Yesterday at the Perimeter Institute, while I was attending FTQC II, I developed a tremendous headache (conveniently it arose just before the panel discussion I was on started its session) which lasted into the night and is only now disipating. This headache was, I’ve concluded, the result of a perfect trifecta of downers. And because I have nothing better to do while waiting for my ride to the Toronto airport to fly back to Seattle, I thought I’d catelog these downers, for posterity, and for my own egotistical record. No one likes to hear anyone complain, heck I myself particularly hate to hear whining complaints come from someone as lucky as I’ve been, so if you’re not interested in such purging, please stop reading now. I meant it! Proceed at your own caution.
(Downer Numero 1) Being surrounded by people who are absolutely a trillion times smarter than I am. Can I ever hope to keep up with Aram Harrow, Barbara Terhal, and Daniel Gotesman? Nope, I most certainly can’t! Most of the time my wonded ego simply keeps its head down and silently wanders through the backrooms of its own extremely minor accomplishments, but yeseterday it seemed my own shortcomings decided to take refuge directly in between my temples. Ouch! Why does this matter, that I’m that much slower than everyone around me? Well certainly in a big picture it doesn’t, but it reminds me of how little I’ve actually done, and the small probabilities that I actually have of doing anything of major merit. Headache pain meter increase “plus one.”
(Downer Numero 2) Hearing about fault-tolerant quantum computing reminded me how far we are from building a quantum computer and how little we realize that we have no clue how far we are from building a quantum computer. The threshold theorem for fault-tolerant quantum computing seems, to me, a soothing balm which we can spread over our proof of principle exposed skin, but it certainly, to me at least, doesn’t seem like anything we’d remotely like to really do. And being at a conference where the whole point of the conference was to explore the realm, and only the realm, of fault-tolerance, began by the time my headache started, to drive me crazy. I think this was exacerbated by the fact that, while there were a few experimental talks (and they were excellent, of course) I have a hard time thinking about fault-tolerance without thinking about experiments. And then I start thinking about experiments and I start wishing I myself could work in a lab, because what I so desire is lots and lots of qubits, which I can tinker with and come up with new ideas for fault-tolerance in these systems. Because I’m an arrogant theorist locked up in an ivory tower, I find myself frustrated at not being able to participate in experimental progress. I want a quantum computer and I want it now, without another decade of fault-tolerant workshop to beat my head up against. Headache pain meter “plus one more.”
(Downer Numero 3) I’ve been reading The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable 
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. This is the kind of book which is both infuriating and which I highly recommend. Infuriating because of the numerous points were I contend that it has gone too far to a philosophical extreme, yet at the same time highly recommended for spouting interesting takes on the world about which I wholeheartedly agree. So how can reading such a book be a downer? Because the “Black Swan”‘s of the title, the highly improbably events you didn’t see coming, remind me so much of the reason I got into this whole quantum business in the first place (or more properly remind me of the story I tell myself about why I am were I am.) In particular I got excited by quantum computing because it was a totally new and rebelious direction. Because it was new, something we hadn’t conceived of before. A new hole in the phase space of ideas, so to speak. Quantum computing was a Black Swan: who ordered Peter Shor and his factoring algorithm? And certainly there have been other quantum Black Swans, not the least of which I would say was the threshold theorem for fault-tolerant quantum computing. But at the workshop, the only swans I saw were white and swimming in the pond just outside the hulking monolithic Perimeter Institute building. Without totally new and novel approaches to fault-tolerance, or new and novel advances in quantum computing or new and novel advances from outside of the phase space of quantum computing, the whole workshop began to remind me of a fear a friend of mine described to me: “of being the scientist who works on water hexamers and goes to conferences to be patted on my back by my water
hexamer friends where we would stand in a six sided circle arms outstretched.” Headache pain meter “plus one.”
Really most days trifectas like the ones above don’t spend their time haunting my heads. But yesterday they ate up my brain, kept me up at night, and, as you can certainly tell from reading this post, made me very very grumpy. Well, I guess there is, as the saying goes, always tomorrow. When I’m hoping only a few of the trifecta pose haunts my throbing head.
