Why Do We Tolerate This?:

(OK, I promised no more. But this time, I can’t constrain the rant. Warning evolution RANT ahead.)
This,
D. Chris Buttars
my friends, is Utah state senator D. Chris Buttars. State senator Buttars opinions in today’s USA today, that

The trouble with the “missing link” is that it is still missing! In fact, the whole fossil chain that could link apes to man is also missing!

To which I can only respond with “The world is flat! The world is flat! The world is flat!” Nothing to see here. Or here (a picture I call…Earthdisk.)
Why, oh why, should anything a scientist do benefit this man? If he wants to be so anti-scientific as to believe that every single scientist is just spouting a bunch of bull, in effect insulting every single one of us, why should I (we) do anything to help improve his world? If he wants to go back to before the enlightenment, he’s welcome to take that step. All he needs to do is give up every single modern convenience which science led to.
Oh, and why does there have to be such great skiing in Utah?
(Update: After calming down, no I don’t advoate withholding medicine etc. from this kind Senator. But “When in the course of human events”…and I must say that my bond with him is pretty much ziltch.)

Foundations of Quantum Theory, Quantum Gravity, and Quantum Computing

On a couple of blogs (Not Even Wrong and Luboลก Motl’s reference frame) a question has creeped up which is what role studies of the foundations of quantum theory have in a future theory of quantum gravity. At the Strings2005 conference in Toronto recently, this question was raised during a panel discussion. When someone claimed that foundations hasn’t contributed anything to physics, Lee Smolin apparently said something to the effect that study of foundations of quantum theory has given us quantum computing.
It is true that the original thinkers about quantum computers, and in particular I’m thinking about David Deutsch, where inspired by interpretation issues in quantum theory. But I think the relationship between foundational studies of quantum theory and what is now quantum information science is a bit different. I think that foundational studies have played the role of a “clarifier” in quantum information science. Instead of many results being motivated by foundational issues directly, studies in foundations have lead those in quantum computing to a better understanding of what quantum theory is and what it is not. I certainly think that banging my head up against the different interpretations of quantum theory has given me a very good grasp of the limits of what quantum theory can say and what it cannot say. Thus I think that quantum information science has benefited immensely by listening to the foundation crowd and learning just exactly what is so different about quantum theory. So, while the interpretations themselves don’t have any gigantic successes (one could argue for smaller ones!), I think they are an essential base which betters the field of quantum computing.
Now back to quantum gravity. Whether or not the foundations of quantum theory has anything to say about quantum gravity, I think, is a question we can debate until the cows come in. There are certainly very good philosophical points of view that the strain between gravity and quantum theory must be broken in some nontrivial manner, and whether we break quantum theory or gravity is, I think, an intriguing question. But if we take quantum computing as an example, the lesson that may be learned is that by careful study of quantum theory you can gain an appreciation for it which might allow you to make progress in forming a quantum theory of gravity. I must say that I am often shocked by the lack of understanding of the details of quantum theory among high energy physicists. Sure they use it every day. But do they really deeply get the theory and what it can and can not do? Of course this is a very prejudiced statement coming from a very prejudiced quantum computing dude. We hold quantum theory fairly sacred and hate to see it abused. I’m also sure that high energy physicists are greatly pained by quantum information scientists lack of understanding of “real” physics!
My person views on the relationship between foundations and quantum gravity are about as close as I get to pseudoscientific gobldy-gook. I gave a talk on those views once. It was supposed to be one hour and it ran to two. Sometimes I contemplate writing a book about these views… Penrose did it, so why can’t I? ๐Ÿ˜‰

Quantum Computing For Dollars

One of the students in the class I am teaching this summer, after we had covered Simon’s quantum algorithm, had this interesting encounter:

I met Dan Simon at Pro Sports Club in Bellevue yesterday and here is the short dialogue we had:
Student – “Your algorithm is giving me so much of a headache this weekend!”
Dan Simon – “You know, I really apologize: I was young, needed the money, I just had to do that…”

Nice.

