Note- Few parts of the article are little scientific in nature and may be little hard to understand, nevertheless for the purpose of simplicity, we have highlighted the important parts and that is what matters from civil service exam standpoint.
China has achieved the first successful teleportation of a photon into space, emerging a leader in science and technology. India needs an indomitable focus and execution to achieve a feat such as this, or even more.
In what looks like a page materialising straight from science fiction, China has achieved the first successful teleportation of a photon into space. This is a tremendous achievement and the fundamental paradoxical irony underlying it cannot go undetected, even by quantum encryption.
What lies at the heart of this technological feat is EPR (Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen) paradox. Originally a theoretical effort to undermine quantum mechanics’ depiction of reality, Albert Einstein along with fellow physicists Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, pointed out the ‘spooky action at a distance’ as an impossible outcome of quantum mechanics. What was a thought experiment to criticise the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, the debate about which made Einstein famously quip that god does not play dice with the universe, has today literally giant-leaped into a very real space experiment.
In between the 1935 EPR paper and the 2017 Space-earth photon ‘teleportation’ there are some important pages. In 1952, David Bohm, the great theoretical physicist had proposed some improvements to the original EPR paradox. He suggested that there might be some hidden variables and the universe after all may be a deterministic one as Einstein thought. In 1964, Irish physicist John Bell working on Bohm’s ideas, figured out how the EPR paradox could be made into real physical experiments.
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Einstein has considered two electrons with known quantum states from a source. When the position of one of these electrons is measured at some point, then that automatically changes the position of the other electron. The changes in the measurements of one particle brought about by measuring another particle at a very great distance is the ‘spooky action’ Einstein talked about. It was Erwin Schrodinger who had described Einstein’s proposed electrons from the source as being “entangled” (verschrankt). Now, the phenomenon is popularly known as “quantum entanglement”.
Quantum entanglement is a physical phenomenon that occurs when pairs or groups of particles are generated or interact in ways such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently of the others, even when the particles are separated by a large distance—instead, a quantum state must be described for the system as a whole
After the theoretical possibility becoming an experiment in real life, there have been no full stops. In technology, it paved the way for quantum computing. The bit that we use in classical computing has on and off states. In quantum computing, the basis is qubit which has the values 0 and 1 and also the superimposed state. This along with quantum entanglement paved the way for what is known as quantum teleportation – instantaneous transfer of information.
The pioneer in the field of quantum teleportation is Austrian physicist Anton Zeilinger. He succeeded in quantum teleporting. It should be remembered here that quantum teleportation is NOT the ‘beaming’ up one sees in science fiction movies. It is not the physical object that is teleported, but its quantum states. The paper ‘Experimental Quantum Teleportation’ published in Nature in the December of 1997 by Zeilinger and his colleagues announced the exciting news in a language that all can understand:
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Quantum teleportation — the transmission and reconstruction over arbitrary distances of the state of a quantum system — is demonstrated experimentally. During teleportation, an initial photon which carries the polarisation that is to be transferred and one of the pairs of entangled photons, are subjected to a measurement such that the second photon of the entangled pair acquires the polarisation of the initial photon. This latter photon can be arbitrarily far away from the initial one. Quantum teleportation will be a critical ingredient for quantum computation networks.
They also observed the tremendous technological possibilities inherent in them: “Besides the promising developments of quantum cryptography (the first probable secure way to send secret messages), we have only recently succeeded in demonstrating the possibility of quantum dense coding, a way to quantum mechanically enhance datacompression.”
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On 16 August 2016, China launched Micius – a satellite which can generate quantum entangled photons. It can send the entangled photons to land stations in Austria and China. Placed at sun-synchronous orbit 500 kilometres above the earth, (1,400 km at horizon), Micius also has ultra-sensitive light detectors, which can detect the quantum states of the photons it gets from the Earth.
With the land station established at 4,000 metres above the altitude at the occupied territory of Tibet (thus reducing the distance of atmospheric interference with the photons), Chinese teams have been creating entangled photon pairs from the base at the rate of 4,000 per second.
Thirty two days and millions of photons later 911 cases turned triumphant. The Chinese team has announced ‘the first quantum teleportation of independent single-photon qubits from a ground observatory to a low Earth orbit satellite — through an up-link channel — with a distance up to 1,400 km’. They have further announced that their achievement ‘establishes the first ground-to-satellite up-link for faithful and ultra-long-distance quantum teleportation, an essential step toward global-scale quantum internet’.
