O brave new quantum world!
To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk. – Thomas Edison
As a theorist who was in the second generation of quantum computing graduate students (the first generation of graduate students arose following Shor’s 1994 invention: prior generations of graduate students are negative generations a.k.a. bloody brave pioneers) one of the most fru
Quacks always say the cutest things. Today I shall attempt my best impersonation.
All of computational complexity is based on a model that is, without question, wrong.
What are the big questions in quantum computing?
Continue reading “The Big Questions”
Last month a local restaurant group, Chow foods—among whose restaurants is one of our favorite Sunday breakfast spots, The Five Spot—ran a contest/charity event: “Chow Dow.” The game: guess the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average at the close of the market on October 29th, 2009. The closest bet under the closing value which did not go over the value would be the winner. The prize was the value of Dow in gift certificates to the Chow restaurants: i.e. approximately $10K in food (or as we would say in Ruddock House at Caltech: “Eerf Doof!” We said that because it fit nicely with another favorite expression, “Eerf Lohocla!”, this later phrase originating in certain now obscure rules enforced by administrative teetotalers.) I love games like this, and I especially love games where the rules are set up in an odd way. Indeed what I found amusing about this game was that, as a quick check of the rules on the Chow website showed, you could enter your guesses at anytime up until October 28th. Relevant also: maximum of 21 bets per person with a suggested donation of $1 per guess. So what would your strategy be optimizing your probability of winning, assuming that you are going to enter 21 times?
Below the fold: my strategy, the amazing power of the X-22 computer, and….chaos!
Continue reading “Guess the Dow, Win Chow!”
Over in the twitterworld, @orzelc and @EricRWeinstein have been having a nice little chat about experiment and theory, when he of uncertain principles opinioned
I’m not sure what you have in mind as examples of experimental sins, though. Nothing really comes to mind.
At which point besides my head nearly exploding, made me think, well okay so what are the sins of theorists and experimentalists (so it’s a good thing that my head did not explode, since that would make thinking that thought rather…difficult)?
For your amusement: the seven deadly sins a theorist v. experimentalist deathmatch below the fold.
Continue reading “The Seven Deadly Sins – a Theorist Versus Experimentalists Deathmatch”
Over at Life as a Physicist, the Physicist for Life gets on a well deserved soap box and laments certain comments concerning articles about a recent College Board study: Trends in College Pricing 2009. The gist of the Physicist for Life’s comments concern the fact that one should not be surprised at rising tuition costs at public universities, given that state budgets have been shot to all hell in the present downturn.
But what I find interesting, and what I’ve never been able to figure out, is the larger trend (ignore the last two years, please). Why are tuition prices increasing at such a fast rate for four year colleges? For example, see slide 5 of this presentation where one sees that over the last three decades, the inflation adjusted price of college has more than tripled at public four year universities and gone up nearly as much a private four year universities. So that is question number one for me. Question number two is really related, and is where is this money going? (And of course the real question, as a pseudo-professor, how do I get some of it?)
Speculation below the fold.
Continue reading “Is College Tuition a Bubble?”
One of the highest “impact” journals in physics is the American Physical Society’s Physical Review Letters (PRL). Among the crazy things about PRL is that it limits letters to four pages. Yes, people from other fields, you heard that right: one of the most “prestigious” journals in physics limits the authors to four pages. Realistically, when you include references, a title, and an abstract, this really means more like less than three and a half pages. Crazy!
Recently looking over papers in PRL, however, it occurred to me that the editors are skewering us even more. That’s because a good two lines (two full lines, damnit!) are being used to denote PACS numbers and DOI
I am selfish. Sometimes when I work on a research problem, I do it in the hope that it will actually turn into something which, you know, will be done experimentally. I know, I know, I should be more of a pure theorist and not hope for salvation validation from reality, but hey we can’t all be perfect. So, here is an experiment I’d like to see done: I would think it would be within the regime of what is doable in a few physical implementations of quantum computers now.
Clearly I’m in the wrong business, this pseudo-professor gig. I should be using quantum physics for mucho dinero! I found out that this is possible via a reader who pointed me to the woo-nderful A Happy Pocket Full of Money
Continue reading “A Pocket Full of Quantum Woo”
God has no power over the past except to cover it with oblivion. – Pliny the Elder
Predicting the future is hard to do. Just ask any economist, stock trader, or weatherman, and you’ll hear of the horrors of predictions gone wrong. But what about on a more fundamental level? What can we say about prediction? In the past, I (and many others before me!) have argued that entities in universes with finite information per volume and local laws are fundamentally limited in their ability to predict the future (for a fable, see The Library of Laplace, for more clear thoughts see this post.) But what about the opposite direction? What if we ask, instead of whether we can predict the future, whether we can predict the past?
Continue reading “Can We Predict the Past?”