Comments

For those of you who’ve noticed that your comments haven’t appear immediately, this is because of my fight with comment spammers. I accidentally blocked all submissions with “mail.com” on them, which blocks gmail, hotmail, etc. It should be fixed now.

The Olympic Peninsula

This weekend we went to the Olympic Peninsula to go “camping.” The quotes are because we were camping out of a car, which, from my purest days growing up in the mountains doesn’t really count. Camping to me is when you hike somewhere away from a road and camp. BTW.
The first thing we learned on this trip is that if you leave Seattle on the 7:30 ferry to Bainbridge Island and you travel to the northern part of the peninsula, you will not get a campsite in August. And when you’ve looked at three campsites which are all full, you will realize that all the hotel rooms in Port Angeles and Sequim are all sold out. Which leads you to consider such ideas as sleeping in your car. But, no, there is hope! Hope comes in the form of a sign above an RV park “We wecome tenters!” OK, so spending the first night under a billboard for a Shell station, a few feet from 101 is not what I consider camping, but hey, you live and learn, no?
On Saturday we traveled up to Huricane Ridge and went on a short hike. Here is the money shot. If you click on it you get a bigger version (some users may need to move the mouse and click the expand button to get the picture to appear.)
From Huricane Hill
On the hike up we saw…..a bear?
A Bear Ahead?
Upon closer inspection and questioning of our depth perseption, this “bear” turned into a marmot:
A Marmot
Apparently this marmot is a separate species known as the Olympic Marmot. We saw three of these fellers on our short hike.
Here is a shot of Mt. Baker which makes it look like the mountain is floating in the air:
A Floating Mountain?
The second night we found a good camping spot and bummed around the western coast. It is cool to go from alpine meadows to staring at sea creatures within only a few miles.
Dangerous Sea Creature!
Yep, it was a good trip. Here is a picture of me cooking bacon. Bacon cooking bacon. Kind of funny?
Mmmm. Bacon

Letter to the Seattle Times

(Warning! Evolution commentary below. Proceed at your own discretion.)
During my recent outrage, I got angry enough to write a letter to a local paper, the Seattle Times. For a long time, the only person I knew who wrote letters to the editor of a local newspaper was my grandfather on my mother’s side. Well, to my astoundment, they actually published my letter! It’s really not the most beautiful bit of writing I’ve done, nor do I like it’s logical consistancy much, but here it is. Note that I did NOT choose the title:

The strong survive
The Times reports that Seattle-based Discovery Institute has compiled a list of more than 400 scientists who are skeptical about evolution. This suggests that there is controversy in the scientific community concerning evolution.
There are more than one million scientists in the world (most of whom are working hard to better our lives through improved medicine and technology), and the fact that 0.04 percent of these scientists are “skeptical” is totally inconsistent with the point of view that evolution is controversial.
Or, to turn those statistics around: 9,996 out of 10,000 scientists agree, evolution is scientifically uncontroversial and intelligent design is not science and should not be taught in public-school science classes.
โ€” Dave Morris Bacon, Seattle

Notice how I signed with my middle name which was my mother’s maiden name and hence my grandfather’s last name. Definitely channeling the old dude.
For comparison, here are all the other letters to the editor on the President’s remarks on teaching all points of view. I can’t resist it, so I’ll comment on some. And then no more evolution talk for a while and back to the quantum world (well maybe quantum evolution ๐Ÿ˜‰ )

The faculties can get a trifle overhyped
Editor, The Times:
On Monday, President Bush said that schools should teach both the theory of evolution and the proposition of intelligent design [“Teaching evolution alone not enough, Bush says,” Times, News, Aug. 2].
I wonder if Bush or any of the other religious-right groups that are pushing for this read the theory or have even checked out [intelligent design proponent] Discovery Institute’s Web site. I suspect not. Intelligent design is definitely not biblical creationism; in fact, it is explicitly stated on the Web site and in several articles that the theory does not support the biblical theory of creation, or any other religious texts, for that matter. It is also clearly stated that the “Intelligent Designer” could be anything from aliens to space debris.
So before the religious right jumps on the Bush bandwagon about having it taught in schools and our tax dollars go to buying new textbooks, I have a little advice for you: Do your homework!
What I don’t understand is why the Discovery Institute is not speaking up about this misconception, unless of course it is creationism wrapped up in a different package and they are trying to slide it in under the radar in the cloak of secular science.
โ€” Patrick Maunder, Seattle

This, I think, is my favorite letter. It’s my favorite because it is entirely an argument based on the agendas at work here combined with a beautiful underhand at the end, which basically implies that “Intelligent Design” is not science.