The socio-political paradox of totalitarian Chinese government announcing a major technological breakthrough in the formation of quantum internet is too obvious to ignore. A country, where internet censorship is very high, is moving towards the realisation of quantum internet that provides the highest standards of web-based privacy. Quantum internet communications based on q-cryptography are theoretically impossible to crack.
There are other fundamental ironies as well. Marxist governments have traditionally run inquisition against quantum mechanics. Often their theoreticians denounced the new physics as ‘bourgeois science’ and ‘decadent fall into mysticism’.
Sure enough, even in the path to quantum computing and teleportation of the scientists we saw, Bohm was almost a mystic and his conversations with philosopher J Krishnamurthy are legendary. Anton Zeilinger the man who made the first quantum teleportation over the distance of more than 100 km, had invited the Dalai Lama to his laboratory. He and his colleagues had visited Dharamsala and discussed quantum physics and cosmology with the Dalai Lama.
Despite all these hurdles at the theoretical level, the Chinese had pulled off a technological achievement over all others in the field of q-computation. Of course, behind this success is a huge human cost.
The Long March rocket series of which one took the satellite to sun-synchronous orbits have been tested with the least concern for human safety. Failed rocket launches had exploded over populous villages and casualties are unknown to the outside world. They could build their satellite land centres in high altitude places of occupied Tibet and still engineer the cooperation of global scientific community. All these have gone into the success, which is definitely a great milestone in the history of science.
What about India?
India is bound to compete with China in science and technology. However India does not have the luxury of the tyranny of state power. It has chosen the harder path. It has chosen democracy and still she has to achieve and perhaps even outsmart the Chinese competition. When Sputnik was launched by the Soviets, it shocked the Americans because they realised not just the technological superiority of the then USSR but also the propaganda value of the achievement – that the Marxist society is superior to democratic society. Today India faces the same challenge.
Unlike Marxist China, India does not have any dogmatic opposition to quantum mechanics or genetics. India has to revamp its education system. It should make science popular and interesting for the coming generations.
Unfortunately, Nehruvian ‘scientific temper’ degenerated into a political slogan often aimed at slandering the Indian culture as ‘unscientific’. It has had two major ill effects. One is the absolute psychological alienation of the masses from science as something alien to Indian culture. Another is the childish cargo-cult like claims of the Eric Von Daniken variety. We need to revamp not only our educational system, but also the socio-cultural orientation towards science.
It is not an accident that China has also emerged a major contributor to global science fiction. China has ignored all the ideological incompatibilities its official dogma has with the worldview of quantum mechanics. India, in this regard, actually had an initial advantage over China. In fact, then some Indian teams sitting in absolutely impoverished science departments in isolated universities in India were competing with global leaders of science in unravelling profound mysteries in science of that day. Yet down the line China has beaten us down and has emerged as a world leader in the technology of the people.
While China can build anything anywhere for making itself a world leader in science and technology, in India, as we just saw in the case of Neutrino Observatory in Tamil Nadu, a bunch of lunatic Luddites stopped the international project in science that could benefit the nation and humanity. Given all her handicaps, and her ethically laudable determination to stick to democracy rather than dictatorship, India does have impressive achievements in science and technology. In his recent book Deep Thinking, while pointing out to Chinese ascendancy in the field of artificial intelligence, Gary Kasparov recalls the response of the US to the ‘crisis’ in telling words:
Sputnik stoked American fires in the most primeval ways: creating fear and anger, and denting America’s national ego and pride. The United States responded. In 1958, three years before President John F. Kennedy boldly promised to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, then–Senator Kennedy supported legislation called the National Defense Education Act, which directly funded science education across the country. The future engineers, technicians, and scientists produced by the program would form the generation that designed and built much of the digital world we live in today.
Today, US may have lost that fire. But India, being China’s neighbour and a competitor at many levels, is governed by the same equations which governed the US attitude to Soviet technological achievements. And for us, the task is even more complex and needs more of an indomitable focus and execution. We represent a pluralist democracy and an ancient nation. We do not have the luxury to be defeated in the vital fields of science and technology by an expansionist undemocratic neighbour.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.