Posted on by dabacon

Happenings in the Quantum World: August 7, 2008

Summer school in November, Quantum crypto is to legit to quit, quantum Pagerank, and no prayer in quantum prayer.

  • An email about a summer school in Australia:

    Dear Colleagues
    Please forgive us if you receive this multiple times…
    We would like to circulate notice of the inaugural 2008 Asher Peres International Summer School in Physics
    which will take place in Chowder Bay, Sydney Harbor, from 17-22 November 2008 in memory of Professor Asher Peres
    The 2008 school is entitled: From Qubits to Black Holes
    and is organised jointly between Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia), and the Technion, (Haifa, Israel).
    The 2008 school will cover the Fundamentals of Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Gravity and Quantum Information and is aimed at senior undergraduates, honours students and early postgraduate students.
    There are no registration fees and all student room and board is covered by the school for the duration in the scenic location of Chowder Bay.
    However capacity is limited to a maximum of 40 students.
    The international lecturers at the school include
    Professor Sir Peter Knight
    Professor Artur Ekert (*)
    Professor Christian Kurtsiefer
    Professor Bei-Lok Hu
    Professor Chris Fuchs
    (*) to be confirmed.
    For more information please consult
    http://web.mac.com/quests/PeresSchool/Welcome.html
    All registrations are made online and the deadline is October 7th
    Please distribute to students who might be interested.
    Best Regards
    Daniel Terno and Jason Twamley and Ady Mann [Organisers]

  • Quantum cryptography gets its hacker credentials and is demoed at Blackhat, and in the coming days DEFCON.
  • Can quantum theory be used to understand PageRank better? 0807.4325 says yes.

    • Google dollars plz.

  • No disrespect to the reverend, but I don’t think you should put your prayers in quantum theory for answering your prayers.

4 Replies to “Happenings in the Quantum World: August 7, 2008”

  1. To your attention: Check out the interview with stem cell researcher Robert Lanza in the September issue of Discover magazine:

    You have suggested that reality is determined by the conscious observer. Most physicists view consciousness as an accident.
    There was a paper published in Science this February, and what it showed was that if you do an experiment with a photon, put it in the apparatus, that what you do right now actually changes an event that already occurred in the past. Now isn’t that bizarre? That is the same universe that you and I are in. How can the physics in this experiment actually show that if you do something right now it retroactively changes an event that has already happened? You can play your little games with it, but any way you cut the pie, if you observe something it acts as a particle, and if you don’t it acts as a wave. It is not an artifact of the system. Those experiments are real. Get over it.
    You’ve said physical laws are exactly balanced for life to exist.
    If there were one-billionth of a difference in the mass of the Big Bang, you couldn’t have galaxies. If the gravitational constant were ever-so-slightly different, you couldn’t have stars, including the sun, and you would just have hydrogen. There are 200 parameters like this. We now have people out there talking about an intelligent design, saying “God” is the explanation. But it is really because quantum theory is right: Everything is observer-determined and the past and present are relative only to you, as the observer. It all fits, but the problem is, you then do need to accept what people will not accept: When you turn you back to the moon, it no longer exists.

    Reply

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