme cosmic explosions which allow us to better understand the death of certain stars," said Frederic Daigne, an astrophysicist at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris.

"All of this data makes it possible to test the laws of physics with phenomena that are impossible to reproduce in the laboratory on Earth."


Once analyzed, the data could help to better understand the composition of space, the dynamics of gas clouds or other galaxies.

The project stems from a partnership between the French and Chinese space agencies as well as other scientific and technical groups from both nations.

Space cooperation at this level between the West and China is fairly uncommon, especially since the United States banned all collaboration between NASA and Beijing in 2011.


- Race against time -

"US concerns on technology transfer have inhibited US allies from collaborating with the Chinese very much, but it does happen occasionally," said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the United States.

In 2018, China and France jointly launched CFOSAT, an oceanographic satellite mainly used in marine meteorology.

And several European countries have taken part in China's Chang'e lunar exploration program.

So while SVOM is "by no means unique", it remains "significant" in the context of space collaboration between China and the West, said McDowell.

Once in orbit 625 kilometers (388 miles) above the Earth, the satellite will send its data back to observatories.


The main challenge is that gamma-ray bursts are extremely brief, leaving scientists in a race against time to gather information.

Once it detects a burst, SVOM will send an alert to a team on duty around the clock.

Within five minutes, they will have to rev up a network of telescopes on the ground that will align precisely with the axis of the burst's source to make more detailed observations.

Keeping astronauts healthy in space isn’t easy

The Conversation
June 18, 2024 

Astronaut Mike Hopkins (AFP)

In the coming decade, more people will go to space than ever before as human spaceflight enters a new era. NASA, the European Space Agency and other governmental agencies are partnering to develop crewed missions beyond the Moon. At the same time, these agencies are collaborating with private companies using new technologies to drive down the price of space exploration.

Companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin and Sierra Space have developed vehicles with reusable boosters, automated flight systems and lightweight materials to support these deep space missions. Some even have ambitions of their own to build private space stations, Moon bases or mining operations in the coming decades.

But as these technologies and partnerships rapidly make spaceflight more accessible, new challenges emerge. For one, maintaining the health and performance of an astronaut crew. My team of researchers and educators at the University of Colorado and others around the world are looking to address this issue.


With spaceflight set to expand, astronauts will need access to medical care over longer voyages and on commercial flights. Katya Arquilla

Emerging medical challenges in space


NASA astronauts are some of the most accomplished people on the planet, and they’re some of the healthiest. Astronauts undergo extensive medical and psychological testing that in one study disqualified 26% of final-round applicants. This rigorous screening and testing process effectively limits the chance of a medical event occurring during a mission.

But as spaceflight becomes more accessible, astronaut crews on commercial missions will likely make up the majority of space travelers in the coming years. Private missions will be short and stay in a close orbit around Earth in the near term, but private crews will likely have less training and more chronic medical conditions than the professional astronauts currently living and working in space.

While experiments aboard the International Space Station have extensively studied the normal physiological changes occurring to the human system in weightlessness, there is limited to no data about how common chronic diseases such as diabetes or high blood pressure behave in the space environment.



During Mars missions, astronauts will be away from Earth for long periods of time, with limited access to medical resources. CU/LASP EMM/EXI ITF/Kevin M. Gill, CC BY

This industry boom is also creating opportunities for long-duration missions to the Moon and Mars. Because of the length of missions and the distance from Earth, professional astronauts on these missions will experience prolonged weightlessness, leading to bone and muscle loss, communication delays of a few seconds up to 40 minutes, and extreme isolation for months to years at a time.


Crews must function autonomously, while being exposed to new hazards such as lunar or Martian dust. Because of the fuel required for these missions, resources will be limited to the lowest mass and volume possible.

As a result, mission planners will need to make difficult decisions to determine what supplies are truly necessary in advance, with limited or unavailable resupply opportunities for food, water and medicine. In space, for example, radiation and humidity inside a spacecraft can cause medications to deteriorate more quickly and become unavailable or even toxic to crew members.

Crews on the space station have access to a flight surgeon at Mission Control to help manage medical care in the same way telehealth is used on Earth. Crews on distant planets, however, will need to perform medical care or procedures autonomously.


In the event of a medical emergency, crews may not be able to evacuate to Earth. Unlike the space station, where medical evacuations to Earth can occur in less than 24 hours, lunar evacuations may take weeks. Evacuations from Mars may not be possible for months or even years.