Lord knows
The mystery of life must not be swept under the table
Why are evolutionary supporters so afraid to have “intelligent design” taught alongside Darwin’s theory? It seems we fight censorship at all costs in this country until it comes to Christianity… then we release the lions.
Even if a day comes when evolution graduates from theory to scientific fact, I will still find more comfort in my faith than in a Periodic Table of the Elements.
โ€” Doug Boyles, Tacoma

OK. Big problems here. First of all no one, most of all scientists are arguing that “the mystery of life must not be swept under the table.” In particular, science is all about bringing mysteries forward. And then investingating them. In the case of the origin of species (which is one of the mysteries of life, but certainly not the only one) the scientists have a robust, non-controversial theory. Called evolution.
Now second of all, “Why are evolutionary supporters so afraid to have “intelligent design” taught alongside Darwin’s theory?” They are not afraid of such a challenge. The problem is that most scientists have looked at intelligent design and seen that it is specifically ascientific. It is simply not science. This is what we are arguing about: whether things which are not science should be taught in a science course at public schools.
“It seems we fight censorship at all costs in this country until it comes to Christianity… then we release the lions.” Would you make the same argument for censureship of teaching astrology in science class? What about spoon bending? See there is a big difference between censorship, and propoganda. We don’t allow our government to tell us all to go to church. Why? Because we are a secular nation. Similarly we don’t allow non-science propoganda, whether it is about astrology, Raelians, Christian Scientists, or radical athiests, into our class room. But, of course you get bonus points for the martyr reference. Everyone loves a good martyr reference.
“Even if a day comes when evolution graduates from theory to scientific fact, I will still find more comfort in my faith than in a Periodic Table of the Elements.” Well, for your purposes, evolution is scientific fact. Yadda, yadda, you can never prove blah blah blah. Whatever. You are, of course, free to take comfort in your faith. You are not, however, free to force your faith to be taught as science in my public schools. I also note that you are being a bit flippant to the “Periodic Table of the[sic] Elements.” Note however, that it is exactly this understanding of this same table of elements which allows our scientists today to make progress in curing all kinds of diseases which someday might save your life. Note also that understanding these same elements has given billions more life, by giving us a better world. Think about us scientists, sometime, when you bite into that meal, shipped from who knows where, on trucks built and optimized by scientists around the world. Which is exactly why I take all kinds of comfort in the period table of elements.

All of them created equal?
So now the president โ€” who has no scientific training and admittedly doesn’t read โ€” telling school boards that intelligent design should be included in school biology classes to present differing points of view.
Surely his logic would lead one to conclude that schools should also present the views of the racist Church of the Creator, the KKK, jihadists, and other groups that devoutly believe such teachings.
Do the president and other supporters of intelligent design realize that the concept supports only 18th-century Deism and not biblical Christianity?
It might be politically useful as a stalking horse, but does not in itself promote evangelical/fundamentalist goals, which run counter to the goals of the Enlightenment and the Founding Fathers.
โ€” David Echols, Kirkland

A pretty good letter. It’s good, but I don’t find the final argument, which is “argument by founding fathers” to be a very pursuasive one. It’s not that it is a bad argument, it’s just that it begs the question “why should we care, today, what the founding fathers thought?” Which is a good question. When do we move beyond those brave beautiful men who wrote some radical things in the late seventeen hundreds? Certainly progress will move. The question is whether we will move with it.

