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Letter to the Seattle Times

(Warning! Evolution commentary below. Proceed at your own discretion.)
During my recent outrage, I got angry enough to write a letter to a local paper, the Seattle Times. For a long time, the only person I knew who wrote letters to the editor of a local newspaper was my grandfather on my mother’s side. Well, to my astoundment, they actually published my letter! It’s really not the most beautiful bit of writing I’ve done, nor do I like it’s logical consistancy much, but here it is. Note that I did NOT choose the title:

The strong survive
The Times reports that Seattle-based Discovery Institute has compiled a list of more than 400 scientists who are skeptical about evolution. This suggests that there is controversy in the scientific community concerning evolution.
There are more than one million scientists in the world (most of whom are working hard to better our lives through improved medicine and technology), and the fact that 0.04 percent of these scientists are “skeptical” is totally inconsistent with the point of view that evolution is controversial.
Or, to turn those statistics around: 9,996 out of 10,000 scientists agree, evolution is scientifically uncontroversial and intelligent design is not science and should not be taught in public-school science classes.
— Dave Morris Bacon, Seattle

Notice how I signed with my middle name which was my mother’s maiden name and hence my grandfather’s last name. Definitely channeling the old dude.
For comparison, here are all the other letters to the editor on the President’s remarks on teaching all points of view. I can’t resist it, so I’ll comment on some. And then no more evolution talk for a while and back to the quantum world (well maybe quantum evolution 😉 )

The faculties can get a trifle overhyped
Editor, The Times:
On Monday, President Bush said that schools should teach both the theory of evolution and the proposition of intelligent design [“Teaching evolution alone not enough, Bush says,” Times, News, Aug. 2].
I wonder if Bush or any of the other religious-right groups that are pushing for this read the theory or have even checked out [intelligent design proponent] Discovery Institute’s Web site. I suspect not. Intelligent design is definitely not biblical creationism; in fact, it is explicitly stated on the Web site and in several articles that the theory does not support the biblical theory of creation, or any other religious texts, for that matter. It is also clearly stated that the “Intelligent Designer” could be anything from aliens to space debris.
So before the religious right jumps on the Bush bandwagon about having it taught in schools and our tax dollars go to buying new textbooks, I have a little advice for you: Do your homework!
What I don’t understand is why the Discovery Institute is not speaking up about this misconception, unless of course it is creationism wrapped up in a different package and they are trying to slide it in under the radar in the cloak of secular science.
— Patrick Maunder, Seattle

This, I think, is my favorite letter. It’s my favorite because it is entirely an argument based on the agendas at work here combined with a beautiful underhand at the end, which basically implies that “Intelligent Design” is not science.

Lord knows
The mystery of life must not be swept under the table
Why are evolutionary supporters so afraid to have “intelligent design” taught alongside Darwin’s theory? It seems we fight censorship at all costs in this country until it comes to Christianity… then we release the lions.
Even if a day comes when evolution graduates from theory to scientific fact, I will still find more comfort in my faith than in a Periodic Table of the Elements.
— Doug Boyles, Tacoma

