In October I get to go to London for the 7th European QIPC Workshop Quantum Information Processing and Communication which is being hosted by the Royal Society of London (Which is cool, because the original society was founded, IIRC, as a meeting to discuss the ideas of one Sir Francis Bacon!) The theme of this workshop is “Physicists and Computer Scientist Reunite!” Here is a blurb which Scott Aaronson produced after taking a huge verbose statement I wrote about this theme (those computer scientists have fine compression algorithms, I do say):
In the early days of quantum information science, physicists and computer scientists could make great progress by just sitting down at the same table and explaining the basic concerns of their respective fields. But those halcyon days are gone. Today the major discoveries of the mid-nineties have essentially morphed into separate disciplines. One can now work on quantum error correction without knowing anything about, say, quantum complexity or ion traps. Whereas the early days were distinguished by conferences in which computer scientists were forced to listen to physicists and vice versa, today the field is large enough that cross-disciplinary traffic has been reduced to a trickle. Yet quantum information is still just a fifteen-year-old teenager, so it would be astonishing indeed if the borderlands between physics and computer science were already picked clean. What connections remain to be discovered? What recent work in physics should computer scientists know about, and vice versa?
Quantum information scientists of the world, unite!
And indeed the workshop will have an interesting format with each one hour time slot consisting of one topic as seem by a more physics perspective and a more computer science perspective. It will be interesting to see if the audience will be able to withstand this dual sided barrage of perspectives!
As cheezy as it may be to cite this, an excellent read is Spin State by Chris Moriarty (many readers of this site have probably read it). Though science fiction, it is creepily believable in most of its speculation – and underscores the possibilities that could arise from deep cross-collaboration between physicists, computer scientists, engineers, and, for lack of a better classification, life scientists. It’s an eerie blend of quantum information, genetics, and artificial intelligence. But it underscores that major (quantum?) leaps in science and technology usually have their catalyst in work performed at the boundaries of disciplines and sub-disciplines.
Hmmm….Sounds intriguing. I had planned to go, but from one of your previous posts (which reappears in the new GQI newsletter) I’m worried that I’ll have my honour (or at least my rigour) called into question by throves of computer scientists .
Horace actually wrote ‘nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri’. It seems much more interesting than ‘nullius in verba’, the motto of R.S.
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