Dear Henry Ford,
My feelings for you are twisted, contradictory, and deeply intense. I write this short letter to you, not for your benefit, but for my own: to sort through the confusing emotional state I find myself in.
In the turmoil of the 1910s, you instituted the 40-hour work week at Ford Motors and doubled the wages for your workers. You saw a massive increase in productivity, which led you to continue the practice; I'm sure your workers appreciated it. Don't get me wrong: 8-hour days are significantly better than 10- or 12-hour ones, but I don't think you understood the gravity of that simple change.
Over the next 20 years, people copied you, Henry. They envied your success. They too gave their workers a strict schedule, as formalized by Welsh reformer Robert Owen in 1817: "8 hours of work, 8 hours of recreation, 8 hours of rest."
What I don't think you realized was that your choice to put that rule in place forced the hand of the United States government. In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act codified the 8-hour workday into federal law. When those bigwigs imagined the American dream, they saw Ford Motors on a glistening throne of gold, surrounded by the angels of General Motors, DuPont, General Electric, and U.S. Steel.
8-hour days were your commandment, Henry, and your people obeyed. Not only did they obey, but the last century's worth of American laborers have been christened with the 8-hour workday. They spend their entire lives wasting away, drones mindlessly following the rule that you so carelessly tossed at your plaything, your entertainer, your manufacturing machine. We're not dolls, Ford, we're people.
Without you, America would have moved forward still—albeit with a slower reformation of labor rights—but the damage wouldn't have been so deep. I much prefer scrapes to stitches, and the 40-hour work week has since become the wound we cannot close.
It's thanks to you, Henry Ford, that I have to wake up at the very reasonable hour of 8 AM, take a 15 minute bath in the warm sunshine of a picturesque valley, and exercise my God-given right to think, all in an attempt to solve some of the most interesting problems I have ever heard of.
It's your fault, Henry Ford, that I am trapped. I have no choice but to be paid a very normal amount for the time I put in, be forced to socialize with other motivated researchers, and receive particularly noteworthy mentorship from people who care about my development.
There is no one to blame but you, Henry Ford, for the completely and totally typical life that I now live. For now, gone are my night-to-mornings watching the moving pictures, jesting with my closest of acquaintances, and waking up at noon. I hate you for that, Henry Ford.
When you stood at the Gates of Heaven, I hope God looked you in the face and said, "Nice try, buddy. You're to blame for the 40-hour work week, and somehow, it made its way up here. Even I'm on salary—to think, it could've been healthcare."
If you send a return letter, I won't read it. I'll be busy. Working.
All the worst,
-Will
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As you might have guessed, I have begun my initiation into adult life by starting a full-time job. I really have nothing to complain about, as it's exactly what I want to be doing anyway, but I still feel like I've lost some of my sweet freedom. I can't just leave 'cause it got boring and go find something more interesting to do. I have to, like, focus on one thing for long periods of time, which isn't my favorite activity. I don't really have coworkers to mess around with. There's no time when there isn't work to be done, since the nature of research is to keep moving forward. There isn't a set of required daily tasks; you just have to go where the wind takes you.
Speaking of moving randomly, that's exactly what my research is about. I'm using quantum random walks to simulate the movement of things like fires and pandemics. Don't worry, that's just the flashy title and fancy words we use to describe to impress other scientists. It's super simple, and if you don't believe me, I'm about to change your mind. Don't turn your brain off if I mention anything you've never heard of, because I promise it isn't difficult.
Think about a drunk person, stumbling around. He (or she, what's wrong with you?) will walk until he falls over. The direction is totally random, each step isn't related to the others. Some of his steps are big, some are little, but there's an average size that they kinda hover around. Let's say you start a timer, say, 30 seconds. How far is that guy gonna get in 30 seconds? Well, he's going to do a fair amount of backtracking, but you can probably draw a circle to estimate how far he's gonna wander until he falls over.
This is basically a classical random walk. Every step has an equal chance of moving left, right, up, or down. Since they're equal, whatever you're tracking can move backwards in the same direction that they just came from. Since the step lengths tend to cluster around whatever that average length was, they can be sampled from a bubble over the average, called a normal distribution (or a Gaussian, if you know physics well).
If you let that guy walk around a million times, taking those steps sampled from his distribution of step sizes, you get something called Brownian Motion, where the most likely ending place is around where he started.
Since drunk people are abundantly available, this is an experimentally testable result.
There are a few math rules you can pull out of this situation. The most important one is how long it takes him to get far from the center. It turns out that the spread (standard deviation) of this situation is related to the square root of how long your timer was. You'd expect the occasional drunk person to get pretty far from the start if you let them walk for a long time, but not very often. How far do they get, assume they can take a certain number of steps in the time? Square root of the step count on average. Let a walker take 100 steps, and on average, it'll only end up 10 steps away from where it started.
This is all well and good, but when viruses and fires move, they don't go backward. Our best equations to calculate where they're going to move demonstrate that they spread out at the same rate that they take steps. If you let a virus take 100 steps, it will, on average, end up 100 steps away. This makes intuitive sense, doesn't it? To predict these crazy things, we can either get a ton of data to solve an equation, or simulate the network and starting configuration according to the rules we set up.
If we tried to use Brownian Motion (the square root one), it wouldn't match up with the known behavior of the fires and pandemics that ruin our lives. Luckily, there is another approach. By modeling these walkers as waves, we introduce an incredibly useful property: interference.
When two waves hit each other, they combine. You've probably seen this in a swimming pool. But they don't always get bigger. They sometimes cancel each other out. If you hit a wave with its inverted twin, they combine to zero. This is how noise cancelling headphones work.
Remember how I said that pandemics and fires don't travel backwards? We can just set a rule in our simulation that says, "Every time the wave moves, put a negative on the direction it just came from." Then, when the wave tries to spread to that spot in the following step, it cancels itself out, causing it to move in other directions instead.
This is why quantum computers are really useful: they work with waves instead of definite values. Turns out, humanity has been pretty stuck on these types of problems for a long time. They've tried using Brownian Motion (and a whole lot of other really complicated tricks) to solve the issue of predicting compounding networks. Ask people who trade stocks where their stock prices will be in a year. If they're right, they're either rich, or in charge of the market. With a quantum computer, I can (hopefully) improve the modeling and simulation of really terrible events that kill people and stuff. Of course, I'm not actually pushing anything forward, I'm mostly just rederiving the same things that the real heroes are figuring out. I'm just a full-time drone, remember?
Anyway, that's what I'm slaving away on. I'm headed to Arches with the 25-student research cohort that I'm a part of tomorrow, so that will be fun. My old work buddies and I won the intramural kickball semi-finals yesterday, so we've got the finals today. Wish us luck. We want those t-shirts.
See you later,
-(W)i(LL) (<-- that's for Jacob)
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