Bite of bad apples
Liberal types are way too touchy over President Bush’s view that the science of intelligent design ought to be taught in our public schools alongside Darwinian evolution. We’re a Christian nation and should respect the many Christians who prefer creationism, or at least intelligent design, to the theory of evolution.
In addition, because some of these folks also embrace astrology, Holocaust denial and flying saucerology, we should add those disciplines to the curriculum so students can compare ideas and make up their own minds.
โ€” Jim White, Lake Forest Park

(Update: Patrick says this letter is sarcastic. I guess I’m too dense to follow the sarcasm. What follows is what I first wrote about this letter.)The logic here is absurd. I do not advocate teaching astrology. I do not advocate teachng flying saucerology. I also do not advocate teaching Christianity. I advocate teaching secular courses to students precisely because I can respect others having those points of view. Does my respect deminish these disciplines. No, Mr. White, I think being touchy feely about respectiving other’s views is the foundation of our country, not your moral majority Christianity. (Update: Well, is this letter sarcastic or isn’t it? I parsed the second half of the letter as sarcastic and a jab at “liberals” (remember it’s a dirty dirty word) believing all sorts of silly things. But taken with the first half, doh!, it does seem a jab to the heart of the matter.)

If we are all here as a direct result of God’s “intelligent design,” those believers have a lot of explaining to do:
We are all put here to do his work but why did he put so many monsters here too, e.g., Osama bin Laden, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Attila the Hun, Jack the Ripper, etc.?
Why does he continue to allow us to make such a mess of it? Surely he is smarter than that!
It’s quite enough to reinforce my belief in Darwin’s evolution.
Accidentally yours,
โ€” Jeff Douthwaite, Seattle

Why would you publish a letter like this in an argument about evolution and “Intelligent Design?” Because it is exactly the problem that people associate a secular school system with being anti-relgious instead of a-religious. This letter does nothing for me.

Purpose over heaven
People need to stop referring to evolution as “an accident” when comparing it to intelligent design. Evolution occurs when animals with particular traits that make them more resilient/attractive survive long enough to mate and spawn children with similar traits.
It is not random; it is nature’s way of improving life. Sounds rather intelligent, actually.
โ€” Angela Boston, Shoreline

Well, equating evolution with “improving” is a problem here. But at least the jist of the letter is something like: look there is beauty in evolution. This last line can be seen, of course, as a belief that, while a supreme being is not guiding the world, the supreme being designed this evolution. If you put the being in the cracks, I have no problem with this. But again, please don’t teach it in a secular setting.

Let higher power decide
I understand that some people believe in God (as do I) and that he created everything; I also understand those of science who believe in the evolution of life. What I don’t understand is why we have to teach either one of these in our schools.
Leave this to universities to deal with, where students want (and pay) to learn either one way or the other and get credits toward their higher education. That leaves the choice to the individuals without stepping on anybody’s belief systems or ideologies.
โ€” Rick Helwick (U.S. Navy, stationed overseas), Oak Harbor

What the hell? OK, first of all, we are not talking about “universities.” We are talking about public middle and high schools. And students in public school are not “paying.” We, the taxpayers are paying, because, well, you know, like education of society, you know, it like, does lead to an improved society. So now the question why teach either? Well we teach evolution because it is one of the greatest discoveries of modern science and is a unifying theme of biology. Is it the most important thing to teach students? Probably not. Getting the basic scientific method, plus good math, in my humble opinion are higher on my list. Why teach evolution and not “intelligent design”? Listen closely. Because “intelligent design” is not scientific. That first one I mentioned: the scientific method. Yeah teaching that one pretty much rules out teaching the second. Especially when it is a thinly veiled attempt to bring religion into a science class.

End with a prayer
Intelligent design may end in God. It might also end in the X-files, the Matrix, or the Borg.
Provided no scientist assumes that “intelligent design” means “benign intent,” then for my part, I see no reason schoolchildren shouldn’t pursue that line of inquiry.
Whatever designed us was really [angry]. Our history is blood-soaked. Whatever part of the globe you choose to study, its history is frequently defined by its wars.
If something designed us and our environment, then we must somehow reflect its tastes, and It likes blood. War is unavoidable under Darwin. Under God, it’s just sadistic.
Consider what you do before you rush to teach the children “intelligent design.” (The Designer also seems to like poverty and has a healthy appetite for terror.)
โ€” Duncan Dunscombe, Seattle

