O brave new quantum world!
Via Saheli, I find a test to determine which superhero I am.
My results:
You are Spider-Man
|
You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.  |
Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test
Power and responsibility? Huh.
One thing that bugs the heck out of me, is when I hear particle physicists talk about their field as if it is all of physics. I have a great love of particle physics, so I’m not dissing the field at all, nor arguing that it isn’t more fundamental, but it rubs me the wrong way to disregard all of the rest of physics that is currently going on. This especially irritates me since it gives students the wrong impression that the only exciting physics is in particle physics. (Yeah, I know, I’m in a CS department, so what do I know about physics 🙂 BTW)
Why bring this up? Because over a Nanoscale Views, Doug Natelson has just put up a blog post with a list of Hot Topics and Controversies in condensed matter/nanoscience. And if the topics listed don’t show you an exciting field full of important open problems, then you’re crazy! The eventual goal of the post is to discuss each of the items on this list in latter blog posts which is a great idea which I am sourly tempted to steal and try out here with quantum hot topics and controversies (okay, maybe the entire field is controversial!)
Long article appearing on CNNmoney written for Fortune magazine on quantum computers. My favorite quote from the article:
But quantum computing scientists are surprisingly bullish, for scientists. “This is the most exciting time of my life, and I’m not young,” says Eli Yablonovitch, professor of electrical engineering at UCLA. “We’re looking forward to a direct impact on everybody in the world.”
And the most interesting quote is
Granted, changing the spin of an electron is a long way from building a circuit out of the same, and history is littered with promising technologies that didn’t pan out. Intel CEO Paul Otellini is one major quantum skeptic, increasingly reluctant to fund R&D for it. Reports of the death of silicon have been greatly exaggerated, he says
What is interesting, I think is that the article makes it sound like Paul Otellini thinks that quantum computers are somehow meant to be computers “beyond Moore’s law,” i.e. as a technology that moves beyond today’s Silicon based transistor technology. I think this is kind of crazy. The point of quantum computers is not that they will be “beyond Moore” but that there is an entirely new form of computing beyond the form of computing we are executing today. I’m skeptical of quantum computers as devices “beyond Moore’s law” too, mostly because I figure there is always a factor in the error correction needed to achieve quantum error correction over classical error correction. Thus any quantum computer I design, say from the single spin up, could probalby be put to use as a classical computer with less overhead needed for error correction. I think this view of quantum computers comes about because an argument made for quantum computing is usually to put up Moore’s law and point out that if it continues, it will eventually make atom sized transistors. This is kind of a silly argument and hides the idea that the reason you build a quantum computer is because it is an entirely new form of computation.
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!