Category Archives: Physics

Resolution of Toom’s rule paradox

Posted on 5/14/2013 by chb

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 | 5 Comments

A Paradox of Toom’s Rule?

Posted on 5/11/2013 by Pontifex Praeteritorum

Science is slow.  You can do things like continue a conversation with yourself (and a few commenters) that started in 2005.  Which is what I’m now going to do  The below is probably a trivial observation for one of the cardinals, … Continue reading →

Posted in Physics | Comments Off

4 Pages

Posted on 5/8/2013 by Pontifex Praeteritorum

Walk up to a physicist at a party (we could add a conditional about the amount of beer consumed by the physicist at this point, but that would be redundant, it is a party after all), and say to him or … Continue reading →

Posted in Go Ahead, Waste Your Time, Off The Deep End, Physics, Quantum, The Loony Bin Called Academia | 4 Comments

Non-chaotic irregularity

Posted on 4/26/2013 by chb

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 | Comments Off

El Naschie works on entanglement now

Posted on 4/24/2013 by sflammia

The Journal of Quantum Information Science will not be getting any of my papers starting today, because today is when I learned that they recently published the following gem: A Resolution of Cosmic Dark Energy via a Quantum Entanglement Relativity Theory, by … Continue reading →

Posted in Funny Ha Ha, Open Science, Physics Bastardizations, Quantum Basterdizations, Scientific Publishing | 10 Comments

Test your intuition

Posted on 4/20/2013 by sflammia

The name of this post was shamelessly stolen from Gil Kalai’s popular series Test Your Intuition. But today’s post will be testing our physics intuition, rather than our mathematical intuition. Although this is a quantum blog, we’ll look at the … Continue reading →

Posted in Physics, Puzzle, Science | 1 Comment

Throwing cold water on the Quantum Internet

Posted on 10/6/2012 by chb

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 →

Posted in Physics, Quantum Computing, Quantum Cryptography, Science By Press Release, Technology | 5 Comments

Quantum Frontiers

Posted on 7/9/2012 by sflammia

As a postdoc at Caltech, I would often have lunch with John Preskill.  About once per week, we would play a game. During the short walk back, I would think of a question to which I didn’t know the answer. Then … Continue reading →

Posted in Blogging, Caltech, Physics, Quantum | 1 Comment