A rare event occurred today here in Seattle. And I’m not just talking about the 20 minutes of partly sunny skies we got at lunchtime. No, this was something rarer still: a quantumista condensate.
What precipitated this joint gathering of the decohered and the coherent? Michael Nielsen was visiting the University of Washington to deliver a distinguished lecture on the topic of his new book: open science. Having seen Michael talk about this subject 3 years ago at QIP Santa Fe, I can say that he has significantly focused his ideas and his message. He makes a very compelling case for open science and in particular open data. He has thought very hard about what makes online collaborative science projects successful at focusing and amplifying our collective intelligence, why such projects sometimes fail, and which steps we need to take to get to the promised land from where we are currently.
The talk was recorded, and as soon as the video becomes available I’ll put a link here. I highly recommend watching it.
Update (12/12): Here is the link to Michael’s talk.
You might be wondering, what is the optimizer doing there? He is in town to give the colloquium to the computer science department. And given all the excitement, Dave Bacon, aka Pontiff++, couldn’t help but sneak over from Google to check things out. He is the one you can blame for coining the horrible phrase “quantumista condensate”, but you probably already guessed that.
O brave new quantum world!
Perchance is there a Quantumista Roadmap? If so, please post about it!
Looking forward to the video. A great picture of the young turks — you can’t really tell their true natures from all of the smiles 😉