Posts

Posted on

Canadian Quantum

Quantum Works.

QuantumWorks is a new, NSERC-funded Innovation Platform that links Canadian researchers with industrial and government agency partners to lead Canada into the next technological revolution – that of Quantum Information. Building on established national expertise in quantum cryptography, quantum algorithms and quantum information processing devices, QuantumWorks research programs will provide “made in Canada” breakthroughs, protect them, and promote them to private and public sectors. Through a national training strategy in quantum information, QuantumWorks will ensure that research labs and the work force of tomorrow are populated with quantum-aware graduates. As the Information Age gives way to the Quantum Age, QuantumWorks will ensure that Canada leads the way.

Quantum Age? Don’t they know time is not a hermitian operator in quantum theory? (Okay, David Pegg did define a POVM operator called “age” which is sort of like a conjugate variable to the energy, BTW!)
The Canadians are coming! The Canadians are coming!
(You cannot begin to understand how hard it was to resit putting the word “eh” somewhere in this post 🙂 )

Posted on

Entangled Superconducting Qubits

Entanglement in two superconducting qubits from UCSB: “Measurement of the Entanglement of Two Superconducting Qubits via State Tomography” Matthias Steffen, M. Ansmann, Radoslaw C. Bialczak, N. Katz, Erik Lucero, R. McDermott, Matthew Neeley, E. M. Weig, A. N. Cleland, and John M. Martinis, Science 313, 1423 (paper here, Science magazine summary here, physics web article here) Note that this is the first demonstration of entanglement in the sense that they have performed tomography on their states (previous results had shown level crossings consistent with entanglement of coupled superconducting circuits.) The authors show a fidelity of 0.87 with the state they were attempting to prepare.

Posted on

How to Offend a Physics and Literature Major

Chad over at Uncertain Principles points to an article Are Physicists Smart? Disciplined Professionals serve Power. To quote from the article

That is the main reason, in my view, that physicists are stupid: They are unable to perceive complexity, a complexity of the real world that goes far beyond what physics will ever be able to handle in any universe. They are unable to even get a glimpse of the textures and subplots that may be intrinsically incompatible with mathematical description. To them, mathematics is the language of reality, not a mere human invention or genetically delimited _expression. To them, the objective mind is all-powerful and able to open all doors. To them, useful perception is physiological and does not benefit from the uncertainties of one’s emotional state. To the physicist, communication is data transmission, not the subtleties that can only be captured by the right configuration of social and emotional attributes. The physicist deals in hard bits, not the imperceptibles that determine our animal and social lives. The physicist is unaware of his blindness and glibly confident in his perception, especially his perception of himself as systematic unraveller of the truth.

Yep, that’s us physicists, a bunch of stupid cultural illiterates. Indeed.

Posted on

More Fridays

Four Fidays ago, I got engaged. Three Fidays ago we bought a house. So what could I possibly do two Fridays ago? How about get a puppy? Everyone please welcome, our new puppy, Tess:
Tess
Tess is an eight week old mutt which we got from an animal rescue in Yakima, Washington. It was interesting trying to find a mutt puppy in Seattle. Where I grew up, in the country, there were mutt puppies all over the place. Mostly this was because many of the dogs were not neutered or spayed in the country. Now in the city, however, it seems that things are much different and nearly everyone spays or neuters their dogs. So there are a lot fewer unplanned puppies in the city. Hence, in order to get a mutt puppy, we had to travel all the way to Yakima! But Tess was certainly worth it. She is definitely a mutt, probably lab mixed with rottweiler mixed with who knows what. Here she enjoys the good life at Villa Sophia:
Tess Sleeps
And of course, I haven’t told you about last Friday. Last Friday, I was taken out to dinner and proposed to! And, because she had all eady said yes to my proposal, you can guess that my answer was also yes. At the dinner I received an incredibly cool engagement watch. One cool feature of the watch is that it has no batteries and never has to be wound. It has been about five years since I wore a watch. That’s a long time to go without time!

Posted on

Mass Increase in Canadian Blackberry Hole

Michael Nielsen (no, not that Michael Nielsen, this one) to join the Perimeter Institute in May 2007 (more here.) It’s not quite all the way on the other side of the world from Brisbane (which is somewhere in the Atlantic ocean), but it is pretty close. Congrats Michael!

Posted on

Oh, the Gall!

Back when I TAed physics, I used to tell the students that a huge chunk of physics was simply having the gall to believe that you could get the answer. In other words, “confidence is key!” (Of course this probably also leads to the well known problem of extralusionary intelligence)
In this spirit, here is an article in the Washington Post about gender stereotypes and scores on a math test. In the 90s a series of experiments showed that if you made students identify their sex (or race) on an exam then this would cause their scores on math tests to change, causing, for example, females scores to fall. The thinking here, of course, is that recalling your gender might also recall the negative stereotypes which are place on females in math. Well what the Washington Post article describes is what happens if you do the opposite. What happens if you ask questions before the exam which remind the students of their postive attributes. Well, the WaPo reports that a recent study found that in fact in this case the male test scores stayed the same and the female test scores increased such that they were indistinguishable from the male test scores! Having the gall to believe you could possibly be smart is, indeed, it seems very important. (I had an English teacher in middle school who used to berate the students for making fun of people who were doing well in class. “Why wouldn’t you want to get good grades?” she would ask. Thanks Mrs. Perry!)

Posted on

Speculation Wednesdays

Okay, so those of you who know me know I love Fermi’s Paradox: “Where are they?” (And by “they” I mean extraterristrials, not some other they, like, physics and literature majors. I guess I’m more attuned to noticing that later odd specimen, but you’d be amazed at how popular that combination is.) One variant of the answer to Fermi’s Paradox is simply that the E.T.s are so advanced that they don’t really give a poop about us. Today I was pondering what could possibly make an E.T. think that we are so boring, so ordinary, that we were like specks of nothing in their eyes. And I thought, well maybe there is a computer science meets physics answer to this question!
A few years ago, we had this beautiful complexity class, BPP, of stuff that our ordinary computers could handle. Today we speculate that there is a slightly large complexity class which “ordinary” (and by ordinary I mean super challenging today, but possibly simple in the future) computers can handle: BQP. Now, suppose that this continues. As we probe deeper into the laws of physics we discover that we gain more and more computational power. We could even speculate that, there is a point where our physical laws allow us to solve NP-complete problems effeciently (that popping sound you just heard was Scott’s head.) As Lance and Scott has so beautifully pointed out, the consequences of this would be a reduction of large chunks of our culture to tractable problems. So if it were indeed true that physical allows for the efficient solution to NP-complete problems, then a society like ours, with our piddly classical computers and even our piddly future quantum computers, and our silly little things like the plays of Shakespeare are pretty boring objects. Large cunks of our society become nothing more than something which can be achieved on an alien laptop computer. Why bother visiting the Earth when not much interesting is occuring there which cannot be made a tractable problem on your computer.
Now of course, we know that NP is just one of a tower of higher and higher complexity classes (I would called it a zoo, but then I’d have to believe that a flood was near and that soon some some brave complexity theorist (who has a severe drinking problem) would have to pack up all the complexity classes, and their complements, into an ark in order to survive a flood which whipes out all other complexity theorists.) So even these luckily aliens who have access to a NP-complete solving computer and who therefore totally ignore us, might have their own Fermi Paradox? Are their levels of aliens all ignoring their lesser beings because of the weakness of the complexity classes their computers can efficiently solve?