• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 352 0

few weeks he will design a vaccine for the new virus. To design the vaccine, he uses software that pulls down information from dozens of online databases, effectively asking and receiving answers to thousands of questions about viruses, their genes, the proteins they produce, and the effect of those proteins. But unlike our earlier examples, these questions aren’t made as one-off requests, h information. Instead, the software is asking the questions and receiving the answers in an automated way, almost invisibly to the scientist, weaving together knowledge acquired by tens of thousands of biologists, and then recombining that knowledge to help make a new discovery.

All over the world millions of connections like these are being made. Scientists whose work is currently stymied by difficult scientific problems are being connected to other scientists who have the expertise to quickly solve those problems. It’s an online market in expert attention, a sort of collaboration market that makes everyone more efficient and capable, better able to work on problems where they have a comparative advantage, and leaving other work for other people. In this collaboration market the sort of connections that today only happen by serendipity instead happen by design. At the same time as these connections between scientists are being made, a quieter but far greater exchange of knowledge is going on in the background, as scientists download and process vast quantities of data, in this way taking advantage of knowledge previously acquired by thousands of other scientists. This, too, is a collaboration market, but instead of specialized, one-off questions, it is for questions so standardized that they can be answered automatically.

Let us zoom back to the personal level, back to Pasadena and Caltech. Aside from your new collaboration with the materials scientist in Hungary, you spend most of your day working on one of your ongoing projects, an ambitious undertaking to design a quantum computer. Quantum computers are hypothetical computers that harness quantum mechanics to solve problems that aren’t feasible to solve on conventional computers. While large-scale quantum computers promise to be remarkable devices, building them is a huge challenge, because quantum states are very delicate. To meet this challenge, six months ago you and two colleagues started a project to design a quantum computer that really can be scaled up. Your project involves a special approach to quantum computing called topological quantum computing, an approach that relies on insights from many different fields of science, ranging from the mathematical field of topology to the physics of superconductors, and from semiconductor fabrication to all the detailed ins and outs of the theory of quantum computing. The project has rapidly grown to involve more than 100 scientists, from all over the world, collaborating online. Some of those scientists are theorists, with diverse expertise ranging across the many areas involved. But most are experimentalists, including some of the world’s top experts on superconductors and semiconductors, as well as materials scientists who specialize in preparing high-quality material samples. Those experimentalists are sharing their tricks and tips about what’s possible in the most advanced laboratories, the type of folklore knowledge that separates the labs at the forefront from those a step behind.

The collaboration hasn’t always made smooth progress toward its goal. But even when apparently insurmountable obstacles have arisen, it’s often been possible to get past those obstacles using the same collaboration market that saw you begin your Hungarian collaboration this morning. This has also helped draw new people and new expertise into the collaboration. As the collaboration has grown, it’s become your biggest ongoing commitment, and most days you spend at least an hour or two on the project. It’s gone much further than you first imagined, as the collaboration has found its way around obstacles that you thought were impassable, and, as the ideas