The author who listens to the sound of the cosmos

In 1983, while on a field recording assignment in Kenya, the musician and soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause noticed something remarkable. Lying in his tent late one night, listening to the calls of hyenas, tree frogs, elephants, and insects in the surrounding old-growth forest, Krause heard what seemed to be a kind of collective orchestra. Rather than a chaotic cacophony of nighttime noises, it was as if each animal was singing within a defined acoustic bandwidth, like living instruments in a larger sylvan ensemble. 

Unsure of whether this structured musicality was real or the invention of an exhausted mind, Krause analyzed his soundscape recordings on a spectrogram when he returned home. Sure enough, the insects occupied one frequency niche, the frogs another, and the mammals a completely separate one. Each group had claimed a unique part of the larger sonic spectrum, a fact that not only made communication easier, Krause surmised, but also helped convey important information about the health and history of the ecosystem.

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 2024

Krause describes his “niche hypothesis” in the 2012 book The Great Animal Orchestra, dubbing these symphonic soundscapes the “biophony”—his term for all the sounds generated by nonhuman organisms in a specific biome. Along with his colleague Stuart Gage from Michigan State University, he also coins two more terms—“anthropophony” and “geophony”—to describe sounds associated with humanity (think music, language, traffic jams, jetliners) and those originating from Earth’s natural processes (wind, waves, volcanoes, and thunder).

In A Book of Noises: Notes on the Auraculous, the Oxford-based writer and journalist Caspar Henderson makes an addition to Krause’s soundscape triumvirate: the “cosmophony,” or the sounds of the cosmos. Together, these four categories serve as the basis for a brief but fascinating tour through the nature of sound and music with 48 stops (in the form of short essays) that explore everything from human earworms to whale earwax.

We start, appropriately enough, with a bang. Sound, Henderson explains, is a pressure wave in a medium. The denser the medium, the faster it travels. For hundreds of thousands of years after the Big Bang, the universe was so dense that it trapped light but allowed sound to pass through it freely. As the primordial plasma of this infant universe cooled and expansion continued, matter collected along the ripples of these cosmic waves, which eventually became the loci for galaxies like our own. “The universe we see today is an echo of those early years,” Henderson writes, “and the waves help us measure [its] size.” 

The Big Bang may seem like a logical place to start a journey into sound, but cosmophony is actually an odd category to invent for a book about noise. After all, there’s not much of it in the vacuum of space. Henderson gets around this by keeping the section short and focusing more on how humans have historically thought about sound in the heavens. For example, there are two separate essays on our multicentury obsession with “the music of the spheres,” the idea that there exists a kind of ethereal harmony produced by the movements of heavenly objects.

Since matter matters when it comes to sound—there can be none of the latter without the former—we also get an otherworldly examination of what human voices would sound like on different terrestrial and gas planets in our solar system, as well as some creative efforts from musicians and scientists who have transmuted visual data from space into music and other forms of audio. These are fun and interesting forays, but it isn’t until the end of the equally short “Sounds of Earth” (geophony) section that readers start to get a sense of the “auraculousness”—ear-related wonder—Henderson references in the subtitle.

Judging by the quantity and variety of entries in the “biophony” and “anthropophony” sections, you get the impression Henderson himself might be more attuned to these particular wonders as well. You really can’t blame him. 

The sheer number of fascinating ways that sound is employed across the human and nonhuman animal kingdom is mind-boggling, and it’s in these final two sections of the book that Henderson’s prose and curatorial prowess really start to shine—or should I say sing. 

We learn, for example, about female frogs that have devised their own biological noise-canceling system to tune out the male croaks of other species; crickets that amplify their chirps by “chewing a hole in a leaf, sticking their heads through it, and using it as a megaphone”; elephants that listen and communicate with each other seismically; plants that react to the buzz of bees by increasing the concentration of sugar in their flowers’ nectar; and moths with tiny bumps on their exoskeletons that jam the high-frequency echolocation pulses bats use to hunt them. 

Henderson has a knack for crisp characterization (“Singing came from winging”) and vivid, playful descriptions (“Through [the cochlea], the booming and buzzing confusion of the world, all its voices and music, passes into the three pounds of wobbly blancmange inside the nutshell numbskulls that are our kingdoms of infinite space”). He also excels at injecting a sense of wonder into aspects of sound that many of us take for granted. 

