We work among extraordinary people doing extraordinary things; get to know some of them by reading these quick-fire interviews.
Name: Alexander Lvovsky
Job title: Professor of Physics
What are you currently working on?
My research is about teaching light to think! Instead of running artificial intelligence on power-hungry computer chips, I use beams of light as the hardware to make up optical neural networks, which can recognise images, see in the dark, and even help microscopes zoom beyond what was once thought possible. As an added bonus, light in such neural networks can keep its quantum properties – giving us smart sensors and machines that find the best solution to combinatorial puzzles like finding optimal school schedules or traffic routes.
Describe a typical day
I go to sleep early – this lets me avoid the alarm clock. I wake up on my own around 6am and study for about an hour before the family wakes up. I cycle to the university at eight. My bike is equipped with a tagalong and a seat in front, so I take my two junior kids (I have three: girls aged 12 and 5 and a boy aged 8) with me and drop them off at schools.
At work, my typical day is half-filled with meetings – gatherings of my research group, discussions with collaborators, COMPOS or Quantum Club team meetings, conversations related to my startup enterprise Lumai or planning a new stratup, recruitment interviews, a variety of internal and external committees, and so on. Then, teaching. In addition to college, I teach the Quantum Ideas short option and I am also responsible for the Optics and Electromagnetism teaching lab so I try to pop by the lab, at least briefly, on those days students work there. About two hours have to be spent on emails: I receive up to a hundred daily and answer 10-15. The rest of the time is dedicated to research. It could be meeting a student to discuss a project or draft an article, writing a grant proposal, spending time in the lab, reading a paper or (on a lucky day) thinking about a problem.
I am normally back at home at 7pm and the rest of the day is spent with the children. I try to get the elder two to solve a page of maths problems daily, but this does not always work out as expected. After the two younger ones are in bed, I sit down with my wife Bhavya for a glass of wine and/or a movie, and now also the elder daughter joins sometimes.
What got you into physics?
I was largely influenced by my parents and my grandfather. Even though they were not physicists themselves, the 1960s Soviet Union had a cult for science and technology, especially physics (think space race, atomic energy, computers, lasers). My family shared that enthusiasm – and infected me with it. But not only that. When I was eight, I had a library book called Hello, Physics! describing various experiments one can do at home – with equilibrium, electrostatics, bubbles, pneumatics and so on, complete with explanations in the language accessible to a child like me. Most experiments were far above my skill level, so I just kept re-reading the descriptions. I fell so much in love with that book that my parents told the library they lost it – and paid a heavy fine – to keep my newborn passion alive.
If you had an entire day at your disposal (not at work/studying), what would be your ideal way to spend it?
Oh yes – sometimes my family drags me away from my desk into days like this kicking and screaming! The day would usually begin with a trip to some local attraction – can be a walk in the park, or a museum, or even circus. Then we get home and I sometimes manage to convince the kids to watch a cult movie of my young years – such as Star Wars. The highlight of the day is a crepes dinner cooked by my wife, which we shamelessly consume with fruit jams and chocolate spread.
What is your favourite place in Oxford?
My lab, of course! Too bad I don’t get to spend a lot of time there – with all the administrative duties that make the life of a professor much less fun than it would otherwise be.
Plan B: what would you be if you weren’t doing the job you are currently doing?
I was crazy about technology for as long I can remember. So if I grew up in a different family and were not nudged towards math and science, I would probably become a computer programmer or a car mechanic – or anything in between.
What discovery would you like to see in your lifetime?
I believe in the technological singularity: a hypothetical point in the future at which AI will become autonomous, self-replicating and self-improving, triggering dramatic, exponential changes not only in our life, society or economy, but eventually the very fabric of the universe. Unlike many people, I look at it without fear: I believe in intelligence as the ultimate value, with the humankind being only an intermediate step in its progress. Eventually, intelligence will leave its biological or cybernetic carriers and start developing according to its own laws, which are far beyond our imagination. I hope to live till then and witness all of it. This is not exactly a discovery – but surely the singularity will deliver all possible discoveries in all sciences – albeit perhaps too complicated for us, humans, to understand.
More academically (and related to the above), I ask myself why the development of the universe entails emergence of increasingly complex objects – from quark-gluon plasma to atoms, stars and planets, then life, then intelligence, then AI and eventually the singularity. The trend is so universal that it cannot be a fluctuation; it must have some fundamental physics behind it, and I would like to know what that is. I must confess that I haven’t done much towards resolving this mystery, but I did sign up to teach Thermal and Statistical Physics at my Keble College, with the hope to acquire enough knowledge of this discipline to be able to make next steps.