OK. Big problems here. First of all no one, most of all scientists are arguing that “the mystery of life must not be swept under the table.” In particular, science is all about bringing mysteries forward. And then investingating them. In the case of the origin of species (which is one of the mysteries of life, but certainly not the only one) the scientists have a robust, non-controversial theory. Called evolution.
Now second of all, “Why are evolutionary supporters so afraid to have “intelligent design” taught alongside Darwin’s theory?” They are not afraid of such a challenge. The problem is that most scientists have looked at intelligent design and seen that it is specifically ascientific. It is simply not science. This is what we are arguing about: whether things which are not science should be taught in a science course at public schools.
“It seems we fight censorship at all costs in this country until it comes to Christianity… then we release the lions.” Would you make the same argument for censureship of teaching astrology in science class? What about spoon bending? See there is a big difference between censorship, and propoganda. We don’t allow our government to tell us all to go to church. Why? Because we are a secular nation. Similarly we don’t allow non-science propoganda, whether it is about astrology, Raelians, Christian Scientists, or radical athiests, into our class room. But, of course you get bonus points for the martyr reference. Everyone loves a good martyr reference.
“Even if a day comes when evolution graduates from theory to scientific fact, I will still find more comfort in my faith than in a Periodic Table of the Elements.” Well, for your purposes, evolution is scientific fact. Yadda, yadda, you can never prove blah blah blah. Whatever. You are, of course, free to take comfort in your faith. You are not, however, free to force your faith to be taught as science in my public schools. I also note that you are being a bit flippant to the “Periodic Table of the[sic] Elements.” Note however, that it is exactly this understanding of this same table of elements which allows our scientists today to make progress in curing all kinds of diseases which someday might save your life. Note also that understanding these same elements has given billions more life, by giving us a better world. Think about us scientists, sometime, when you bite into that meal, shipped from who knows where, on trucks built and optimized by scientists around the world. Which is exactly why I take all kinds of comfort in the period table of elements.

All of them created equal?
So now the president — who has no scientific training and admittedly doesn’t read — telling school boards that intelligent design should be included in school biology classes to present differing points of view.
Surely his logic would lead one to conclude that schools should also present the views of the racist Church of the Creator, the KKK, jihadists, and other groups that devoutly believe such teachings.
Do the president and other supporters of intelligent design realize that the concept supports only 18th-century Deism and not biblical Christianity?
It might be politically useful as a stalking horse, but does not in itself promote evangelical/fundamentalist goals, which run counter to the goals of the Enlightenment and the Founding Fathers.
— David Echols, Kirkland

A pretty good letter. It’s good, but I don’t find the final argument, which is “argument by founding fathers” to be a very pursuasive one. It’s not that it is a bad argument, it’s just that it begs the question “why should we care, today, what the founding fathers thought?” Which is a good question. When do we move beyond those brave beautiful men who wrote some radical things in the late seventeen hundreds? Certainly progress will move. The question is whether we will move with it.

Bite of bad apples
Liberal types are way too touchy over President Bush’s view that the science of intelligent design ought to be taught in our public schools alongside Darwinian evolution. We’re a Christian nation and should respect the many Christians who prefer creationism, or at least intelligent design, to the theory of evolution.
In addition, because some of these folks also embrace astrology, Holocaust denial and flying saucerology, we should add those disciplines to the curriculum so students can compare ideas and make up their own minds.
— Jim White, Lake Forest Park

(Update: Patrick says this letter is sarcastic. I guess I’m too dense to follow the sarcasm. What follows is what I first wrote about this letter.)The logic here is absurd. I do not advocate teaching astrology. I do not advocate teachng flying saucerology. I also do not advocate teaching Christianity. I advocate teaching secular courses to students precisely because I can respect others having those points of view. Does my respect deminish these disciplines. No, Mr. White, I think being touchy feely about respectiving other’s views is the foundation of our country, not your moral majority Christianity. (Update: Well, is this letter sarcastic or isn’t it? I parsed the second half of the letter as sarcastic and a jab at “liberals” (remember it’s a dirty dirty word) believing all sorts of silly things. But taken with the first half, doh!, it does seem a jab to the heart of the matter.)

If we are all here as a direct result of God’s “intelligent design,” those believers have a lot of explaining to do:
We are all put here to do his work but why did he put so many monsters here too, e.g., Osama bin Laden, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Attila the Hun, Jack the Ripper, etc.?
Why does he continue to allow us to make such a mess of it? Surely he is smarter than that!
It’s quite enough to reinforce my belief in Darwin’s evolution.
Accidentally yours,
— Jeff Douthwaite, Seattle

Why would you publish a letter like this in an argument about evolution and “Intelligent Design?” Because it is exactly the problem that people associate a secular school system with being anti-relgious instead of a-religious. This letter does nothing for me.

