Peagram Lecturer 2025

Professor Tony Hey CBE

Tony Hey began his career as a theoretical physicist with a doctorate in particle physics from the University of Oxford. After a career in particle physics that included research positions at Caltech, MIT and CERN, and a professorship at the University of Southampton, he became interested in computing and computer science. His parallel computing research group in the Electronics and Computer Science Department at Southampton were one of the pioneers of distributed memory message-passing computers. His group also produced the first distributed memory ‘Genesis’ benchmark suite and also initiated a US-European standardization process for the now universally accepted ‘MPI’ message passing standard.
 
As Dean of Engineering at Southampton, Tony established one of the first open access digital research repositories. With Stevan Harnad, Wendy Hall, and Les Carr, colleagues in the Electronics and Computer Science Department, he was responsible for funding the development of the very successful open source EPrints software that has been used by many universities to set up open access research repositories.
 
Tony left Southampton in 2001 to lead the UK’s ground-breaking ‘eScience’ initiative. He recognized the importance of Big Data for science and with Professor Anne Trefethen, wrote one of the first papers on the growing importance of curating and linking scientific data: ‘The Data Deluge: An e-Science Perspective’. With librarian, Dr Jessie Hey, he also wrote an award-winning paper on ‘e-Science and its implications for the library community’ which recognized the importance of linking experimental datasets to research papers. In 2005 Tony joined Microsoft as a Vice-President in Microsoft Research in the US and was responsible for Microsoft’s global university research engagements. He worked with Turing Award winner Jim Gray on applying computer science technologies to science and edited the much-cited ‘Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery’ in tribute to Jim. 
 
He returned to the UK in 2015 as Chief Data Scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and founded a new ‘Scientific Machine Learning’ group. The group is applying machine learning technologies to the ‘Big Scientific Data’ generated by the Diamond Synchrotron, the ISIS neutron and muon source, the Electron Microscopy facility and the Central Laser Facility that are located on the Harwell campus. The discovery of the effectiveness of Deep Learning neural networks in 2012 is now revolutionizing much of science. The recent progress in Large Language models using ‘transformer’ neural networks is a very exciting development and chatbots like ChatGPT are promising not only to transform much of business but also programming and scientific discovery.
 
Tony is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Engineering and Technology, the British Computer Society, the Institute of Physics and the Royal Academy of Engineering. He wrote up Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman’s ‘Lectures on Computation’ in which Feynman also discussed his ideas for a quantum computer. Tony is also the co-author of three popular books on science and computing – ‘The New Quantum Universe’, ‘Einstein’s Mirror’ and ‘The Computing Universe – Journey Through a Revolution’ – as well as the best-selling graduate text ‘Gauge Theories in Particle Physics’ with Ian Aitchison. His latest book is a collection of articles on ‘AI for Science’. In 2005, he was awarded a CBE for his services to science.

The Peagram Lecture   Einstein, Bohr and John Bell: Entanglement, Hidden Variables and Quantum Computers

The talk will begin with a survey of the quantum description of polarized light and the concept of wave-particle duality. Although it was Einstein who had first introduced the idea of light as a stream of particle-like photons, he remained unhappy about the probabilistic nature of the predictions of quantum mechanics. He believed that these probabilities only appeared because the present quantum theory was incomplete and needed to be supplemented by some yet-to-be-determined ‘hidden variables’. After a series of debates with Niels Bohr, Einstein and two young colleagues came up with what is now called the ‘Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen’ or EPR experiment. This seems to show that a quantum mechanical description of their EPR  experiment requires ‘spooky’ faster-than-light signalling between the two separated final states. In terms of the debate between Einstein and Bohr, the result seemed to be a draw and that there was an unreconcilable philosophical disagreement between their two explanations. However, in 1964, 30 years later, the Irish physicist John Bell came up with an inequality for the results of the EPR experiment arising from ‘common-sense’ pre-determined conditions - such as could be provided by knowledge of Einstein’s hidden variables. However, the dramatic results of an actual EPR experiment showed a violation of Bell’s inequality and agreed instead with predictions of quantum mechanics. This talk shows how such a fundamental and powerful result can be appreciated without the use of any advanced mathematics.

The second half of the talk will briefly discuss Feynman’s ideas that he gave in a talk at MIT 40 years ago about the possibility of building a new type of computer. In his talk he showed how a computer made up of intrinsically quantum mechanical components could be used to simulate large quantum systems that could not be simulated on a classical computer. Remarkably, Feynman stated explicitly that such a computer was ‘not a Turing machine, but a machine of a different kind’. There has been considerable progress towards actually building a quantum computer and much theoretical work on the new field of quantum information science. In the EPR experiment, the final two-particle quantum state is said to be ‘entangled’ and it is this entanglement that is responsible for the spooky faster-than-light correlations. The new generation of quantum information theorists are now boldly making use of quantum entanglement as a foundational element of their research. 

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