Jessica Wade: prediction

Transcript context

…But in terms of a new item — we can make screens better; we can make batteries last longer — maybe it’s too early to say, but what new good or service could we expect? Again, assuming things go fairly well. I think a lot around optical communications and encrypting data transfer and things like that. If you can harness circular polarizations of lights, you can multiplex the way you send data. You can make use of left- and right-handed channels, but you can also encrypt the signal that you’re sending because only the sender and the receiver know what to expect, based on the kind of chirality of those patterns that are produced. Probably, in some kind of encrypted optical communications, you’ll see this, but again, not know entirely that that’s what’s happening. But making more efficient and more impactful technologies like that, we will entirely have. The particular aspect that I’m really excited about at the moment, other than all the other work I do — because I love everything I do — but it’s trying to use chiral structures to be able to detect really weak magnetic fields, particularly the magnetic fields associated with brain function. When neurons are sending signals around your brain, they generate these tiny magnetic fields. If you could use some kind of chiral structure to be able to detect those magnetic fields optically, you could generate some kind of medical imaging system that was much more flexible. Again, it could operate at room temperature. I think you’ll see innovations in things like medical imaging, and also in optical communications. Now, I can pick up popular science magazines, and they will tell me, sometimes, we have quantum computing now. How accurate is that?…

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