Put simply, the current approaches to medical care in spaceflight will not meet the needs of future commercial and professional astronauts. Researchers will need to develop new technologies and novel training approaches to prepare future providers to treat medical conditions in space.

The current leaders in space medicine are either experts in aerospace engineering or in medicine, but rarely do experts have formal training or a complete understanding of both fields. And these disciplines often can’t speak each other’s language both literally and figuratively.

Training the next generation

To meet the evolving demands of human spaceflight, educators and universities are looking to develop a way to train specialists who understand both the limitations of the human body and the constraints of engineering design.

Some schools and hospitals, such as the University of Texas Medical Branch, have residency training programs for medical school graduates in aerospace medicine. Others, such as UCLA and Massachusetts General Hospital, have specialty training programs in space medicine, but these currently target fully trained emergency medicine physicians.

My team at the University of Colorado has created a program that integrates human physiology and engineering principles to train medical students to think like engineers.


The University of Colorado brings students to the desert to simulate a lunar base. Students work together to solve simulated medical issues that might occur during a space mission. Katya Arquilla

This program aims to help students understand human health and performance in the spaceflight environment. It approaches these topics from an engineering design and constraints perspective to find solutions to the challenges astronauts will face.

One of our most popular classes is called Mars in Simulated Surface Environments. This class puts students through engineering and medical scenarios in a simulated Mars environment in the Utah desert. Students deal with the challenges of working and providing care while wearing a spacesuit and on a desolate Mars-like landscape.

The stress of the simulations can feel real to the students, and they learn to apply their combined skill sets to care for their fellow crew members.

Educational programs like these and others aim to create cross-trained specialists who understand both patient care and the procedural nature of engineering design and can merge the two, whether for space tourists in orbit or as a pioneer to the surface of another planet.

A new period of spaceflight is here, and these programs are already training experts to make space accessible and safe.

Arian Anderson, Emergency Medicine Physician, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus


This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Say no to the DARC – stop accelerating the space arms race

18th June 2024Leave a Commenton Say no to the DARC – stop accelerating the space arms race

“If DARC is eventually sited at Bawdy, the UK government will be ensuring that the people of Wales become an integral part of any future war in space and therefore a possible target.”

By Dave Webb, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND)

Cawdor Barracks near Brawdy, about 10kms from St. Davids in a most beautiful part of Pembrokeshire, is set to be the site of another US military facility in the UK. It will include 21 receiving antenna dishes towering about 20m above the ground and 15m in diameter; 6 transmitting dishes of the same size; an operations building and perimeter and security fencing.

The RAF used Cawdor as an airfield from 1944 until it closed in 1992. It was reactivated in 1995 by the Army and became home to their electronic warfare unit. If the proposed development takes place, it will now become part of the US ‘Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability’ (DARC) system, an enhancement to US Space Surveillance Network (SSN) which includes the pyramid-shaped US ballistic missile early warning radar at Fylingdales in North Yorkshire and is controlled by the 18th Space Defence Squadron, which is a component of Space Force’s Space Delta 2 unit.

The existing data collection network can be affected by bad weather and DARC is being added to provide all-weather, 24/7 coverage of objects in geosynchronous orbit. DARC, part of the AUKUS defence agreement, will consist of three transmit/receive sites, in Texas, Australia and the UK, to detect, track and identify potential targets up to 36,000km away in geosynchronous orbit, where a lot of military surveillance and communications satellites are stationed.

And it would perform an important role in the US Space Domain Awareness (SDA) programme. SDA data is collected from an extensive collection of space-based sensors and ground-based telescopes and radars and combined with intelligence sources, produces a picture of the space environment. The US declares that SDA is needed to keep track of space debris and warn of possible collisions with satellites, but its main function is to detect, track, and identify objects in orbit, including active and inactive satellites. Thus, SDA enables the military to monitor the activities of others in space and can provide data for the targeting of anti-satellite systems.

The space component of SDA is a group of satellites called the Space-Based Space Surveillance (SBSS) system, which is maintained by the US Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office (the US intelligence agency that builds spy satellites). Coverage of the geosynchronous orbit is also enhanced by the US Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP) and a jointly funded spy satellite constellation called ‘Silent Barker’. The latter is a response to Russian and Chinese satellites that can manoeuvre in space and may engage with American space assets.

