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!)
Google Seeks to Make My Library a Relic
Via quantumbiodiscs I learn that Google Book Search now has full out-of-copyright books in full form. A search for “quantum computer” yields four books, one of which is “Kabbalah, Science and the Meaning of Life.” It seems that quantum computing is at least receiving a nice reception among Kabbalists.
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?
Vacation? We Don't Need No Stickin Vacation!
Oh wow does this (via Structure & Strangeness) hit home. Yep, I spent large portions of my trip on the ferries in Alaska doing perturbation theory calculations.
For Use at Ant Checkout Counters
Tis the Season for Awards
Congrats to Christian Weedbrook, Thomas Symul, Andrew Lance, and Ping Koy Lam from the University of Queensland and the Australian National University for winning the University of New South Wales Eureka Prize for Scientific Research for research on quantum cryptography.
Comment Wagering Madness
Quant-ph people have some interesting comments, but those cond-mat people just one-uped everyone:
cond-mat/0608492
Title: Do superconductors violate Lenz’s law?
Authors: J.E. Hirsch
Comments: Readers are invited to place a wager on the outcome of the proposed experiment, this http URL
Subj-class: Superconductivity; Strongly Correlated Electrons
Wagering? On the ArXiv?
The Tao of Tao
Terence Tao, in a UCLA press release about his Fields medal:
What are Tao’s secrets for success?
Tao, who was raised in Australia, offered some insight. “I don’t have any magical ability,” he said. “I look at a problem, and it looks something like one I’ve done before; I think maybe the idea that worked before will work here. Nothing’s working out; then you think of a small trick that makes it a little better but still is not quite right. I play with the problem, and after a while, I figure out what’s going on.
“Most people, faced with a math problem, will try to solve the problem directly,” he said. “Even if they get it, they might not understand exactly what they did. Before I work out any details, I work on the strategy. Once you have a strategy, a very complicated problem can split up into a lot of mini-problems. I’ve never really been satisfied with just solving the problem. I want to see what happens if I make some changes; will it still work? If you experiment enough, you get a deeper understanding. After a while, when something similar comes along, you get an idea of what works and what doesn’t work.
“It’s not about being smart or even fast,” Tao added. “It’s like climbing a cliff: If you’re very strong and quick and have a lot of rope, it helps, but you need to devise a good route to get up there. Doing calculations quickly and knowing a lot of facts are like a rock climber with strength, quickness and good tools. You still need a plan — that’s the hard part — and you have to see the bigger picture.”
His views about mathematics have changed over the years.
“When I was a kid, I had a romanticized notion of mathematics, that hard problems were solved in ‘Eureka’ moments of inspiration,” he said. “With me, it’s always, ‘Let’s try this. That gets me part of the way, or that doesn’t work. Now let’s try this. Oh, there’s a little shortcut here.’ You work on it long enough and you happen to make progress towards a hard problem by a back door at some point. At the end, it’s usually, ‘Oh, I’ve solved the problem.'”
…
What does Tao think of his success?
“I’m very happy,” he said. “Maybe when I’m in my 60s, I’ll look back at what I’ve done, but now I would rather work on the problems.”
Quantum Caribbean
French Caribbean anyone? The First International Conference on Quantum, Nano, and Micro Technologies, ICQNM 2007 to be held on Guadeloupes.
Awards
Fields Medals: Okounkov, Perelman, Tao, Werner. I was excited to see Terence Tao win because I’ve actually read and understood one of his papers. Not the stuff he’s winning the Medal for, of course. See Michael Nielsen (rising from his deep silence 😉 ) for connections of Tao’s work to quantum information science (by Hayden, Daftuar, and Klyachko.) Perelman has, apparently, declined the Medal and the arxiv is stressed by people downloading his papers:
22 Aug 2006: arXiv.org servers are currently under very heavy load due to demand for Grisha Perelman’s papers, published only as arXiv.org e-prints, which are available below. We encourage you to use a mirror such as lanl.arXiv.org or aps.arXiv.org, and we thank you for your patience as we try to accommodate the demand. Perleman was named a Fields Medalist at the opening ceremony of the International Mathematical Union.
Nevanlinna Medal: Jon Kleinberg.
Gauss Prize: Kiyoshi Ito. And the quants rejoice!