My grandfather liked to write letters to the editor. I think I inherited this disease from him. Here are the contents of a recent letter I wrote to the editor of Physics Today which I hope some of you may find amusing.
Continue reading “Qubit, qbit, q-bit, or Q*Bert?”
Nitpicker's Paradiso: Paul Davies Anthropic Edition
Paul Davies essay in the New York Times on “Taking Science on Faith” is sure to raise some hackles from the science community. Me, I’d just like to point out how silly some of Davies arguments specifics are. Yes, its another edition of “Nitpickers Paradiso.”
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"Space-Time" to Call Mystics on Their Misuse of Quantum Theory
Well it is certainly true that Mystics and quantum physicists speak the same language, that language most probably being Mandarin, English, or Hindi, but I’m guessing that’s probably not what they meant by that title. I should have stopped reading at the title, but instead I actually scanned down the page.
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Off the Queue and Into the Brain
Books recently removed from the queue. “Mathematicians in Love” by Rudy Rucker, “An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets” by Donald Mackenzie, “Financial Calculus : An Introduction to Derivative Pricing” by Martin Baxter and Andrew Rennie. “109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos” by Jennet Conant.
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Happenings in the Quantum World: Nov 21, 2007
Postdocs, APS GQI quantum newsletter, Quantum computing in Waikiki, quantum chicanery, quantum foods.
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Learn Quantum Theory in Ten Minutes
So you want to learn quantum theory in ten minutes? Well I certainly can’t give you the full theory in all its wonder and all its gory detail in that time, but I can give you a light version of the quantum theory in about that time. And won’t that impress your friends!
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A Simple Experimental Challenge?
Commenter Michael J. Biercuk asks about D-wave’s machine:
What is the fundamental experimental test which would demonstrate the system is not simply undergoing a classical, incoherent process?
Of course there are answers to this question which involve some technically fairly challenging experiments (proving that a quantum computer is quantum computing is something which many experimentalists have struggled over, for far smaller systems than D-wave’s system.) But there is a much simpler experiment which I haven’t seen answered in any of the press on D-wave, and which, for the life of me, I don’t understand why it hasn’t been done and publicized.
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D-Wave Talk
So did anyone at MIT go to this talk and care to comment:
Mohammad Amin (D-Wave)
Adiabatic Quantum Computation with Noisy Qubits
Adiabatic quantum computation (AQC) is an attractive model of quantum computation as it may naturally possess some degree of fault tolerance. Nonetheless, any practical quantum circuit is noisy and one must answer important questions regarding what level of noise can be tolerated. Gate model quantum computation relies on three important quantum resources: superposition, entanglement, and phase coherence. In this presentation, I will discuss the role of these three resources and the effect of environment upon them with respect to AQC. I will also show a close relation between open AQC and incoherent tunneling processes as in a double-well potential. At a more microscopic level, I will present a non-Markovian theory for macroscopic resonant tunneling, together with recent experimental results on superconducting flux qubits which demonstrate excellent agreement with the theory and may shed light on the microscopic origin of flux noise in these devices. Finally, I will discuss the effect of low and high frequency noise on practical AQC processors and compare AQC with thermal annealing.
Update (11/21/07): Geordie Rose has put the slides of the talk online at this blog post. I’ll have to look at them while eating Turkey.
What a Canadian STOC Deadline Looks Like
Here is a picture I call “STOC 2008 deadline”:
STOC 2008 will be in Victoria, British Columbia. I was just across the border in Surey, BC, and shot this picture which I call “Crazy Canadian Fireplace Channel”:
Chemical Pontiff
Will the real quantum pontiff please stand up? From the Taiwan Journal:
Lee Yuan-tseh, a Taiwanese-born scholar and the 1986 Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry, was named Oct. 9 as a new member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences by Pope Benedict XVI. He is the fourth ethnic Chinese scientist to receive this honor.