The war in Ukraine has reinforced how important space resources are to the military and US Space Command stated its aim of dominating and controlling space in its 1997 ‘Vision for 2020’. And domination of a region requires an ability to monitor everything that goes on there and that is why SDA is so important.

An article on DARC in the Global Times in 2021 explained how “[DARC] … is a significant escalation that has the potential to further change the direction of global military competition. The head of the Royal Air Force, Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Wigston, has bluntly predicted the next war could be won or lost in space. The primary purpose of the US and its allies in developing DARC is obviously to prepare for winning a war and to deter China and Russia.”

The response to DARC is likely to be more countermeasures from China and Russia, accelerating the space arms race. For almost 40 years the US has either abstained or voted against UN resolutions proposed by Russia and China to prevent an arms race in space sometimes the UK joins them. In May, Brig Gen Jesse Morehouse from US Space Command was reported as saying that the US had “no choice” but to prepare for orbital combat and that the US “is ready to fight tonight in space if we have to.”

If DARC is eventually sited at Bawdy, the UK government will be ensuring that the people of Wales become an integral part of any future war in space and therefore a possible target.

---

• A campaign against the radar – “Parc Against DARC” – has been now been launched. More details can be found here.
• Dave Webb is the Former Chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. You can follow the CND on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter/X.
• If you support Labour Outlook’s work amplifying the voices of left movements and struggles here and internationally, please consider becoming a supporter on Patreon.

Vatican convenes astrophysicists to discuss black holes, quantum theory

‘We think we have put together a dream team,’ said organizers of the event, which hopes to reconcile quantum theory and cosmology.

The Carina Nebula is one of the largest and brightest nebulae in the sky, located approximately 7,600 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina. Nebulae are stellar nurseries where stars form. The Carina Nebula is home to many massive stars, several times larger than the sun. (Image credits: NASA, ESA, CSA and STScI)

June 11, 2024
By Claire Giangravé


VATICAN CITY (RNS) — Renowned physicists, including two Nobel Prize winners, will gather at the Vatican Observatory near Rome next week to ponder the unresolved mysteries of the cosmos and to honor the legacy of Georges Lemaître, the priest who first theorized the Big Bang and the expansion of the universe.

“We think we have put together a dream team that we vehemently hope will lead to some innovative thinking,” said Fabio Scardigli, a theoretic physicist from the Polytechnic Institute of Milan and one of the organizers of the event, during a news conference Tuesday (June 11) presenting the meeting.

The workshop June 16-21 will bring together experts from two sides of the scientific community: those who study cosmology and the theory of relativity, and those physicists who study quantum theory. Organizers of the event hope that the gathering will foster dialogue about these two different and at times irreconcilable theories.

“Among the goals of this conference is to take small steps, through discussion and debate, to reconcile these two theoretic constructions of the 20th century,” Scardigli said.

The Vatican Observatory, called Specola Vaticana, was established in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII to promote dialogue between faith and science. Forty physicists will participate at the gathering, including Adam Riess, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for proving that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, and Roger Penrose, who won the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking study of black holes.

Participants also include Andrei Linde and Joseph Silk, who revolutionized cosmology through their studies on the first moments of the universe; Wendy Freedman, known for her groundbreaking research on the expansion of the universe; Licia Verde, an expert on dark matter and energy; Cumrun Vafa, who is considered a trailblazer for his studies on geometry and quantum physics; and Edward Witten, best known for his pioneering contributions to string theory.


The Vatican Observatory sits atop Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome. (Photo by H. Raab/Wikipedia/Creative Commons)

Participants are scheduled to meet with Pope Francis at the Vatican on June 19, and organizers believe the pope will deliver a speech.

While the Vatican might strike some as an unlikely partner for the advancement of science, the Catholic Church has played a key role in the field of physics throughout history. “I was a scientist for 20 years before I joined the Jesuits, and the most common reaction from fellow scientists was a freedom from them to tell me about the churches they belong to,” said Brother Guy Consolmagno, the director of the Vatican Observatory, during the news conference.

“In the field of cosmology, where we are so much aware of what we do not know, there is an openness to reflect on why there is something instead of nothing,” Consolmagno said, adding that “in the academic world you find more atheists in the literature department than among physicists.”