Purpose over heaven
People need to stop referring to evolution as “an accident” when comparing it to intelligent design. Evolution occurs when animals with particular traits that make them more resilient/attractive survive long enough to mate and spawn children with similar traits.
It is not random; it is nature’s way of improving life. Sounds rather intelligent, actually.
— Angela Boston, Shoreline

Well, equating evolution with “improving” is a problem here. But at least the jist of the letter is something like: look there is beauty in evolution. This last line can be seen, of course, as a belief that, while a supreme being is not guiding the world, the supreme being designed this evolution. If you put the being in the cracks, I have no problem with this. But again, please don’t teach it in a secular setting.

Let higher power decide
I understand that some people believe in God (as do I) and that he created everything; I also understand those of science who believe in the evolution of life. What I don’t understand is why we have to teach either one of these in our schools.
Leave this to universities to deal with, where students want (and pay) to learn either one way or the other and get credits toward their higher education. That leaves the choice to the individuals without stepping on anybody’s belief systems or ideologies.
— Rick Helwick (U.S. Navy, stationed overseas), Oak Harbor

What the hell? OK, first of all, we are not talking about “universities.” We are talking about public middle and high schools. And students in public school are not “paying.” We, the taxpayers are paying, because, well, you know, like education of society, you know, it like, does lead to an improved society. So now the question why teach either? Well we teach evolution because it is one of the greatest discoveries of modern science and is a unifying theme of biology. Is it the most important thing to teach students? Probably not. Getting the basic scientific method, plus good math, in my humble opinion are higher on my list. Why teach evolution and not “intelligent design”? Listen closely. Because “intelligent design” is not scientific. That first one I mentioned: the scientific method. Yeah teaching that one pretty much rules out teaching the second. Especially when it is a thinly veiled attempt to bring religion into a science class.

End with a prayer
Intelligent design may end in God. It might also end in the X-files, the Matrix, or the Borg.
Provided no scientist assumes that “intelligent design” means “benign intent,” then for my part, I see no reason schoolchildren shouldn’t pursue that line of inquiry.
Whatever designed us was really [angry]. Our history is blood-soaked. Whatever part of the globe you choose to study, its history is frequently defined by its wars.
If something designed us and our environment, then we must somehow reflect its tastes, and It likes blood. War is unavoidable under Darwin. Under God, it’s just sadistic.
Consider what you do before you rush to teach the children “intelligent design.” (The Designer also seems to like poverty and has a healthy appetite for terror.)
— Duncan Dunscombe, Seattle

While this letter is interesting, this doesn’t do it for me either. The problem is that the issue is what should be taugh in public schools. Not what the consequences of such and such a proposition (ID) means. And really, does this argument actually work for people? If I really believe in a being outside of the laws of science, then does his, her, or it’s existence really have anything to do with the kind of universe which the being created?
OK, I’m done. Sorry about that. Like I said, it’s in my family and I just couldn’t resist 😉 For the record, my grandfather was a Republican, I never knew his views on evolution, but he was a scientist who (like his grandson) went to Caltech. When he was at Caltech, he met Albert Einstein. Pretty cool stuff.

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A Mere Five Orders of Magnitude

