Author: dabacon

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Physics Viewpoint: "Too entangled to quantum compute one-way"

Physics is an new APS initiative to highlight select articles for Physical Review journals, very much in the model of the commentaries that appear on articles in journals like Science. Many (all?) of the articles are written by researchers in the field, and are meant to be readable by a wide audience of physicists and serve as a sieve for what a good broad physicist should know about what is currently going on in physics.
Today, a highlight I wrote about two recent PRLs has appeared: Too entangled to quantum compute one-way. This paper highlights two recent papers on entanglement in one-way quantum computing: D. Gross, S. T. Flammia, and J. Eisert, “Most Quantum States Are Too Entangled To Be Useful As Computational Resources” Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 190501 (2009) (arXiv:0810.4331) and M. J. Bremner, C. Mora, and A. Winter, “Are Random Pure States Useful for Quantum Computation?” Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 190502 (2009) (arXiv:0812.3001). (With the bonus appearance of arXiv:0903.5236 by Richard Low.)

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Adiabatic Paper Dance

Yes, it’s a slow dance:

Through the hourglass I saw you, in time you slipped away
When the mirror crashed I called you, and turned to hear you say
If only for today I am adiabatic
Take my pulsed gates away

arXiv:0905.0901, “Adiabatic Gate Teleportation” by Dave Bacon and Steve Flammia(As seen on arXiview)

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Too Few Wrong Papers?

After watching Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk* it occurred to me to go back and look at my own scientific papers and try to assess them for how creative they were. Some things you should just never do, I guess, but it did lead me to an interesting question.
* The first 2/3 of the talk is excellent, ending not as great. I’m heartily in support of his cause, but it felt to me like he was implying that this was the one and only problem with the education system, which I find hard to swallow.
Continue reading “Too Few Wrong Papers?”

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LTCM Video

Via MarketSci blog, Eric Rosenfeld talks about the collapse of LTCM at MIT. Funny I can’t find in any MIT literature an advertisement for the fact that 2/3s of LTCM had MIT roots? (Caltech, snarky snark snark)

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Many-Worlds Critique

For the bus ride home, I’m going to check out “One world versus many: the inadequacy of Everettian accounts of evolution, probability, and scientific confirmation” by Adrian Kent (arXiv/0905.0624) Nothing like ending the day with some against many-worlds reading. That and a fun TED talk should make the ride go by fast

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Kindle DX Drooool

I’ve not had a chance to play with a Kindle, but seen a lot of them in the coffee shops of Seattle (Amazon will soon be moving to a neighborhood very close to mine, in South Lake Union.) My first impression was: cool, but a bit small. Now here comes the Kindle DX with a 9.7″ display and better integrated PDF. Now if Amazon will just offer an easy method for connecting to the arXiv, and I can scrounge up $500 bucks (can I put a Kindle on one of my grants?), I might think of getting one. One question I couldn’t find an answer to was whether one could use the “basic web browser” in the Kindle DX to download PDFs.

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An Identification Problem

Some quotes, with some substitutions, denoted by [], for the actual words:

“The famous physicist Max Planck was talking about the resistance of the human mind, even the bright human mind, to new ideas…. And he said science advances one funeral at a time, and I think there’s a lot of truth to that and it’s certainly been true in [FIELD X].”

and

“If you stand up in front of a [FIELD Y] class and say a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, you won’t get tenure…. Higher mathematics my be dangerous and lead you down pathways that are better left untrod.”

and

“The more symbols they could work into their writing the more they were revered.”

Question: who said these things? A disgrunted professor? Peter Woit talking about string theory?
Continue reading “An Identification Problem”