The verdant setting of Castel Gandolfo, where the Specola resides, offers a neutral ground for scientists to discuss theories, present their research and studies and butt heads on the cosmos’s conundrums, organizers said.

“It’s a place where scientists, researchers and academics can feel free to speak unencumbered by academic structures where they are bound to one type of theoretical current or another,” said the Rev. Gabriele Gionti, the vice director at the observatory.

In 2022, Gionti and the Rev. Matteo Galaverni, a priest in the Diocese of Reggio Emilia-Guastalla in northern Italy, theorized a new way to study gravity after the Big Bang. Their study was highly regarded in the scientific community and published in the prestigious Physical Review D journal. Gionti’s life work has been to attempt to reconcile quantum physics and cosmology, following in the footsteps of another influential physicist and priest: Lemaître.

RELATED: Pope recreates the 2014 Mideast peace prayer in Vatican Gardens to beg for an end to Gaza conflict

Born in Belgium in 1894, Lemaître was an innovator in the field of physics and theology, having joined the Priestly Fraternity of the Friends of Jesus. In 1927, he proved that the universe was expanding before Edwin Hubble, which led Lemaître to theorize the existence of “the primeval atom,” when the universe must have been compressed before the Big Bang.

That same year, the first theories on quantum physics emerged, challenging our understanding of the universe. Lemaître, whose studies outlined what would later be described as quantum gravity, was a friend of Albert Einstein, despite Einstein’s opposition to the theory of an expanding universe and quantum physics. Recognition of Lemaître’s lasting impact has been growing recently, with the International Astronomical Union voting in 2018 that the Hubble Law, which describes the speed at which galaxies are moving away from Earth, should be renamed the Hubble-Lemaître Law.

Quoting St. John Paul II, Consolmagno described faith and reason as two wings leading toward the truth. “Truth is the goal,” he said, “and for those of us who believe that God is the truth, exploring the truth leads us closer to God.”

100 years ago, our understanding of the universe exploded

The Conversation
June 14, 2024

The Universe (Shutterstock)

Astronomers, maybe more than anyone, appreciate what an island of perfection our Earth is. Our orbit may put us at a perfect distance from the sun for life to flourish, but it is too small to easily help astronomers determine how big the universe is.

Late Renaissance scholar Nicolaus Copernicus suggested that the Earth orbits the sun in 1543, but it took 300 years to prove it.

In 1838, a nearby star appeared to wobble because our viewpoint on Earth was moving due to our planet being in orbit around the sun. Such apparent motion is called “parallax.”

We can use only indirect means to find out how far away any external galaxy lies. Recent space missions allow us to see the apparent motion of billions of stars, but that still covers only a corner of our huge galaxy.

Until 100 years ago, it was greatly disputed whether other galaxies even existed, or if the Milky Way was the whole universe.

Explaining the universe

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant published Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens in 1755, speculating that certain small dim patches in the sky might be analogues of our Milky Way. These “nebulae” (the word means cloud) were usually viewed as nuisances, confusing comet hunters. Only with the development of large telescopes in the early 19th century were some of them seen to have a spiral form.

Seeking, much like Kant, a mechanical explanation for the universe and the formation of the solar system, the French mathematical astronomer Pierre Simon Laplace published Exposition du Système du Monde in 1796. Laplace survived the French Revolution to become a government minister under Napoleon, and eventually minor nobility when royalty returned to France: such survival skills enabled him to publish several editions of his influential book.

In it, Laplace describes the collapse of a gas cloud to form a star and solar system, a process for which we now have direct evidence. It was perhaps natural that the spiraling in of material to form a star became a preferred theory to explain the spiral nebulae.

There was no way to tell whether these spirals were new stars forming or Kant’s “island universes” until Edwin Hubble observed a star not wobbling, but instead varying in brightness in a nearby galaxy; Hubble presented his findings in January 1925.
Distance and luminosity

The Milky Way has several neighbouring galaxies. The Andromeda spiral (M31) resembles it, but the smaller, irregular pair of dwarf galaxies known as the Magellanic Clouds, visible only from southerly latitudes, are closer. Due to their huge distance from us, no outside galaxy can be seen to wobble (have parallax) due to Earth’s motion and another method is needed to find their distances.

Certain stars vary in brightness, and those called Cepheids are useful for indicating distance due to a relation between how much light they give off and their period of variation (in days).

