Today, Robert Alicki and Michale Horedecki have an interesting preprint on the arxiv, quant-ph/0603260: “Can one build a quantum hard drive? A no-go theorem for storing quantum information in equilibrium systems.” (Now where have I seen that word “quantum hard drive” before?) As you can imagine, the paper cuts closely to my own heart, so [...]
What should we make of this press release from MagiQ Technologies? The press release cites two advances: The first breakthrough demonstrates there are no distance limitations to MagiQ’s quantum cryptography solution. Utilizing Verizon’s commercial fiber infrastructure, MagiQ successfully bridged two separate spans of 80km by cascading a number of MagiQ’s QPN 7505 devices. The commercial [...]
Two papers (experiment: gr-qc/0603033, theory: gr-qc/0603032), an ESA press release, and blog posts (Uncertain Principles, Something Similar, and Illuminating Science) today are all about a recent experiment performed by Martin Tajmar (ARC Seibersdorf Research GmbH, Austria) and Clovis de Matos (ESA-HQ, Paris) which they claim shows a gravitomagnetic effect in a laboratory experiment. Not only [...]
From the Washington Post, in a fair and balanced (*ahem*) article on the effect of prayer on healing: But supporters say that much about medicine remains murky or is explained only over time. They say, for example, that it was relatively recently that scientists figured out how aspirin works, although it has been in use [...]
Seth Lloyd has a new book out Programming the Universe : A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On the Cosmos . I just picked up a copy and flipped to this amusing anecdote: …When Shannon showed his new formula for information to the mathematician John von Neumann and asked him what the quantity he had just [...]
Today I was in the University of Washington bookstore and notice an oversized book in the physics section. The top of the book read “Quantum Computing,” so I pulled it out. The subtitle, however, was a bit of a surprise: “The Vedic Fabric of the Digital Universe.” Um. Who is this book for? “This book [...]
Congrats to the two winners of the first Best Student Paper Awards for the APS Topical Group on Quantum Information, Concepts and Computation: Michael Garrett (Calgary) and Chris Langer (NIST, Boulder) (What you’ve already seen this announcement, congrats! What you’ve not seen this announcement? Must be because your not a member of the topical group. [...]
Daneil Dennet’s new book “Breaking the Spell” was reviewed by Leon Wieseltier in the New York Times a few weeks ago. The review was not very favorable, to say the least. Further, the review was not very well thought out. What proof of this do I have? Well, this last weekend, the entire letter section [...]
Black holes evaporate via the process of Hawking radiation. If we take the initial pure state describing a body which will collapse and form a black hole which can evaporate, then it would appear that this pure state will evolve, after the complete evaporation, to a state which is mixed. Since it is doing this [...]
I’m visiting the KITP in Santa Barbara because they are having a term long workshop on Topological Phases and Quantum Computation (directed by Sander Bais, Chetan Nayak, and John Preskill.) Unfortunately I won’t be able to stay for the entire workshop. But this isn’t as huge of a blow as it would have been years [...]
An amusing anecdote from Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance by Perry Mehrling. For background, Paul Samuelson won the Nobel prize in Economics (okay, so it’s not really a true Nobel, but, whatever) in 1970 and is considered one of the founders of modern neoclassical economics. Robert Merton won the (psuedo?) Nobel prize [...]
A reliable source (heh, that’s funny isn’t it) tells me that the ion trap dance I discussed here was the “Open Box Salsa.” Because, you know, I’m sure you all really wanted to know that. (Which of course reminds of a story. So an old teaching technique for those who have trouble spelling (like me) [...]