It turns out that sound is not just a great way to communicate and navigate underwater—it may be the best way.

In an essay about its power to heal, he marvels at ultrasound’s twin uses as a medical treatment and a method of examination. In addition to its kidney-stone-blasting and tumor-ablating powers, sound, Henderson says, can also be a literal window into our bodies. “It is, truly, an astonishing thing that our first glimpse of the greatest wonder and trial of our lives, parenthood, comes in the form of a fuzzy black and white smudge made from sound.”

While you can certainly quibble with some of the topical choices and their treatment in A Book of Noises, what you can’t argue with is the clear sense of awe that permeates almost every page. It’s an infectious and edifying kind of energy. So much so that by the time Henderson wraps up the book’s final essay, on silence, all you want to do is immerse yourself in more noise.

Singing in the key of sea

For the multiple generations who grew up watching his Academy Award–­winning 1956 documentary film, The Silent World, Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s mischaracterization of the ocean as a place largely devoid of sound seems to have calcified into common knowledge. The science writer Amorina Kingdon offers a thorough and convincing rebuttal of this idea in her new book, Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water.

CROWN, 2024

Beyond serving as a 247-page refutation of this unfortunate trope, Kingdon’s book aims to open our ears to all the marvels of underwater life by explaining how sound behaves in this watery underworld, why it’s so important to the animals that live there, and what we can learn when we start listening to them.

It turns out that sound is not just a great way to communicate and navigate underwater—it may be the best way. For one thing, it travels four and a half times faster there than it does on land. It can also go farther (across entire seas, under the right conditions) and provide critical information about everything from who wants to eat you to who wants to mate with you. 

To take advantage of the unique way sound propagates in the world’s oceans, fish rely on a variety of methods to “hear” what’s going on around them. These mechanisms range from so-called lateral lines—rows of tiny hair cells along the outside of their body that can sense small movements and vibrations in the water around them—to otoliths, dense lumps of calcium carbonate that form inside their inner ears. 

Because fish are more or less the same density as water, these denser otoliths move at a different amplitude and phase in response to vibrations passing through their body. The movement is then registered by patches of hair cells that line the chambers where otoliths are embedded, which turn the vibrations of sound into nerve impulses. The philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith may have put it best: “It is not too much to say that a fish’s body is a giant pressure-sensitive ear.” 

While there are some minor topical overlaps with Henderson’s book—primarily around whale-related sound and communication—one of the more admirable attributes of Sing Like Fish is Kingdon’s willingness to focus on some of the oceans’ … let’s say, less charismatic noise-­makers. We learn about herring (“the inveterate farters of the sea”), which use their flatuosity much as a fighter jet might use countermeasures to avoid an incoming missile. When these silvery fish detect the sound of a killer whale, they’ll fire off a barrage of toots, quickly decreasing both their bodily buoyancy and their vulnerability to the location-revealing clicks of the whale hunting them. “This strategic fart shifts them deeper and makes them less reflective to sound,” writes Kingdon.  

Readers are also introduced to the plainfin midshipman, a West Coast fish with “a booming voice” and “a perpetual look of accusation.” In addition to having “a fishy case of resting bitch face,” the male midshipman also has a unique hum, which it uses to attract gravid females in the spring. That hum became the subject of various conspiracy theories in the mid-’80s, when houseboat owners in Sausalito, California, started complaining about a mysterious seasonal drone. Thanks to a hydrophone and a level-headed local aquarium director, the sound was eventually revealed to be not aliens or a secret government experiment, but simply a small, brownish-green fish looking for love.

Kingdon’s command of, and enthusiasm for, the science of underwater sound is uniformly impressive. But it’s her recounting of how and why we started listening to the oceans in the first place that’s arguably one of the book’s most fascinating topics. It’s a wide-ranging tale, one that spans “firearm-­happy Victorian-era gentleman” and “whales that sounded suspiciously like Soviet submarines.” It’s also a powerful reminder of how war and military research can both spur and stifle scientific discovery in surprising ways.  