This “period-luminosity” relation for Cepheids was discovered by pioneering astronomer Henrietta Leavitt using the Magellanic Clouds.

Calibration of Cepheids for use in any galaxy was done by American scientist Harlow Shapley, who had become famous by showing that the sun was not in the centre of the Milky Way. Ironically, Shapley did not believe that external galaxies existed.


A lesser-known figure, American astronomer Vesto Slipher, worked at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., built by the millionaire astronomer Percival Lowell to further his ideas about life on Mars and the presence of a then-unknown ninth planet (Pluto, discovered in 1930 before being demoted in 2006).


The original plates from Clyde Tombaugh’s discovery of Pluto in 1930. 

(Lowell Observatory Archives/Wikimedia Commons)


Slipher, working with a small telescope equipped with ingenious spectroscopes, had found that spiral nebulae move at high speeds, mostly away from us — which is usually regarded as Hubble’s second breakthrough. Slipher also found that they spin at high speed, which made such an impression that some leading astronomers claimed to see the motion (over years), proving the spiral nebulae to be nearby.

It took the world’s largest telescope, painstakingly used by Edwin Hubble, to resolve the question.

Measuring distance

Mount Wilson looms about 1.7 km above the Los Angeles basin. Before light pollution from the city became excessive, the mountainside was a suitable location for the Hooker telescope, finished in 1917. It was a powerful tool for the young Hubble, hired at the Mount Wilson Observatory in 1919 after serving in the military.

The apparent large size of the Andromeda nebula — many times larger than the moon if photographed to show the faint outer regions — meant it was nearby and might resolve the spiral nebula question if studied properly. Hubble initially studied novae — exploding stars that can be picked out due to their brightness.

Hubble had to work past the confusion that in 1885, Andromeda had hosted a supernova, something so unfamiliar at the time that it was thought to prove the Laplace collapse theory since the spiral seemed to have formed a new star near its centre. To make matters worse, among novae there is a lot of variation in brightness, so they are not good indicators of distance

Nevertheless, Hubble monitored them systematically. On a photograph taken in late 1923, he realized that one of his “novae” was fading in and out, and was in fact a Cepheid variable star, able to be used to determine distances accurately.

In 1924, Hubble found many more Cepheids, all able to have their actual luminosity determined. Knowing this and how faint they appeared as seen from Earth, Hubble was able to demonstrate that the Andromeda nebula was roughly two million light years away: a neighbouring spiral galaxy. Previously thought to be part of our own galaxy, Andromeda was in fact about one thousand times further away.

The new perception of the size of the universe allowed Hubble, several years later, to go further and propose Hubble’s Law, a theory of the expansion of the universe, yet later shown to have begun with the Big Bang 13.6 billion years ago.

But, at least in astronomy, 1924 was the year that the universe exploded.

Martin Connors, Professor of Space Science and Physics, Athabasca University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Quantum computers are like kaleidoscopes − metaphors illustrate science and technology

The Conversation
June 17, 2024

Quantum computing (Amin Van/Shutterstock.com)

Quantum computing is like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates: You never know what you’re gonna get. Quantum phenomena – the behavior of matter and energy at the atomic and subatomic levels – are not definite, one thing or another. They are opaque clouds of possibility or, more precisely, probabilities. When someone observes a quantum system, it loses its quantum-ness and “collapses” into a definite state.

Quantum phenomena are mysterious and often counterintuitive. This makes quantum computing difficult to understand. People naturally reach for the familiar to attempt to explain the unfamiliar, and for quantum computing this usually means using traditional binary computing as a metaphor. But explaining quantum computing this way leads to major conceptual confusion, because at a base level the two are entirely different animals.

This problem highlights the often mistaken belief that common metaphors are more useful than exotic ones when explaining new technologies. Sometimes the opposite approach is more useful. The freshness of the metaphor should match the novelty of the discovery.

The uniqueness of quantum computers calls for an unusual metaphor. As a communications researcher who studies technology, I believe that quantum computers can be better understood as kaleidoscopes.
Digital certainty vs. quantum probabilities

The gap between understanding classical and quantum computers is a wide chasm. Classical computers store and process information via transistors, which are electronic devices that take binary, deterministic states: one or zero, yes or no. Quantum computers, in contrast, handle information probabilistically at the atomic and subatomic levels.