After the cool PRL describing high visibility for a superconducting qubit, today I find in Physical Review Letters the article “Long-Lived Qubit Memory Using Atomic Ions” by Langer et al (volume 95, page 060502). This paper describes work at NIST (Boulder) with trapped Beryllium ions. This is a cool paper where they achieve coherence lifetimes for their qubit in excess of 10 seconds using two techniques: one involving tuning of an external magnetic field to obtain a sweet spot in the energy levels of their qubit and the other using a decoherence-free subspace encoding of the quantum information (this latter actually leads to slightly less than 10 seconds of coherence)
One of the main sources causing decoherence for ionic qubits comes from ambient fluctuating magnetic fields. In many implementations of qubits in ions, the energy levels used for the qubit are sensitive to magnetic fields. Stray magnetic fields cause these energy levels to fluctuate and this causes phase decoherence of the qubit. The trick which this paper reports on is to tune an external magnetic field to a percise point (0.01194 Tesla, the Earth’s magnetic field on the surface of the earth, for comparison is around 50 microTesla) where the energy difference the two energy levels used for the qubit have no first order dependence on the magnetic field (but do have a higher, second order dependence on the magnetic field.) Similar tricks have been used in neutral atom systems, in particular in Rubidium. But there these manipulations where done by microwaves and with large numbers of atoms. Further there are other problems (perhaps not killer, but they are there) for using these qubits in quantum computers. One problem is that using microwaves may eventually not be a practical way to build a quantum computer because they are hard to focus and other suggested techniques, like apply a magnetic field gradient to distinguish between qubits, may have other destructive overheads . For these reasons, this technique with a Berrylium ion qubit are very cool. What is really nice is that the authors obtain an increase in five orders of magntiude for the lifetime of this qubit over their previous experiments with this qubit. Nothing like a good five orders of magntidue to make my day. (Oh, and for those of you who care about these things, they quote this as a memory error rate per detection rate as around 10^(-5), below some of the good old fault-tolerant thresholds for quantum computation.)
The other technique the authors use to obtain long lifetimes is to encode their qubit into a decoherence-free subspace (DFS). Here the idea is to encode into one qubit into two qubits such that these logical qubits are effected equally by uniform (over the physical qubits) magnetic fields. Using DFSs to protect quantum information in the ion traps had previously been reported. In fact it helped me get my Ph.D. When I was giving my qualifying examine and explaining what a a DFS was, one unnamed experimentalist asked (roughly) “This is all good and fine, in theory, but does it correspond to the real world?” Luckily my next slide was a slide on the DFS demonstrated in ion traps by Kielpenski et. al. Booyah! In this paper the authors encode information into the DFS and then cause oscillations between the two levels of the qubit by applying a magentic field gradient. Since the DFS states are |01> and |10> this basically means that the system is almost always in an entangled state. The lifetime for this entangled state oscillation is measured to be around seven seconds!
Update: Right after I posted this, I read quant-ph and found, quant-p/ 0508021 “Robust Entanglement” by H. Haeffner et al. which reports on ion trap experiments in Innsbruck. Here they demonstrate lifetimes for entangled quantum states that are twenty seconds long in their Calcium ions. How cool is that!
Update update: Some press here

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Four in Ten Thousand Scientists Agree

(Warning, anti-creationist political rant ahead. This clearly serves no use here as you either (1) agree with me on these issues, or (2) don’t agree with me and the chances that what I say will change your mind are 0.04%)
From a Seattle Times article about the U.S. president’s view on intelligent design, I find the following interesting quote:

The Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank in Seattle that is the leading proponent of intelligent design, said it has compiled a list of more than 400 scientists, including 70 biologists, who are skeptical about evolution.

Let’s see there are at least one million scientists in the world. 400 divided by one million is 0.04%. 0.04% of scientists don’t believe in evolution! Holy cow, there really is a controversy.
As for the U.S. president coming out about teaching “different schools of thought,” well I certainly understand why he got a “D” in astronomy at Yale now. He must have been advocating that different school of thought which believes that stars are really angels and not big globes of hot plasma. From a comment on Cosmic Variance:

DarkSyde: Why, oh, why, does biology hate America?

OK, I’m done now. Just had to get that out of my system. Back to work!
Update: What’s this link? Well just a good natured attempt at google bombing.

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Stringy Article

The New York Times has a nice article about the recent string theory conference, Strings05, where a panel discussion on the next string theory revolution has held.
I especially like

Leonard Susskind, a Stanford theorist and one of the founders of string theory, replied, “There’s nothing to do but just hope the Bush administration will keep paying us.”
Amanda Peet of the University of Toronto suggested making string theory “a faith-based initiative,” to much nervous laughter.