The fact that Sing Like Fish ends up being both an exquisitely reported piece of journalism and a riveting exploration of a sense that tends to get short shrift only amplifies Kingdon’s ultimate message—that we all need to start paying more attention to the ways in which our own sounds are impinging on life underwater. As we’ve started listening more to the seas, what we’re increasingly hearing is ourselves, she writes: “Piercing sonar, thudding seismic air guns for geological imaging, bangs from pile drivers, buzzing motorboats, and shipping’s broadband growl. We make a lot of noise.”

That noise affects underwater communication, mating, migrating, and bonding in all sorts of subtle and obvious ways. And its impact is often made worse when combined with other threats, like climate change. The good news is that while noise can be a frustratingly hard thing to regulate, there are efforts underway to address our poor underwater aural etiquette. The International Maritime Organization is currently updating its ship noise guidelines for member nations. At the same time, the International Organization for Standardization is creating more guidelines for measuring underwater noise. 

“The ocean is not, and has never been, a silent place,” writes Kingdon. But to keep it filled with the right kinds of noise (i.e., the kinds that are useful to the creatures living there), we’ll have to recommit ourselves to doing two things that humans sometimes aren’t so great at: learning to listen and knowing when to shut up.   

Music to our ears (and minds)

We tend to do both (shut up and listen) when music is being played—at least if it’s the kind we like. And yet the nature of what the composer Edgard Varèse famously called “organized sound” largely remains a mystery to us. What exactly is music? What distinguishes it from other sounds? Why do we enjoy making it? Why do we prefer certain kinds? Why is it so effective at influencing our emotions and (often) our memories?  

In their recent book Every Brain Needs Music: The Neuroscience of Making and Listening to Music, Larry Sherman and Dennis Plies look inside our heads to try to find some answers to these vexing questions. Sherman is a professor of neuroscience at the Oregon Health and Science University, and Plies is a professional musician and teacher. Unfortunately, if the book reveals anything, it’s that limiting your exploration of music to one lens (neuroscience) also limits the insights you can gain into its nature. 

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2023

That’s not to say that getting a better sense of how specific patterns of vibrating air molecules get translated into feelings of joy and happiness isn’t valuable. There are some genuinely interesting explanations of what happens in our brains when we play, listen to, and compose music—supported by some truly great watercolor-­based illustrations by Susi Davis that help to clarify the text. But much of this gets bogged down in odd editorial choices (there are, for some reason, three chapters on practicing music) and conclusions that aren’t exactly earth-shattering (humans like music because it connects us). 

Every Brain Needs Music purports to be for all readers, but unless you’re a musician who’s particularly interested in the brain and its inner workings, I think most people will be far better served by A Book of Noises or other, more in-depth explorations of the importance of music to humans, like Michael Spitzer’s The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth. 

“We have no earlids,” the late composer and naturalist R. Murray Schafer once observed. He also noted that despite this anatomical omission, we’ve become quite good at ignoring or tuning out large portions of the sonic world around us. Some of this tendency may be tied to our supposed preference for other sensory modalities. Most of us are taught from an early age that we are primarily visual creatures—that seeing is believing, that a picture is worth a thousand words. This idea is likely reinforced by a culture that also tends to focus primarily on the visual experience.

Yet while it may be true that we rely heavily on our eyes to make sense of the world, we do a profound disservice to ourselves and the rest of the natural world when we underestimate or downplay sound. Indeed, if there’s a common message that runs through all three of these books, it’s that attending to sound in all its forms isn’t just personally rewarding or edifying; it’s a part of what makes us fully human. As Bernie Krause discovered one night more than 40 years ago, once you start listening, it’s amazing what you can hear. 

Bryan Gardiner is a writer based in Oakland, California.

African farmers are using private satellite data to improve crop yields

Last year, as the harvest season drew closer, Olabokunde Tope came across an unpleasant surprise. 

While certain spots on his 70-hectare cassava farm in Ibadan, Nigeria, were thriving, a sizable parcel was pale and parched—the result of an early and unexpected halt in the rains. The cassava stems, starved of water, had withered to straw. 

“It was a really terrible experience for us,” Tope says, estimating the cost of the loss at more than 50 million naira ($32,000). “We were praying for a miracle to happen. But unfortunately, it was too late.”  

