Clipped from a New Yorker article on Mr. Schwarzenegger (thanks to a tip from Patrick Hayden) In the “Pumping Iron” series, which chronicles events leading up to and including the Mr. Olympia contest of 1975, there are intimations that Schwarzenegger’s ultimate goal, absurd as it would have seemed at the time, was power. “I was [...]
Okay. I promise. This will be my last time travel post for a while. But interestingly, the day after my paper appeared I got a hit on this blog from an ARDA internet address. Of course if I were ARDA I would pay attention to any claims of algorithmic speedups. So if I disappear tomorrow, [...]
Following up on my follow up to my time travel paper, there is an article on Wired describing comments Wesley Clark made about traveling faster than the speed of light. Seems everybody’s favorite four star general believes deep down in his heart that faster than light travel is possible. My first reaction, being a scientist [...]
David Deutsch emailed me with nice comments and suggestions about my just posted paper. I told him the funny story behind the paper. A few years ago I was watching a NOVA program about time travel and closed timelike curves. On watching the program I thought: “hmm, I wonder if quantum circuits always give you [...]
Mark Fiore’s animations just crack me up. This one in particular is super choice. Requires Flash.
Well I’ve done it. I’ve gone completely crazy. The proof? Today I submitted a paper on what happens to quantum computation when you have access to a time machine. But of course physicists don’t like to say time machine, so the title of the paper is “Quantum Computational Complexity in the Presence of Closed Timelike [...]
A place where really distinguished older physicists went to retire -Robert Calderbank describing quantum computing prior to Shor’s algorithm
Me: W.W.F.D.? Person: What would who do? Me: What would Feynman do? Person: Oh. Is Feynman like some kind of California Jesus? Me (with an evil Mr. Burns-ish tapping of the fingers): Yeeees.
Suppose you are told to attempt to produce a sting of zeros and ones which is completely random. Of course, one would like to believe that one could act totally random. But it is easy to write a computer program which gets as input a sample of some of the random sequences you produce and [...]
Today I decided that I wanted to calculate the probability that the god of christianity exists. If I took a poll of the average citizen of the United States I’d get something like a 75% probability that he exists. But wait, you object, the United States is not a fair representative sample from which to [...]
One of the most frustrating aspects of living in the groves of academe (not a typo, my friends, look it up) is the lack of control one seems to have over the eventual institution where one gains long term employment. I mean, who in their right mind really wants to teach at the University of [...]