While this letter is interesting, this doesn’t do it for me either. The problem is that the issue is what should be taugh in public schools. Not what the consequences of such and such a proposition (ID) means. And really, does this argument actually work for people? If I really believe in a being outside of the laws of science, then does his, her, or it’s existence really have anything to do with the kind of universe which the being created?
OK, I’m done. Sorry about that. Like I said, it’s in my family and I just couldn’t resist ๐Ÿ˜‰ For the record, my grandfather was a Republican, I never knew his views on evolution, but he was a scientist who (like his grandson) went to Caltech. When he was at Caltech, he met Albert Einstein. Pretty cool stuff.

A Mere Five Orders of Magnitude

After the cool PRL describing high visibility for a superconducting qubit, today I find in Physical Review Letters the article “Long-Lived Qubit Memory Using Atomic Ions” by Langer et al (volume 95, page 060502). This paper describes work at NIST (Boulder) with trapped Beryllium ions. This is a cool paper where they achieve coherence lifetimes for their qubit in excess of 10 seconds using two techniques: one involving tuning of an external magnetic field to obtain a sweet spot in the energy levels of their qubit and the other using a decoherence-free subspace encoding of the quantum information (this latter actually leads to slightly less than 10 seconds of coherence)
One of the main sources causing decoherence for ionic qubits comes from ambient fluctuating magnetic fields. In many implementations of qubits in ions, the energy levels used for the qubit are sensitive to magnetic fields. Stray magnetic fields cause these energy levels to fluctuate and this causes phase decoherence of the qubit. The trick which this paper reports on is to tune an external magnetic field to a percise point (0.01194 Tesla, the Earth’s magnetic field on the surface of the earth, for comparison is around 50 microTesla) where the energy difference the two energy levels used for the qubit have no first order dependence on the magnetic field (but do have a higher, second order dependence on the magnetic field.) Similar tricks have been used in neutral atom systems, in particular in Rubidium. But there these manipulations where done by microwaves and with large numbers of atoms. Further there are other problems (perhaps not killer, but they are there) for using these qubits in quantum computers. One problem is that using microwaves may eventually not be a practical way to build a quantum computer because they are hard to focus and other suggested techniques, like apply a magnetic field gradient to distinguish between qubits, may have other destructive overheads . For these reasons, this technique with a Berrylium ion qubit are very cool. What is really nice is that the authors obtain an increase in five orders of magntiude for the lifetime of this qubit over their previous experiments with this qubit. Nothing like a good five orders of magntidue to make my day. (Oh, and for those of you who care about these things, they quote this as a memory error rate per detection rate as around 10^(-5), below some of the good old fault-tolerant thresholds for quantum computation.)
The other technique the authors use to obtain long lifetimes is to encode their qubit into a decoherence-free subspace (DFS). Here the idea is to encode into one qubit into two qubits such that these logical qubits are effected equally by uniform (over the physical qubits) magnetic fields. Using DFSs to protect quantum information in the ion traps had previously been reported. In fact it helped me get my Ph.D. When I was giving my qualifying examine and explaining what a a DFS was, one unnamed experimentalist asked (roughly) “This is all good and fine, in theory, but does it correspond to the real world?” Luckily my next slide was a slide on the DFS demonstrated in ion traps by Kielpenski et. al. Booyah! In this paper the authors encode information into the DFS and then cause oscillations between the two levels of the qubit by applying a magentic field gradient. Since the DFS states are |01> and |10> this basically means that the system is almost always in an entangled state. The lifetime for this entangled state oscillation is measured to be around seven seconds!
Update: Right after I posted this, I read quant-ph and found, quant-p/ 0508021 “Robust Entanglement” by H. Haeffner et al. which reports on ion trap experiments in Innsbruck. Here they demonstrate lifetimes for entangled quantum states that are twenty seconds long in their Calcium ions. How cool is that!
Update update: Some press here

Four in Ten Thousand Scientists Agree

(Warning, anti-creationist political rant ahead. This clearly serves no use here as you either (1) agree with me on these issues, or (2) don’t agree with me and the chances that what I say will change your mind are 0.04%)
From a Seattle Times article about the U.S. president’s view on intelligent design, I find the following interesting quote:

The Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank in Seattle that is the leading proponent of intelligent design, said it has compiled a list of more than 400 scientists, including 70 biologists, who are skeptical about evolution.