When the next planting season rolled around, Tope’s team weighed different ways to avoid another cycle of heavy losses. They decided to work with EOS Data Analytics, a California-based provider of satellite imagery and data for precision farming. The company uses wavelengths of light including the near-infrared, which penetrates plant canopies and can be used to measure a range of variables, including moisture level and chlorophyll content. 

EOS’s models and algorithms deliver insights on crops’ health weekly through an online platform that farmers can use to make informed decisions about issues such as when to plant, how much herbicide to use, and how to schedule fertilizer use, weeding, or irrigation. 

When EOS first launched in 2015, it relied largely on imagery from a combination of satellites, especially the European Union’s Sentinel-2. But Sentinel-2 has a maximum resolution of 10 meters, making it of limited use for spotting issues on smaller farms, says Yevhenii Marchenko, the company’s sales team lead.  

So last year the company launched EOS SAT-1, a satellite designed and operated solely for agriculture. Fees to use the crop-monitoring platform now start at $1.90 per hectare per year for small areas and drop as the farm gets larger. (Farmers who can afford to have adopted drones and other related technologies, but drones are significantly more expensive to maintain and scale, says Marchenko.)

In many developing countries, farming is impaired by lack of data. For centuries, farmers relied on native intelligence rooted in experience and hope, says Daramola John, a professor of agriculture and agricultural technology at Bells University of Technology in southwest Nigeria. “Africa is way behind in the race for modernizing farming,” he says. “And a lot of farmers suffer huge losses because of it.”

In the spring of 2023, when the new planting season was to start, Tope’s company, Carmi Agro Foods, had used GPS-enabled software to map the boundaries of its farm. Its setup on the EOS crop monitoring platform was also completed. Tope used the platform to determine the appropriate spacing for the stems and seeds. The rigors and risks of manual monitoring had disappeared. Hisfield-monitoring officers needed only to peer at their phones to know where or when specific spots needed attention on various farms. He was able to track weed breakouts quickly and efficiently. 

This technology is gaining traction among farmers in other parts of Nigeria and the rest of Africa. More than 242,000 people in Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, the United States, and Europe use the EOS crop-monitoring platform. In 2023 alone, 53,000 more farmers subscribed to the service.

One of them is Adewale Adegoke, the CEO of Agro Xchange Technology Services, a company dedicated to boosting crop yields using technology and good agricultural practices. Adegoke used the platform on half a million hectares (around 1.25 million acres) owned by 63,000 farmers. He says the yield of maize farmers using the platform, for instance, grew to two tons per acre, at least twice the national average.  

Adegoke adds that local farmers, who have been struggling with fluctuating conditions as a result of climate change, have been especially drawn to the platform’s early warning system for weather. 

As harvest time draws nearer this year, Tope reports, the prospects of his cassava field, which now spans a thousand hectares, is quite promising. This is thanks in part to his ability to anticipate and counter the sudden dry spells. He spaced the plantings better and then followed advisories on weeding, fertilizer use, and other issues related to the health of the crops. 

“So far, the result has been convincing,” says Tope. “We are no longer subjecting the performance of our farms to chance. This time, we are in charge.”

Orji Sunday is a freelance journalist based in Lagos, Nigeria.

Inside the long quest to advance Chinese writing technology

Every second of every day, someone is typing in Chinese. In a park in Hong Kong, at a desk in Taiwan, in the checkout line at a Family Mart in Shanghai, the automatic doors chiming a song each time they open. Though the mechanics look a little different from typing in English or French—people usually type the pronunciation of a character and then pick it out of a selection that pops up, autocomplete-style—it’s hard to think of anything more quotidian. The software that allows this exists beneath the awareness of pretty much everyone who uses it. It’s just there.

MIT PRESS, 2024

What’s largely been forgotten—and what most people outside Asia never even knew in the first place—is that a large cast of eccentrics and linguists, engineers and polymaths, spent much of the 20th century torturing themselves over how Chinese was ever going to move away from the ink brush to any other medium. This process has been the subject of two books published in the last two years: Thomas Mullaney’s scholarly work The Chinese Computer and Jing Tsu’s more accessible Kingdom of Characters. Mullaney’s book focuses on the invention of various input systems for Chinese starting in the 1940s, while Tsu’s covers more than a century of efforts to standardize Chinese and transmit it using the telegraph, typewriter, and computer. But both reveal a story that’s tumultuous and chaotic—and just a little unsettling in the futility it reflects.   

