Oh boy: four hours in the San Diego airport! Thought my flight was at two. It’s at six.
Blessed be wireless access at airports.
Quantum Dollars
At the workshop here a claim was made that the world has now spent over one billion dollars in the field of quantum information science since the discovery of Shor’s algorithm in 1994. How many billions more before a useful quantum computer is built?
Sound Projects Down the Aisle
If you concentrate hard enough on the book you’re reading on the planeride, you won’t even hear the two women behind you discuss the fate of their souls. But you have to concentrate really hard.
Now I’m in San Diego for a workshop resembling a particle theory experiment. In this case we’re smashing together quantum algorithm people with signal processing people in hopes that this collision will produce some new particle of knowledge unknown to man.
Day Three
There is nothing quite like the silence of snow. This morning the sound of snow woke me up before my alarm went off. Two new inches of new fluffy right outside my bedroom window. Quick to the qubit-mobile and off to Taos for $20 all day skiing! Taos had around three inches of new snow and I spent most of the morning skiing a run on the backside until my legs felt like jello. When my legs felt like jello, well this reminded me of jello shots. At Taos they used to have a tree where people would stop and have a martini. That’s right, a tree. That’s right, martinis. The locals would supply a community batch of martinis. Well, lawsuits and all, you know, and now the martini tree is no more. Instead I grabbed lunch and headed upstairs to the Martini Tree Bar. There I discovered what the straight version of a cool tradition had become: a bar with pool tables, foosball, video game machines, and air hockey. Anyone who visits me will therefore be immediately challenged to one of these games. Better practice.
In the afternoon I made the acquaintance of “K squared,” the son of a national medal of science winner, and, apparently, on a permanent ski vacation. What a life. The fun thing was that K^2 kept giving me puzzles to work on as we went up the lifts. Hard to ski when you’re trying to reason through a logic puzzle. Well at least it makes a good excuse for a few of my terrific crashes.
Master Master
During a talk today by Sid Redner, the question came up as to the origin of the expression “master equation.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first such use of the term was given in by A. Nordsieck et al. in Physica 7, p. 353, 1940
The required probability of an energy distribution will be a function of the numbers ni and of x, which we will denote by W(n1, n2,..; x). From this function W one can find all other distribution functions… When the probabilities of the elementary processes are known, one can write down a continuity equation for W, from which all other equations can be derived and which we will call therefore the “master” equation.
Reality TV Show Needs Scientists
From a Caltech postdoc mailing list:
I am working on two science show teasers for Discovery and we are looking for a couple of articulate, passionate scientists who would be interested in appearing in reality television. The first show is called “Get Out of There” in which we recreate survival situations that actually occured and two scientists have to figure out how to get out/survive. The second show is called “Brain vs. Brawn” in which two contestants are both given the same challenge and one is coached on how to accomplish it by a scientist and the other by a non-scientist. The challenge we will be shooting for the pilot/teaser will be fire-walking, so ideally we will have scientist who can explain the physics behind it and the other will be a new agey-type who will focus on a more mind over matter approach. If you can recommend anyone, please contact: *******
(if you really want to know who to contact, please email me.)
The Itchy and Scratchy Show
Crap. Poison oak from an offtrail hike last week to look at an interesting landslide on the Klamath river. Itch.
Wrong Number
My friend Lon Christensen is the CTO of a company called Quorum Systems in San Diego which makes chipsets which can access both GSM and WLAN networks simultaneously. If you Google for “quorum systems” you will realize why it’s important not to name your company after a technical computer science term.
Ion Trap Milestone
The slow steady advance in ion traps! A milestone: Realization of quantum error correction,” J. Chiavernini, D. Leibfried, T. Schaetz, M. D. Barrett, R. B. Blakestad, J. Britton, W. M. Itano, J. D. Jost, E. Knill, C. Langer, R. Ozeri & D. J. Wineland, Nature 432, 602–605 (2004)
Scalable quantum computation and communication require error control to protect quantum information against unavoidable noise. Quantum error correction protects information stored in two-level quantum systems (qubits) by rectifying errors with operations conditioned on the measurement outcomes. Error-correction protocols have been implemented in nuclear magnetic resonance experiments, but the inherent limitations of this technique prevent its application to quantum information processing. Here we experimentally demonstrate quantum error correction using three beryllium atomic-ion qubits confined to a linear, multi-zone trap. An encoded one-qubit state is protected against spin-flip errors by means of a three-qubit quantum error-correcting code. A primary ion qubit is prepared in an initial state, which is then encoded into an entangled state of three physical qubits (the primary and two ancilla qubits). Errors are induced simultaneously in all qubits at various rates. The encoded state is decoded back to the primary ion one-qubit state, making error information available on the ancilla ions, which are separated from the primary ion and measured. Finally, the primary qubit state is corrected on the basis of the ancillae measurement outcome. We verify error correction by comparing the corrected final state to the uncorrected state and to the initial state. In principle, the approach enables a quantum state to be maintained by means of repeated error correction, an important step towards scalable fault-tolerant quantum computation using trapped ions.
Courage
Kiev, Ukraine, Nov. 29 (UPI) — The sign-language interpreter on a Ukrainian TV station Thursday staged a silent protest against the nation’s election by signing, “They are lying.”
During a news report on state-owned UT-1 that called Viktor Vanukovych the winner of the presidential election, Natalya Dmitruk told viewers in sign language, “I am addressing all the deaf citizens of Ukraine. Our president is (Viktor) Yushchenko. Don’t believe what they say. They are lying.”
Dmitruk then went back to signing the news report but digressed one more time at the end: “My soul is heavy that I had to repeat these lies. I will not do it again. I don’t know if we’ll see each other again.”