The QSE Roadmap and Journal is undergoing a major upgrade this week (Dec. 18-25) to a new graphical interface. Some of the Roadmap entries may be temporarily truncated: they will return after they have been converted. Happy Holidays to all!

---

To apply for the UW ME Department's tenure-track faculty position(s) in quantum system engineering, please see this advertisement.

The ME Department encourages any and all qualified applicants, from both theoretical and experimental backgrounds, who seek to create and teach new technologies that push against the bounds that quantum mechanics imposes on the speed, accuracy, sensitivity, size, and power consumption of modern mechatronic devices.

This position provides a wonderful opportunity to participate in creating and teaching the new, exciting, strategically important, and rapidly growing engineering discipline of quantum system engineering (QSE).

---

The Bannner of the QSE Roadmap and Journal

The figures in the banner all pursued federative goals in science and technology that (in one sense or another) are parallel to the objectives of this journal, and of the QSE Roadmap that guides it.

The following are some preliminary remarks, which will be amended during the coming year; readers are encouraged to follow the links.

Spinoza (LINKS)
The honor of friendship and cheerfulness

Our QSE Group's engineering goal is extend Spinoza's microscopy goals to their ultimate limit: three-dimensional atomic-resolution microscopy of living tissues.

Caroline Herschel (LINKS)
A personal equation

Caroline Herschel spearheaded the transformation of science from the privileged activity of an elite to an open, democratic activity accessible to all.

Our use of the phrase a personal equation is a dual tribute to Herschel's observational skills and her breaking of gender barriers.

Linus Pauling (LINKS)
Possibilities for progress

Linus Pauling proposed the first system biology center grant in 1945. Pauling's visionary proposal is still viable today, sixty years later.

John von Neumann (LINKS)
The earth as an entity.

In 1995—during the last two years of his life—John von Neumann vividly foresaw the emerging strategic danger inherent in what we now understand as the society-destroying confluence of technological flattening and global environmental degradation.

The following excerpt is from von Neumann's 1955 essay Can We Survive Technology?:

Intervention in atmospheric and climatic matters will come in a few decades, and will unfold on a scale difficult to imagine at present. ... Such actions would be more directly and truly worldwide than recent, or presumably, future wars, or the economy at any time. ... All this will merge each nation's affairs with those of every other, more thoroughly than the threat of a nuclear or any other war would have done.

The crisis is due to the rapidity of progress, to the probable further acceleration thereof, and to the reaching of certain critical relationships. Specifically, the effects that we are now beginning to produce are of the same order of magnitude as 'the great globe itself. Indeed, they affect the earth as an entity.

Hence further acceleration can no longer be absorbed as in the past by an extension of the area of operations. ... The most hopeful answer is that the human species has been subjected to similar tests before, and seems to have a congenital ability to come through, after varying amounts of trouble.

Had he lived, von Neumann might reasonably have foresworn his pursuit of thermonuclear weapons, and refocussed his research upon his earlier interests in microscopy and system biology, the latter having greater consequence in light of the above global strategic challenges.

Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Sacagawea (LINKS)
A journal of discovery, resources for a nation, and a survival sweepstakes

For our QSE Group, the salient aspects of Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery are (1) their journey was accomplished by ordinary people, and (2) they kept a journal that told everyone how to do it! Their journal encouraged people to open a vast new resource frontier; this is our QSE Journal's goal too.

Shiing-Shen Chern and Shing-Tung Yau (LINKS)
Foundations for understanding

Our QSE Group discovered the work of Shiing-Shen Chern and Shing-Tung Yau, (and Yau's partnership with the prominent Chinese businessmen Gerald Chan and Ronnie Chan) through our emerging interest in the mathematics of quantum model order reduction (MOR), specifically, when we recently discovered that the building-blocks of quantum MOR are Kähler manifolds (see also Shing-Tung Yau's review).

As this journal will make clear, Kähler manifolds are the mathematical arena within which quantum physics is being transformed into quantum engineering. For us engineers, this transformation is very exciting! An important purpose of this journal is to communicate this excitement.

Remarks on China's Science and Technology Megaproject (LINKS)

In recent months our QSE Group has observed China's technology development efforts with great interest, because China's Ministry of Science and Technology has announced that China's Science and Technology Plan will focus upon four "megaprojects in fundamental science and engineering".

The four focus areas of China's Science and Technology (S&T) Megaprojects are:

1. protein science;
2. quantum physics;
3. nanotechnology;
4. developmental biology.

Our QSE Group was surprised, and pleased—and more than a little bit daunted—to see that China's four S&T Megaproject goals are in one-to-one correspondance with the Apollo-scale and Apollo-style objectives that our QSE Group has been pursuing, and which this daily journal chronicles:

1. survey the global biome, comprehensively, with atomic resolution,
2. by the new technology of quantum microscopy,
3. as realized by the "smaller, colder, quieter" path of nanotechnology,
4. in service of "regenerative healing for every wounded soldier".