RIVERHEAD BOOKS, 2022

Chinese characters are not as cryptic as they sometimes appear. The general rule is that they stand for a word, or sometimes part of a word, and learning to read is a process of memorization. Along the way, it becomes easier to guess how a character should be spoken, because often phonetic elements are tucked in among other symbols. The characters were traditionally written by hand with a brush, and part of becoming literate involves memorizing the order in which the strokes are made. Put them in the wrong order and the character doesn’t look right. Or rather, as I found some years ago as a second-language learner in Guangzhou, China, it looks childish. (My husband, a translator of Chinese literature, found it hilarious and adorable that at the age of 30, I wrote like a kindergartner.)

The trouble, however, is that there are a lot of characters. One needs to know at least a few thousand to be considered basically literate, and there are thousands more beyond that basic set. Many modern learners of Chinese devote themselves essentially full-time to learning to read, at least in the beginning. More than a century ago, this was such a monumental task that leading thinkers worried it was impairing China’s ability to survive the attentions of more aggressive powers.

In the 19th century, a huge proportion of Chinese people were illiterate. They had little access to schooling. Many were subsistence farmers. China, despite its immense population and vast territory, was perpetually finding itself on the losing end of deals with nimbler, more industrialized nations. The Opium Wars, in the mid-19th century, had led to a situation where foreign powers effectively colonized Chinese soil. What advanced infrastructure there was had been built and was owned by foreigners.  

Some felt these things were connected. Wang Zhao, for one, was a reformer who believed that a simpler way to write spoken Chinese was essential to the survival of the nation. Wang’s idea was to use a set of phonetic symbols, representing one specific dialect of Chinese. If people could sound out words, having memorized just a handful of shapes the way speakers of languages using an alphabet did, they could become literate more quickly. With literacy, they could learn technical skills, study science, and help China get ownership of its future back. 

Wang believed in this goal so strongly that though he’d been thrown out of China in 1898, he returned two years later in disguise. After arriving by boat from Japan, he traveled over land on foot in the costume of a Buddhist monk. His story forms the first chapter of Jing Tsu’s book, and it is thick with drama, including a shouting match and brawl on the grounds of a former palace, during a meeting to decide which dialect a national version of such a system should represent. Wang’s system for learning Mandarin was used by schools in Beijing for a few years, but ultimately it did not survive the rise of competing systems and the period of chaos that swallowed China not long after the Qing Dynasty’s fall in 1911. Decades of disorder and uneasy truces gave way to Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in northern China in 1931. For a long time, basic survival was all most people had time for.

However, strange inventions soon began to turn up in China. Chinese students and scientists abroad had started to work on a typewriter for the language, which they felt was lagging behind others. Texts in English and other tongues using Roman characters could be printed swiftly and cheaply with keyboard-controlled machines that injected liquid metal into type molds, but Chinese texts required thousands upon thousands of bits of type to be placed in a manual printing press. And while English correspondence could be whacked out on a typewriter, Chinese correspondence was still, after all this time, written by hand.      

Of all the technologies Mullaney and Tsu describe, these baroque metal monsters stick most in the mind. Equipped with cylinders and wheels, with type arrayed in starbursts or in a massive tray, they are simultaneously writing machines and incarnations of philosophies about how to organize a language. Because Chinese characters don’t have an inherent order (no A-B-C-D-E-F-G) and because there are so many (if you just glance at 4,000 of them, you’re not likely to spot the one you need quickly), people tried to arrange these bits of type according to predictable rules. The first article ever published by Lin Yutang, who would go on to become one of China’s most prominent writers in English, described a system of ordering characters according to the number of strokes it took to form them. He eventually designed a Chinese typewriter that consumed his life and finances, a lovely thing that failed its demo in front of potential investors.

