Robert Laughlin, Nobel prize winner for the theory behind the fractional quantum Hall effect, has a new book out, “A Different Universe.” The book is interesting, but it also has its problems. As you might guess from previous posts I’ve made, Professor Laughlin has a amazing view of quantum computers: There is a great deal [...]
There are certain coincidences which, we you first hear about them, you sit up all night thinking wild and crazy thoughts. I think my favorite example of this comes from the Kerr-Newman black hole. The Kerr-Newman solution to the Einstein-Maxwell equations describes black holes with charge and angular momentum. What is strange about the Kerr-Newman [...]
Yesterday I attended a talk by Ed Thorpe. Ed not only wrote the highly influential book “Beat the Dealer” where card counting for blackjack was first popularized but he also did work which anticipated the Black-Scholes model of options pricing (and in fact was trading using the basic formula before the formula was even written [...]
A wormhole is a topological feature of spacetime which essentially links two locales in the universe. Perhaps the most famous (and one of the first examples) considered by physicists is the so-called “Einstein-Rosen bridge.” This is a solution to the vacuum Einstein equations in which one pastes two Schwarzschild solutions together in such a way [...]
For sale on ebay, a time machine: The bidding, unfortunately, for this wonderful device is over. Well, uh, unless the time machine actually works in which case, words like “over” seem to have distinct problems.
One often hears biologists say that biology is the “physics of the 21st century.” When they say this, I think the main motive is to indicate that great scientific advances will be coming out of biology in the next century. Certainly I agree wholeheartedly with this. But I also wonder whether the following ever crosses [...]
Todd Brun has put together a list of faculty openings and postdoctoral positions available in quantum information processing. See this page. In a related note, but not yet listed on Todd’s website, Australia continues its battle with Canada for the center of the quantum computing universe with various job openings listed on Michael Nielsen’s blog [...]
How do we store information? One way is to use a magnetic media, like as is done in our hard drive, where the information is encoded into the total magnetization of a group of spins. Another way is to use a capacitor and transistor to store information into the charge on the capacitor. Now researchers [...]
Beware the Ides of March Yesterday was a snow day shutting down work at the Santa Fe Institute. It snowed about a foot in town. So with a friend, Alex, we decided to go to Taos for a great day of powder skiing. First run of the day, starting about 10:15, we hiked up the [...]
Via Not Even Wrong, comes an article from the San Francisco Chronicle which is pretty critical of string theory. Philip Anderson, as always, comes away with an interesting quote, “…we from outside the (string) field are disturbed by our colleagues’ insistence that every new semi-adolescent who has done something in string theory is the greatest [...]
Last week, my friend Luis came through town, with…a two faced calf named “Unique”: We went for drinks at the Pink Adobe, $3 cover charge, the band playing loud Led Zeppin covers, and then some of my collegues from the Santa Fe Institute wanted to see what Luis had in the back of his big [...]
The dealine (March 15, 2005) for the Summer School on Principles and Applications of Control in Quantum Systems to be held at Caltech on August 7-14, 2005 is fast approaching. If you’ve ever wanted to learn how to apply control theory to quantum systems, this looks like an amazing opportunity. The potential agenda includes: Experiments [...]