Come on string theorists, even you have got to admit that this is funny!
A heartening part of the article is at the end

At the end Dr. Shenker invoked his executive privileges. He asked the audience members for a vote on whether, by the year 3000, say, the value of the cosmological constant would be explained by the anthropic principle or by fundamental physics.
The panel split 4 to 4, with abstentions, but the audience voted overwhelmingly for the latter possibility.

I don’t think my mother ever said “If you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything at all,” but in this spirit, I won’t say anything about the anthropic principle. Although I will say that the only thing which anoyed me more than Stephen Hawking’s musing on God in “A Brief History of Time” where his musings in “A Brief History of Time” on the anthropic principle.

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High Visibility In Superconducting Qubits

One of the more attractive approaches to building a quantum computer are the various proposals which utilize superconducting electrical circuits. One of the benefits of using superconducters to build a quantum computer is that it is expected that scaling up from a few to many qubits might be easier because of the advanced state of the fabrication for superconducing circuits (Although it must be said that “fitting everything together” will certainly still be a challenge. But it does seem like a slightly easier challenge, than, say loading 1000 ions into separate ion traps.)
One of the interesting problems with superconducting qubits has been that no one has been able to demonstrate high visibility of the qubits. One question which is particularly acute for solid state qubits is whether they can be sufficiently isolated from their environment to act as truly two level systems. Interestingly, some of the early experiments with superconducting circuits, while they demonstrated Rabi flopping of a single qubit, these experiments weren’t able to get high visibility of this flopping. What this means is that instead of observing the the qubit system flopping back and forth between 100% population in one of the qubit states to 100% population in the other qubit states, the experiments observed, say 100% in one state and then, say 30% in the other state. And in these experiments, while the flopping was not between 100% |0> and 100% |1>, after this initial reduction to, in our example, 30%, the qubits then Rabi flopped with a pretty slow decay. Thus it seemed that there was a “visibility” problem: the qubits were probably oscillating properly, but something in the scheme was causing the measurements to not see this full oscillation. Hence there was a “visibility” problem.
Now in todays Physical Review Letters, A. Wallraff et. al. from Yale, report on superconducting experiments in which they achieve nearly 95% visibility in Rabi flop measurements of superconducting qubits! The trick which these authors use is to couple their (charge) superconducting circuit to, basically, an electromagnetic cavity. Thus what these experimentalists are able to achieve is a superconducting qubit which can be strongly coupled to a quantum electrodynamic cavity mode. They then use this nice pure coupling to perform a measurement on the superconducting qubit with the beautiful result that they really high visibilities.
This is very exciting news. Ion trap proposals for quantum computers can still obtain higher visibility in their experiments, but this movement from visibilities less than 50 percent to 95 percent is an awesome jump. I can’t wait until they get this up to 99 percent and then to 99.9 percent. Then we will be rocking!