PUBLIC DOMAIN/COURTESY OF THOMAS S. MULLANEY

Technology often seems to demand new ways of engaging with the physical, and the Chinese typewriter was no exception. When I first saw a functioning example, at a private museum in a basement in Switzerland, I was entranced by the gliding arm and slender rails of the sheet-cake-size device, its tray full of characters. “Operating the machine was a full-body exercise,” Tsu writes of a very early typewriter from the late 1890s, designed by an American missionary. Its inventor expected that with time, muscle memory would take over, and the typist would move smoothly around the machine, picking out characters and depressing keys. 

However, though Chinese typewriters eventually got off the ground (the first commercial typewriter was available in the 1920s), a few decades later it became clear that the next challenge was getting Chinese characters into the computer age. And there was still the problem of how to get more people reading. Through the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, systems for ordering and typing Chinese continued to occupy the minds of intellectuals; particularly odd and memorable is the story of the librarian at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, who in the 1930s came up with a system of light and dark glyphs like semaphore flags to stand for characters. Mullaney and Tsu both linger on the case of Zhi Bingyi, an engineer imprisoned in solitary confinement during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, who was inspired by the characters of a slogan written on his cell wall to devise his own code for inputting characters into a computer.

As the child of a futurist, I’ve seen firsthand that the path to where we are is littered with technological dead ends.

The tools for literacy were advancing over the same period, thanks to government-­mandated reforms introduced after the Communist Revolution in 1949. To assist in learning to read, everyone in mainland China would now be taught pinyin, a system that uses Roman letters to indicate how Chinese characters are pronounced. Meanwhile, thousands of characters would be replaced with simplified versions, with fewer strokes to learn. This is still how it’s done today in the mainland, though in Taiwan and Hong Kong, the characters are not simplified, and Taiwan uses a different pronunciation guide, one based on 37 phonetic symbols and five tone marks. 

Myriad ideas were thrown at the problem of getting these characters into computers. Images of a graveyard of failed designs—256-key keyboards and the enormous cylinder of the Ideo-Matic Encoder, a keyboard with more than 4,000 options—are scattered poignantly through Mullaney’s pages. 

In Tsu’s telling, perhaps the most consequential link between this awkward period of dedicated hardware and today’s wicked-quick mobile-phone typing came in 1988, with an idea hatched by engineers in California. “Unicode was envisioned as a master converter,” she writes. “It would bring all human script systems, Western, Chinese, or otherwise, under one umbrella standard and assign each character a single, standardized code for communicating with any machine.” Once Chinese characters had Unicode codes, they could be manipulated by software like any other glyph, letter, or symbol. Today’s input systems allow users to call up and select characters using pinyin or stroke order, among other options.

There is something curiously deflating, however, about the way both these books end. Mullaney’s careful documenting of the typing machines of the last century and Tsu’s collection of adventurous tales about language show the same thing: A simply unbelievable amount of time, energy, and cleverness was poured into making Chinese characters easier for both machines and the human mind to manipulate. But very few of these systems seem to have had any direct impact on the current solutions, like the pronunciation-led input systems that more than a billion people now use to type Chinese. 

This pattern of evolution isn’t unique to language. As the child of a futurist, I’ve seen firsthand that the path to where we are is littered with technological dead ends. The month after Google Glass, the glasses-borne computer, made headlines, my mother helped set up an exhibit of personal heads-up displays. In the obscurity of a warehouse space, ghostly white foam heads each bore a crown of metal, glass, and plastic, the attempts of various inventors to put a screen in front of our eyes. Augmented reality seemed as if it might finally be arriving in the hands of the people—or, rather, on their faces. 

That version of the future did not materialize, and if augmented-reality viewing ever does become part of everyday life, it won’t be through those objects. When historians write about these devices, in books like these, I don’t think they will be able to trace a chain of unbroken thought, a single arc from idea to fruition.

A charming moment, late in Mullaney’s book, speaks to this. He has been slipping letters in the mailboxes of people he’s found listed as inventors of input methods in the Chinese patent database, and now he’s meeting one such inventor, an elderly man, and his granddaughter in a Beijing Starbucks. The old fellow is pleased to talk about his approach, which involves the graphical shapes of Chinese characters. But his granddaughter drops a bomb on Mullaney when she leans in and whispers, “I think my input system is a bit easier to use.” It turns out both she and her father have built systems of their own. 

