A nicely written article in the New York Times about entanglement: Quantum Trickery: Testing Einstein’s Strangest Theory by Dennis Overbye (author of “Einstein in Love”.) Interestingly, the article claims that the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen paper is now Einstein’s most cited paper. Of course a lot of this is because this is one of Einstein’s most [...]
Chirstmas Eve at my mom’s home in Yreka (“Yreka Bakery” backwards is “Yreka Bakery”) enjoying a warm meal before going out to look at the Christmas lights. I will say that Wal-Mart is making a killing off of those blow up Santas and blow up Snowmen.
University of California, in a consortium with Bechtel, has won the contract to manage the Los Alamos National Lab.
I have often heard it describe that to be a great philospher, one must grab ahold of a single idea, put on blinders to all opposing thoughts, and then run with it. This is not to accuse all philosophers of such maniacal tunnel vision, but there certainly is at least a grain of truth in [...]
One of the big pushes occuring in ion trap quantum computing these days is the construction of different ion traps which will be useful in scaling up these quantum computer architectures. Chris Monroe’s group at Michigan (in collaboration with Keith Schwab at the PRL in Maryland) has a nice paper out a few days ago [...]
Scott Aaronson and Lance Fortnow discuss What should physicists know about computational complexity? I’m thinking that this deserves a rejoiner, “What should a computer scientist know about computational complexity?” I mean, how silly have these computer scientists been…they’ve been studying classical computers for all these years, when it is totally obvious (at least to a [...]
QIP 2006, to be held in Paris, now has the list of talks for this workshop here. There were 160 submissions! There are eight invited talks, sixteen long talks, and sixteen short talks. Lots of interesting talks, which makes me wish I could have figured a way to attend (that and I’ve never spent any [...]
Last trip of the term visiting the Institute for Quantum Information at Caltech this week, my old stomping ground (for seven years!) Those who are bored might be interested in the talk I’m giving tomorrow for the IQI seminar. It is possible that after this talk you might even be more bored, but, well thats [...]
The course I’m teaching next term: CSE 599 (Special Topics in Computer Science) Quantum Computing ————————— Instructor: Dave Bacon Time: Monday and Friday, 1:30-2:50, Wednesday 1:00-2:20 Location: CSE 503 What are the ultimate limits to the information processing power of computing machines? Since computers are physical devices, it makes sense to look for the answer [...]
This is the first year in a few that I haven’t been applying for jobs (You might suspect that this makes me less grumpy. Well, judge for yourself!) Now I could be wrong, but is this the first explicit advertisement by a U.S. university physics department for a theory position in quantum information science? Quantum [...]
Saturday I went to Steven’s Pass for a day of skiing. This ski area is rather nice, especially due to the fact that they had about a foot of new snow. I suspect, however, that when the snow conditions are icy the place isn’t as much fun. What was amazing about the ski area was [...]
