The Keck Foundation helps support the new Center for Extreme Quantum Information Theory at MIT (xQIT). Seth Lloyd and Jeffrey Shapiro to lead the new center.
Skepticism….Check. Axes….Ummm…
Bah (posted without long line of four letter words I would really like to print but am forced, by my good nature and good upbringing, to avoid printing on this family friendly blog.):
“Businesses aren’t too fascinated about the details of quantum mechanics, but academics have their own axes to grind. I can assure you that our VCs look at us a lot closer than the government looks at the academics who win research grants,” Martin said.
Note to D-wave. We aren’t skeptical that you built a device. We are skeptical that your path forward will ever work (some more skpetical than others…me I’m an optimist!) and we are even more skeptical of your statements trying to sell quantum devices by advertising unsubstantiated computational power. I also know VCs who looked closely at your company and said something very similar to what those lazy no good bum academics are saying.
America COMPETES
New legislation designed to help foster science, innovation, and education: the America COMPETES (Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science) Act. Proposes, among other things, the doubling of NSF/DoE Office of Science budgets in four years.
Mock Theta Functions?
Any mathematician care to comment on this press coverage of a recent preprint on Mock Theta Functions? Oh, right I scared away all the mathematicians when I urged computer scientists and physicists to join in war against the evil mathematicians (a war since expanded to include evil biologists. š )
Scientometrics On Your Desktop
Publish or Perish: a program for calculating h-indices and more. (And yes, to preempt the grumpy academics, taking these measures seriously is clearly silly. But then again, from my perspective there ain’t much in the world that ain’t just plain silly š )
Scirate.com Not Just For Quantum Anymore
A few changes at Scirate.com, which I thought I’d mention. The website now supports all of the different arXives. Of course since the only people who read this silly blog are quantum people, I have no idea how much traction these other archives will have in the short term. Navigation to different days should now be easier with the handy-dandy floating navigation icons I’ve setup. Finally, international characters should be showing up correctly now….I hope! Stay tuned for lots of interesting upgrades (lots of ideas!)…err well, just as long as I can find some spare time!
Posts To Read While the World Spins
They Built….a Brain!
The mystery of what exactly was built up north has been resolved. They built a brain:
Within Holistic Quantum Relativity lies the realm of the human mind and the observable universe running like Quantum Computers: this technological synthesis offers the possibility of solving what computer science calls “NP-complete” problems. Last week D-Wave Systems, a privately-held Canadian firm Headquartered near Vancouver, BC, demonstrated what it calls the world’s first commercially viable Quantum Computer at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. These are problems which are impossible or nearly impossible to calculate on a classical digital computer. Picking out a single pattern from a collection of patterns, such as one’s mother, father, or child, from a photo of people, is easy for the human mind, but beyond the reach of a conventional desk-top computer!
Can't you hear, can't you hear the thunder?
Traveling in a fried-out combie, on a hippie trail, head full of zombie, I found a new quantum blog: we donāt need no āstickingā room 408, it made me nervous, but it linked to me which is sort of like breakfast.
Factoring Bacteria
No sooner do I attack biologists as the common mortal enemy of computer scientists and physicists in my last post when along comes quant-ph/0702203. Yet another nomination, in that great cosmic contest: “best paper title ever!” (said with the comic book guy accent, of course.) quant-ph/0702203:
Purple bacteria and quantum Fourier transform
Author: Samir Lipovaca
Abstract: The LH-II of purple bacteria Rhodospirillum (Rs.) molischianum and Rhodopseudomonas (Rps.) acidophila adopts a highly symmetrical ring shape, with a radius of about 7 nm. In the case of Rps. acidophila the ring has a ninefold symmetry axis, and in LH-II from Rs. molischianum the ring has an eightfold symmetry axis. These rings are found to exibit two bands of excitons. A simplified mathematical description of the exciton states is given in Hu, X. & Schulten, K. (1997) Physics Today 50, 28-34. Using this description, we will show, by suitable labeling of the lowest energy (Qy) excited states of individual BChls, that the resulting exciton states are the quantum Fourier transform of the BChls excited states. For Rs. molischianum ring exciton states will be modeled as the four qubit quantum Fourier transform and the explicit circuit will be derived. Exciton states for Rps. acidophila ring cannot be modeled with an integer number of qubits. Both quantum Fourier transforms are instances of the hidden subgroup problem and this opens up a possibility that both purple bacteria implement an efficient quantum circuit for light harvesting.
Boy are we going to have mud on our face when we discover that Bacteria have beaten even D-wave towards the construction of a useful quantum computer š