The story’s not over, in other words.    

People tinker with technology and systems of thought like those detailed in these two books not just because they have to, but because they want to. And though it’s human nature to want to make a trajectory out of what lies behind us so that the present becomes a grand culmination, what these books detail are episodes in the life of a language. There is no beginning, no middle, no satisfying end. There is only evolution—an endless unfurling of something always in the process of becoming a fuller version of itself. 

Veronique Greenwood is a science writer and essayist based in England. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, and many other publications.

PsiQuantum plans to build the biggest quantum computing facility in the US

The quantum computing firm PsiQuantum is partnering with the state of Illinois to build the largest US-based quantum computing facility, the company announced today. 

The firm, which has headquarters in California, says it aims to house a quantum computer containing up to 1 million quantum bits, or qubits, within the next 10 years. At the moment, the largest quantum computers have around 1,000 qubits. 

Quantum computers promise to do a wide range of tasks, from drug discovery to cryptography, at record-breaking speeds. Companies are using different approaches to build the systems and working hard to scale them up. Both Google and IBM, for example, make the qubits out of superconducting material. IonQ makes qubits by trapping ions using electromagnetic fields. PsiQuantum is building qubits from photons.  

A major benefit of photonic quantum computing is the ability to operate at higher temperatures than superconducting systems. “Photons don’t feel heat and they don’t feel electromagnetic interference,” says Pete Shadbolt, PsiQuantum’s cofounder and chief scientific officer. This imperturbability makes the technology easier and cheaper to test in the lab, Shadbolt says. 

It also reduces the cooling requirements, which should make the technology more energy efficient and easier to scale up. PsiQuantum’s computer can’t be operated at room temperature, because it needs superconducting detectors to locate photons and perform error correction. But those sensors only need to be cooled to a few degrees Kelvin, or a little under -450 °F. While that’s an icy temperature, it is still easier to achieve than what’s required for superconducting systems, which demand cryogenic cooling. 

The company has opted not to build small-scale quantum computers (such as IBM’s Condor, which uses a little over 1,100 qubits). Instead it is aiming to manufacture and test what it calls “intermediate systems.” These include chips, cabinets, and superconducting photon detectors. PsiQuantum says it is targeting these larger-scale systems in part because smaller devices are unable to adequately correct errors and operate at a realistic price point.  

Getting smaller-scale systems to do useful work has been an area of active research. But “just in the last few years, we’ve seen people waking up to the fact that small systems are not going to be useful,” says Shadbolt. In order to adequately correct the inevitable errors, he says, “you have to build a big system with about a million qubits.” The approach conserves resources, he says, because the company doesn’t spend time piecing together smaller systems. But skipping over them makes PsiQuantum’s technology difficult to compare to what’s already on the market. 

The company won’t share details about the exact timeline of the Illinois project, which will include a collaboration with the University of Chicago, and several other Illinois universities. It does say it is hoping to break ground on a similar facility in Brisbane, Australia, next year and hopes that facility, which will house its own large-scale quantum computer, will be fully operational by 2027. “We expect Chicago to follow thereafter in terms of the site being operational,” the company said in a statement. 

“It’s all or nothing [with PsiQuantum], which doesn’t mean it’s invalid,” says Christopher Monroe, a computer scientist at Duke University and ex-IonQ employee. “It’s just hard to measure progress along the way, so it’s a very risky kind of investment.”

Significant hurdles lie ahead. Building the infrastructure for this facility, particularly for the cooling system, will be the slowest and most expensive aspect of the construction. And when the facility is finally constructed, there will need to be improvements in the quantum algorithms run on the computers. Shadbolt says the current algorithms are far too expensive and resource intensive. 

The sheer complexity of the construction project might seem daunting. “This could be the most complex quantum optical electronic system humans have ever built, and that’s hard,” says Shadbolt. “We take comfort in the fact that it resembles a supercomputer or a data center, and we’re building it using the same fabs, the same contract manufacturers, and the same engineers.”

Correction: we have updated the story to reflect that the partnership is only with the state of Illinois and its universities, and not a national lab

Update: we added comments from Christopher Monroe