Let’s see there are at least one million scientists in the world. 400 divided by one million is 0.04%. 0.04% of scientists don’t believe in evolution! Holy cow, there really is a controversy.
As for the U.S. president coming out about teaching “different schools of thought,” well I certainly understand why he got a “D” in astronomy at Yale now. He must have been advocating that different school of thought which believes that stars are really angels and not big globes of hot plasma. From a comment on Cosmic Variance:

DarkSyde: Why, oh, why, does biology hate America?

OK, I’m done now. Just had to get that out of my system. Back to work!
Update: What’s this link? Well just a good natured attempt at google bombing.

Stringy Article

The New York Times has a nice article about the recent string theory conference, Strings05, where a panel discussion on the next string theory revolution has held.
I especially like

Leonard Susskind, a Stanford theorist and one of the founders of string theory, replied, “There’s nothing to do but just hope the Bush administration will keep paying us.”
Amanda Peet of the University of Toronto suggested making string theory “a faith-based initiative,” to much nervous laughter.

Come on string theorists, even you have got to admit that this is funny!
A heartening part of the article is at the end

At the end Dr. Shenker invoked his executive privileges. He asked the audience members for a vote on whether, by the year 3000, say, the value of the cosmological constant would be explained by the anthropic principle or by fundamental physics.
The panel split 4 to 4, with abstentions, but the audience voted overwhelmingly for the latter possibility.

I don’t think my mother ever said “If you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything at all,” but in this spirit, I won’t say anything about the anthropic principle. Although I will say that the only thing which anoyed me more than Stephen Hawking’s musing on God in “A Brief History of Time” where his musings in “A Brief History of Time” on the anthropic principle.

High Visibility In Superconducting Qubits

One of the more attractive approaches to building a quantum computer are the various proposals which utilize superconducting electrical circuits. One of the benefits of using superconducters to build a quantum computer is that it is expected that scaling up from a few to many qubits might be easier because of the advanced state of the fabrication for superconducing circuits (Although it must be said that “fitting everything together” will certainly still be a challenge. But it does seem like a slightly easier challenge, than, say loading 1000 ions into separate ion traps.)
One of the interesting problems with superconducting qubits has been that no one has been able to demonstrate high visibility of the qubits. One question which is particularly acute for solid state qubits is whether they can be sufficiently isolated from their environment to act as truly two level systems. Interestingly, some of the early experiments with superconducting circuits, while they demonstrated Rabi flopping of a single qubit, these experiments weren’t able to get high visibility of this flopping. What this means is that instead of observing the the qubit system flopping back and forth between 100% population in one of the qubit states to 100% population in the other qubit states, the experiments observed, say 100% in one state and then, say 30% in the other state. And in these experiments, while the flopping was not between 100% |0> and 100% |1>, after this initial reduction to, in our example, 30%, the qubits then Rabi flopped with a pretty slow decay. Thus it seemed that there was a “visibility” problem: the qubits were probably oscillating properly, but something in the scheme was causing the measurements to not see this full oscillation. Hence there was a “visibility” problem.
Now in todays Physical Review Letters, A. Wallraff et. al. from Yale, report on superconducting experiments in which they achieve nearly 95% visibility in Rabi flop measurements of superconducting qubits! The trick which these authors use is to couple their (charge) superconducting circuit to, basically, an electromagnetic cavity. Thus what these experimentalists are able to achieve is a superconducting qubit which can be strongly coupled to a quantum electrodynamic cavity mode. They then use this nice pure coupling to perform a measurement on the superconducting qubit with the beautiful result that they really high visibilities.
This is very exciting news. Ion trap proposals for quantum computers can still obtain higher visibility in their experiments, but this movement from visibilities less than 50 percent to 95 percent is an awesome jump. I can’t wait until they get this up to 99 percent and then to 99.9 percent. Then we will be rocking!