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Quantum Computer Dollars

How much would you pay for a quantum computer?
Of course, it depends on exactly what this quantum computer can do, doesn’t it! If I give you a two qubit quantum computer, you may not want to pay me more than two bits (25 cents people, not two binary numbers.) Which is not to belittle the experiments that have been done to date which are few qubit quantum computers…these are among the most impressive works of experimental physics/engineering around. But I certainly wouldn’t pay much for the computational power these experiments demonstrate.
There are sort of two regimes where I think someone might actually want to buy a quantum computer. The first is when a quantum computer with around 100 qubits or so which can process some thousands of parallel operations before the computer decoheres/errors. Why would I be interested in such a machine? Well because I have no idea how to efficiently simulate some quantum systems of this size. Why do I go up to 100 qubits and not as some smaller number like 20 or 30. Certainly simulating quantum systems of this size is difficult. However, the systems which we would really like to use a quantum computer to simulate, those with a large amount of entanglement, are probably two (or higher) dimensional systems, and getting to a two dimensional system of ten by ten seems like a regime where I can at least begin to rid myself of some small finite size effects.
The next step, of course, is a full scale quantum computer, one which is operating below the threshold for fault-tolerant quantum computation. What price should we assign such a device. Again it depends on the exact specs. But let’s just assume that this quantum computer has a few kilobytes of quantum memory. What will the clock speed of our quantum computer be? Well it will certainly depend on the physical implementation. And there is the overhead of quantum error correction. So the clock speed may range anywhere from MHz, to even PHz. How much would you pay for such a quantum computer?
For comparison, IBM’s Blue Gene, the worlds fastest supercomputer (that we know about) today, cost around one hundred million dollars.
Let the bidding begin!
The qBabbage: 100 qubit quantum computer, with the ability to perform, say 1000 operations before decoherence/noise ruins a quantum simulation. Start bids at 10 thousand dollars.
The qMark I: A fault-tolerant quantum computer with 2 kilobytes of quantum memory and a clock speed of MHz. Start bids at half a million dollars.
The qWhirlwind: A fault-tolerant quantum computer with 2 kilobytes of quantum memory and a clock speed of THz. Start bids at one million dollars.

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Poor Pluto

Looks like Pluto’s got some competition.

Two sets of astronomers have spotted a new planetoid in the outskirts of our Solar System. It is the brightest object in the region after Pluto, and it has its own small moon.
…
In recent years astronomers have spotted several Kuiper-belt planetoids, including ones named Quaoar and Varuna; the latest has been nicknamed Santa. Philosophical debates continue about how large such objects have to be before we call them ‘planets’ rather than simple lumps of rock

Funny, I thought the earth was simply a lump of rock. Am I wrong? Is the earth really made of cheese or some other non-rock substance? And what’s with the philosopher bashing? Surely philosophers do more than just debate what one should label a planet! 😉

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Been Around the World, and I, I, I…

One of the cool things about being a scientist these days is that the level of international collaboration is fairly high, and this means that one gets to make exciting trips to exciting lands. Last week I booked some travel for the end of the summer. Italy and Singapore. What a rough rough life!

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OMG My Classical Probability Distrubution Collapsed!

Scott Aaronson has a nice diatribe “Are Quantum States Exponentially Long Vectors?” which he’s posted on the arXiv as quant-ph/0507242. In this note he discusses his own personal counter to certain objections to quantum computation. It’s a very nice read.
My favorite part of the article is where Scott comes out as a full on epistemologist:

To describe a state of n particles, we need to write down an exponentially long vector of exponentially small numbers, which themselves vary continuously. Moreover, the instant we measure a particle, we “collapse” the vector that describes its state—and not only that, but possibly the state of another particle on the opposite side of the universe. Quick, what theory have I just described?
The answer is classical probability theory. The moral is that, before we throw up our hands over the “extravagance” of the quantum worldview, we ought to ask: is it so much more extravagant than the classical probabilistic worldview?

