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Author Archives: chb
Resolution of Toom’s rule paradox
A few days ago our Ghost Pontiff Dave Bacon wondered how Toom’s noisy but highly fault-tolerant 2-state classical cellular automaton can get away with violating the Gibbs phase rule, according to which a finite-dimensional locally interacting system, at generic points … Continue reading
Posted in General, Mathematics, Physics
4 Comments
Non-chaotic irregularity
In principle, barring the intervention of chance, identical causes lead to identical effects. And except in chaotic systems, similar causes lead to similar effects. Borges’ story “Pierre Menard” exemplifies an extreme version of this idea: an early 20′th century writer … Continue reading
Posted in Mathematics, Physics
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Simple circuit “factors” arbitrarily large numbers
Last Thursday, at the QIP rump session in Beijing, John Smolin described recent work with Graeme Smith and Alex Vargo [SSV] showing that arbitrarily large numbers can be factored by using this constant-sized quantum circuit to implement a compiled version … Continue reading
Apocalypses, Firewalls, and Boltzmann Brains
Last week’s plebeian scare-mongering about the world ending at the wraparound of the Mayan calendar did not distract sophisticated readers of gr-qc and quant-ph from a more arcane problem, the so-called Firewall Question. This concerns what happens to Alice when … Continue reading
Posted in Off The Deep End, Quantum, Science
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Haroche and Wineland win Physics Nobel
The physics prize was shared between experimentalists Serge Haroche and David Wineland, longtime leaders in the study of atom-photon interaction. In recent decades both have honed their techniques to meet the challenges and opportunities opened by “quantum information science” which … Continue reading
Posted in News, Quantum, Quantum Computing, Science
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A way around Nobel’s 3-person limit
Most fields of science have become increasingly collaborative over the last century, sometimes forcing the Nobel Prizes to unduly truncate the list of recipients, or neglect major discoveries involving more than three discoverers. In January we pointed out a … Continue reading
Posted in General
3 Comments
Throwing cold water on the Quantum Internet
There has been a lot of loose talk lately about a coming “Quantum Internet”. I was asked about it recently by a journalist and gave him this curmudgeonly answer, hoping to redirect some of the naive enthusiasm: …First let me … Continue reading
Instruments for Natural Philosophy
Thomas B. Greenslade, emeritus physics professor at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, USA, has amassed (both physically and virtually) a fascinating and expertly curated collection of old physics teaching equipment. Among my favorite items are Bernard H. Porter’s 1939 … Continue reading
Posted in General
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