“There are always obstacles, but I just keep going. You can’t let obstacles get in your way, because as soon as you do, you’ve basically lost the game.”
~Dahl Winters
This newsletter issue features Dahl Winters, CEO at TerraNexum – Quantum for Climate Progress
Dahl has formal training in biology, ecology, and systems engineering, but is self-taught in physics, geospatial analysis, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, quantum vacuum, quantum gravity, Bjerknes forces, acoustic radiation force, acoustic metamaterials. In her spare time, she is also an artist and a member of the OpenAir Collective.
You have such an amazing, diverse background. How has that helped you?
Having a diverse perspective on things really helps me to find the commonalities between all those different fields of expertise. When you are just studying one core subject, you can’t really see the broader picture. It’s as if you have a field of ant hills, and you’re really concentrated on just one ant hill. When you have a wider perspective, you can better see how all the things are connected.
How is your diverse knowledge and background related to your founding Terranexum?
I’ve been working in solving problems using science and engineering for seven years prior to that within a different company that I started with my husband. At some point, I started thinking, “Climate is a big issue. I’ve been doing a lot in carbon dioxide removal. I can’t do all the work myself.” I noticed that a lot of companies AirMiners and a lot of volunteers on the OpenAir collective– they’re all doing individual things. And I thought, “We can actually drive progress a lot faster if we work together.” There’s so many skills that we can bring together and different types of technologies that need deploying today.
Municipalities and companies in every state of every country in every part of the world are doing what they can locally to try to address the climate issue. They may not all be at the same level, though. It’s my goal to help make the path forward accessible to everyone.
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Bonus section on Dahl’s unusual hobby
I once read that you have an unusual hobby–collecting physics equations. Can you say more about this hobby and why you find some of the equations to be very beautiful?
I did have quite a bit of fun collecting physics equations a while back. It’s been pretty useful when applying one set of technologies/methods to a completely different area of applications. A few examples of what I came across:
- The Prandtl-Glauert singularity (easy to find, on Wikipedia for example) is unmistakable in form to equations from special relativity describing relativistic effects (length contraction, time dilation, mass increase, etc.). Very nice correspondence there between fluid mechanics and special relativity.
- The equations that govern the formation of “galaxies” – we typically think of galaxies in a cosmological sense, but we can also form these in bubble clouds caused by acoustic streaming (Figure 5: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.457.1993&rep=rep1&type=pdf.
- Even at the largest scales in the universe, where we see formations like these (https://www.vox.com/2014/9/4/6105631/map-galaxy-supercluster-laniakea-milky-way), the dynamics of formation are very similar to those behind the structure of bubble formations as in Figure 2 here https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.457.1993&rep=rep1&type=pdf.
- And at the smallest scales, the correspondence between 3D spherical harmonics to electron orbitals from quantum mechanics is also unmistakable.
- The Navier-Stokes and Lorentz force equations require some calculus knowledge and rearrangement of terms to see the similarity. These are from fluid mechanics and electromagnetism respectively, and the correspondence is between fluid velocity and electric current.
It’s not just the correspondences between equations that are so pleasant to find, but the resulting visuals are also incredibly beautiful. I have seen so many mathematical parallels between the same physics happening in a glass of water and what anyone can see in the night sky, if you’re lucky to not have it obscured by haze and light pollution. Unfortunately, there are dozens of physics journals, all in different specialized fields, with different variable names and definitions for so many kinds of physics equations. Thus, the quantum physicists haven’t been talking to the cosmologists or to the acoustics and fluid mechanics folks, or to the electrical engineers, particle physicists, etc. It has therefore proven very difficult for anyone to even consider that there could be just one set of physical principles underlying all these diverse fields. Certainly, spending many years going through physics equations in most of these areas can help with that, which is what I did for quite a while before I found my first job.
I mention all the above since that problem has probably influenced my development of Quantum Global Optimizer (QGO) more than anything else. Every company, city, state, and nation seems to have their own siloed, isolated approach to solving their localized version of an otherwise global-scale climate problem. There are dozens of carbon marketplaces, many more than the actual companies currently removing carbon, and every carbon removal/sequestration solution has its own specialized processes and resource/energy needs. Not too different from how physics has been developing over the past 200 years or so. QGO is designed specifically to enable not just the necessary crosstalk between stakeholders, but to focus on one set of principles that every stakeholder will be basing their decisions on, regardless of which field they are in: carbon, money, and time. In QGO, no one company benefits more than any other, since we compute a solution that optimizes our money-carbon-time metric across all stakeholders. And we’re the only such company using quantum computing to do this, since it’s the only technology that will enable us to solve this problem at global scale.