The engineering effort of our QSE Group can thus be understood as an effort—more near-term and more tightly focussed, yet philosophically similar—to achieve the same strategic objectives as China's Science and Technology Megaprojects.

The Vital Role of Mathematics in the QSE Roadmap and in China's S&T Megaprojects

Our QSE Group anticipates that within the context of the thee QSE Roadmap, and also China's Megaproject, the creative efforts of mathematicians like Shing-Tung Yau will have global strategic consequences similar to the work of Julian Schwinger on Green functions.

The strategic parallel is that Schwinger's work was originally undertaken in the specific context of radar development, and yet it eventually proved to be seminal across a broad spectrum of fundamental mathematics, science and engineering.

Similarly, it is becoming clear (to our QSE Group) that the Kähler manifolds whose study Yau has pioneered will provide the conceptual foundation and computational tools upon which much 21st Century quantum science and engineering will be built—including the science and engineering foundations of both China's S&T Megaprojects and of the quantum system engineering effort that this daily journal chronicles.

As one of our journal entries states: "the frontier is unbounded, the challenges are tough, the parallels are compelling, the missions are urgent, the opportunities are unlimited."

We owe mathematicians like Shiing-Shen Chern and Shing-Tung Yau (and many others) enormous gratitude for creating the conceptual foundations for our effort.

Observations on the Strategic Scope of China's S&T Megaproject Goals
Contrasted with Those of America's Apollo Program

China's S&T Megaproject is part of a national science and technology development effort that is unparalleled in scope: the net Chinese investment in research and development during the period 2005–20020 is budgeted to be 1.1 trillion US dollars.

Our QSE Daily Journal often uses the phrase "Apollo-scale and Apollo-style" in reference to our QSE Program's objectives, which (as we have noted above) are closely confluent with China's S&T Megaproject objectives.

But upon analysis, we see that quantum microscopy's strategic performance objectives—and those of China's S&T Megaproject—are significantly more ambitious than those of the Apollo Program in the following respects:

1. Quantum biospace is larger than outer space; every cell contains 100x as many atoms as there are stars in the galaxy.
2. Individual citizens will have access to the new resources of biospace, because quantum instruments needed to explore biospace are desktop-scale,
   (as contrasted with, e.g., the enormous size of a Saturn V booster).
3. The exploration of biospace engages moral and strategic issues that are intimately entangled with every person's daily life.

We anticipate that quantum instruments will be produced in enormous numbers, at low cost, for individual use, and that the flood of bioinformation these instruments produce will comprise the 21st Century's greatest single new resource for lifting the globe from "hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos."

Does the Future Belong to China?

The federative synergy that is so strikingly evident in China's development strategy has led our QSE Group to a deeper appreciation of a phrase that is heard worldwide: "the future belongs to China."

Our QSE Group believes that the future belongs not to any one nation, but to all nations in which free individuals, governments, and businesses work together, and especially to the individual citizens of those nations. For the people of the globe to survive and prosper, the 21st Century must be a century in which—as this daily journal discusses—"ordinary people can make extraordinary contributions."

Our professional goal as quantum system engineers is to help ordinary people make the extraordinary contributions that the 21st Century requires.

Gen. George C. Marshall (LINKS)
Responsibility for victory

The United States is at war—the Global War on Terror (GWOT)—and our QSE Group therefore studies carefully the lessons of war. The goal of helping to win the GWOT is a central organizing principle of our QSE Group's research.

President Truman famously called Gen. Marshall "the architect of victory." More than any other person on this page, Gen. Marshall's personal example and strategic thought has inspired and guided our own quantum system engineering efforts. This consonance is not too surprising, since Gen. Marshall himself was trained as a civil engineer, and his way of thinking is well-adapted to guiding engineering enterprises.

When we reflect that President Hu Jintao of China is also an engineer, as are all nine members of China's Politburo, then we are not surprised that China's 21st Century economic and military activities—in particular, China's above-mentioned S&T Megaproject goals—are broadly consonant with an overall Marshall-type strategy for winning the GWOT.

Gen. Marshall's assistant secretary has vividly described Marshall's personal character, which was exemplary. Marshall's Nobel Peace Prize Lecture describes his objectives, which remain as valid today as they were in 1953.

Gene Kranz (LINKS)
Failure is not an option

For our entire planet—and especially when it comes to winning the GWOT—failure is not an option.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin (LINKS)
Don't do evil; Democracy Works

Nothing could be more federative than Google's corporate philosophy, and the profound effects this philosophy is exerting upon the world of knowledge:

The need for information crosses all borders. Though Google is headquartered in California, our mission is to facilitate access to information for the entire world, so we have offices around the globe. [...] To accelerate the addition of new languages, Google offers volunteers the opportunity to help in the translation through an automated tool available on the Google.com website. This process has greatly improved both the variety and quality of service we're able to offer users in even the most far-flung corners of the globe.

Jane Goodall (LINKS)
Reason for hope

So long as individuals, corporations, religions, and nations of good will cooperate in solving the world's problems, there is reason for hope.

---

---