To which I can only say “Amen, brother!” I think physicists, in particular, are VERY bad at understanding this argument.
Suppose we want to write down a theory which describes the state of classical bits. One can certainly pretend that the classical bits are always in some definite state, but now ask how do we describe the state of our classical bits when we carry out an operation like, flip a fair coin, and conditional on the outcome set a bit to zero or one? We then need probabilities to describe out classical set of bits. If we have n classical bits, then the probability vector describing such a classical system will be made up of two to the power n numbers (the probabilities.) The number of numbers needed to describe a classical n bit system is exponential in the number of bits! So should we be surprised that quantum computing requires states described by an exponential numbers of complex amplitudes? Doesn’t seem as surprising now, does it?
And there are a bunch of other similarities between probabilistic computation and quantum computation. If we measure such a classical system, we certainly get one of the bit strings, and out description immediately changes to a probability distribution with only one nonzero entry: the probability distribution collapses. Similarly if we perform a single measurement, we don’t learn the probabilities themselves, i.e. we don’t learn these (real) numbers describing the classical state.
Another interesting analogy (which can only be pushed so far…and this is the real interesting part!) is with correlated bits. Suppose I flip a fair coin and if the outcome is heads I put two bits which are both zero into two boxes. If the outcome is tails, I put two bits which are both one into two boxes. What is our description of the classical probabilistic state of these two boxes? We say 50% 00 and 50% 11. Now carry these boxes to the far ends of the universe. Open one of the boxes. Well, opening this box, I immediately know that whatever is in this box, well the other bit, on the other side of the universe, well it must have the same value as my bit. Communication faster than light? No! Correlated bits? Yes! As a global observor, we can update our description of the system after a measurement by appropriately collapsing the probability distribution. Notice that until information is communicated about the measurement from one party to the other, the left out party can’t change his/her description of their system (or of the global system). Quantum entanglement is a “bit” like this…but the surprising thing is that it turns out to be different! How different? Well this is the subject of Bell’s theorem and, needless to say the end result is one of the essential differences between classical probabilistic computation and quantum computation. But the fact that quantum theory is a consistent way to describe probability amplitudes is directly analogous to the manner in which classical probabilistic description work!
There are even more similarities between quantum computation and probabilistic classical computation. For example, there is a classical analogy of teleportation. It works out to be one time pads!
Notice that to get these interpretations of the similarites between classical probabilistic computation and quantum computation, we need to adopt a particular stance towards quantum theory. This is the epistemological view of quantum theory. In this view, roughly, the wave function of a quantum system is merely a description of a quantum system. It is not, say, like the classical position of a particle, which is a real number which we can really assign as a property of that classical system. I must say that I find myself very much in tune with this view of quantum theory. This does not mean, however, that this point of view totally solves all the problems people have with quantum theory. In particular, the problems of contextuality and no local hidden variable theory remain “troubling” and the question of “a description of WHAT?” is roughly the measurement problem. I certainly think that among quantum computing theorists, roughly this point of view is gaining more and more adherents. Which is good, because any mention of many worlds is destined to make me go crazy!
As a side note, when I started teaching the quantum computing course this summer, I attempted to teach quantum theory from the epistemological point of view. Unfortunately, the pace I set was too fast, and so I had to change tactics. But it certainly would be interesting to try to teach quantum theory from this perspective.
A final quote from Scott:

For almost a century, quantum mechanics was like a Kabbalistic secret that God revealed to Bohr, Bohr revealed to the physicists, and the physicists revealed (clearly) to no one. So long as the lasers and transistors worked, the rest of us shrugged at all the talk of complementarity and wave-particle duality, taking for granted that we’d never understand, or need to understand, what such things actually meant. But today—largely because of quantum computing—the Schr¨odinger’s cat is out of the bag, and all of us are being forced to confront the exponential Beast that lurks inside our current picture of the world. And as you’d expect, not everyone is happy about that, just as the physicists themselves weren’t all happy when they first had to confront it the 1920’s.

Which I really like, but I must take issue with. It’s all the physicist’s fault for not clearly communicating?! I don’t think so. I think computer scientists were too busy with other important things, like, say inventing the modern computer and building modern complexity theory, to even bother coming over and talking with us physicists about quantum theory. Just because you weren’t paying attention doesn’t mean you get to say that physicists weren’t communicating clearly! Notice that it was basically three physicists, Benioff, Feynman, and Deutsch, who first really raised the question of what exactly a quantum computer would be. Of course it took computer scientists, like Bernstein, Vazirani, Simon, and Shor to actually show us the path forward! But I think someone just as easily could have thought up quantum computation in 1950 as in 1980. The reason why it took so long to dream up quantum computers probably has more to do with the fact that no one, physicists or computer scientists, could really imagine doing the kinds of experiments which quantum computers represent. Of course, none of this really matters, but it’s fun to yell and scream about this and pretend that it makes some sort of difference, when really its just fun and funny.