Classical computers use the flow of electricity to sequentially open and close gates to record or manipulate information. Information flows through circuits, triggering actions through a series of switches that record information as ones and zeros. Using binary math, bits are the foundation of all things digital, from the apps on your phone to the account records at your bank and the Wi-Fi signals bouncing around your home.

In contrast, quantum computers use changes in the quantum states of atoms, ions, electrons or photons. Quantum computers link, or entangle, multiple quantum particles so that changes to one affect all the others. They then introduce interference patterns, like multiple stones tossed into a pond at the same time. Some waves combine to create higher peaks, while some waves and troughs combine to cancel each other out. Carefully calibrated interference patterns guide the quantum computer toward the solution of a problem.


Physicist Katie Mack explains quantum probability.

Achieving a quantum leap, conceptually

The term “bit” is a metaphor. The word suggests that during calculations, a computer can break up large values into tiny ones – bits of information – which electronic devices such as transistors can more easily process.

Using metaphors like this has a cost, though. They are not perfect. Metaphors are incomplete comparisons that transfer knowledge from something people know well to something they are working to understand. The bit metaphor ignores that the binary method does not deal with many types of different bits at once, as common sense might suggest. Instead, all bits are the same.

The smallest unit of a quantum computer is called the quantum bit, or qubit. But transferring the bit metaphor to quantum computing is even less adequate than using it for classical computing. Transferring a metaphor from one use to another blunts its effect.

The prevalent explanation of quantum computing is that while classical computers can store or process only a zero or one in a transistor or other computational unit, quantum computers supposedly store and handle both zero and one and other values in between at the same time through the process of superposition.

Superposition, however, does not store one or zero or any other number simultaneously. There is only an expectation that the values might be zero or one at the end of the computation. This quantum probability is the polar opposite of the binary method of storing information.

Driven by quantum science’s uncertainty principle, the probability that a qubit stores a one or zero is like Schroedinger’s cat, which can be either dead or alive, depending on when you observe it. But the two different values do not exist simultaneously during superposition. They exist only as probabilities, and an observer cannot determine when or how frequently those values existed before the observation ended the superposition.

Leaving behind these challenges to using traditional binary computing metaphors means embracing new metaphors to explain quantum computing.

Peering into kaleidoscopes

The kaleidoscope metaphor is particularly apt to explain quantum processes. Kaleidoscopes can create infinitely diverse yet orderly patterns using a limited number of colored glass beads, mirror-dividing walls and light. Rotating the kaleidoscope enhances the effect, generating an infinitely variable spectacle of fleeting colors and shapes.

The shapes not only change but can’t be reversed. If you turn the kaleidoscope in the opposite direction, the imagery will generally remain the same, but the exact composition of each shape or even their structures will vary as the beads randomly mingle with each other. In other words, while the beads, light and mirrors could replicate some patterns shown before, these are never absolutely the same.

If you don’t have a kaleidoscope handy, this video is a good substitute.

Using the kaleidoscope metaphor, the solution a quantum computer provides – the final pattern – depends on when you stop the computing process. Quantum computing isn’t about guessing the state of any given particle but using mathematical models of how the interaction among many particles in various states creates patterns, called quantum correlations.

Each final pattern is the answer to a problem posed to the quantum computer, and what you get in a quantum computing operation is a probability that a certain configuration will result.

New metaphors for new worlds

Metaphors make the unknown manageable, approachable and discoverable. Approximating the meaning of a surprising object or phenomenon by extending an existing metaphor is a method that is as old as calling the edge of an ax its “bit” and its flat end its “butt.” The two metaphors take something we understand from everyday life very well, applying it to a technology that needs a specialized explanation of what it does. Calling the cutting edge of an ax a “bit” suggestively indicates what it does, adding the nuance that it changes the object it is applied to. When an ax shapes or splits a piece of wood, it takes a “bite” from it.

Metaphors, however, do much more than provide convenient labels and explanations of new processes. The words people use to describe new concepts change over time, expanding and taking on a life of their own.

When encountering dramatically different ideas, technologies or scientific phenomena, it’s important to use fresh and striking terms as windows to open the mind and increase understanding. Scientists and engineers seeking to explain new concepts would do well to seek out originality and master metaphors – in other words, to think about words the way poets do.

Sorin Adam Matei, Associate Dean for Research, Purdue University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.