Yesterday, while waiting for the bus, I was acosted by a homeless man who was missing his front teeth. I asked him how he was doing and he said he was high. I told him I was a theoretical physicist and he said “Amazing! Because I don’t live in reality, so it’s strange that we should meet.” (Indeed!) Then he asked me if the manhole cover in front of us turned into a portal which would take me to an alternate reality whether I would jump into the hole. Of course I said I would. Then somehow our conversation turned to time travel (doesn’t it always) and he said he thought that he was in a situation where things kept repeating themselves. I told him that physicists call this a “closed timelike curve.” He asked me how he could get off the closed timelike curve. Which made me sad.
Filibuster Logic
I find it very difficult to agree with the majority of what any one political pundit has to say. It’s a rare case where I read an article that I don’t have at least some problem with the language and logic used in the article. Normally this is just in the back of my head and doesn’t really get to me. But the current “debate” over changing the filibuster rules has sent me over the edge.
Take, for example, this from Ronald D. Rotunda, a law professor at George Mason,
The filibuster has a long history, but its pedigree should not make us proud. It prevented civil rights legislation from being adopted for nearly a century. Now a minority of senators is using it to prevent the Senate from voting on judicial nominees even though a majority of the senators from both parties would vote to confirm if they only could vote.
Aaaaaah! The logic in this paragraph is (1) filibuster blocked civil rights legislation, (2) that was bad, (3) the filibuster is being used to block judicial nominations, (4) ergo blocking those judges (“even though”) must be bad. What kind of logic is that?
In the last paragraph of the article we further find
Now, a minority of senators once again claims that the Senate cannot change it rules to prevent this filibuster unless a super-majority agree. That is wrong. To paraphrase Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, to vote without debate is unwise, but to debate without even being able to vote is ridiculous.
Ack. Not being able to vote is ridiculous, but the filibuster IS a vote. It’s a vote by 41 Senators not to proceed. Just because a vote is not a majority vote does not invalidate that it is a vote. By a similar logic, votes to amend the constitution do not constitute a proper vote because they require supermajorities.
OK, sorry, I don’t usually make to many political posts, but this lack of logic in the debate is making me bonkers.
Talks and Papers Posted
I’ve put a bunch of my talks and my papers on the web. They can be accessed using the cute little tabs above.
Unfortunately I somehow lost a few of my talks. One talk that is missing, for example, is my talk “What Would John Bell Do?” which included sounded as well as astounding movies and animation. I hope I can find where I put a backup, cus this talk is really rather amusing.
Summer Teaching
This summer I’m teaching a course in the professional masters program here at UW:
CSE P 590 TU: Quantum Computing
Dave Bacon – Instructor
Day/Time: Wednesday 6:30-9:20 pm; Place: TBD
(First time offering.) An introduction to and survey of the field of quantum computing. Quantum computation is an emerging field whose goal is to design effectively atomic sized computers which exploit the parallelism of the quantum mechanical laws of the universe. While this sounds futuristic, quantum computers are fast becoming a reality, and have the potential to revolutionize computation over the next twenty years. Topics include quantum algorithms, quantum error correction, and quantum cryptography. This course will cover why quantum computers can break certain public key cryptosystems, the engineering challenges in building a physical quantum computing device, and the level of security assured by quantum crytopgraphic devices. Prior knowledge of quantum theory is not necessary.
I just put up a preliminary version of the course website. The one issue which is bugging me a lot as I try to think about this class is exactly how to deal with the nearly three hour length of these classes. I may be a funny looking guy, but am I really as entertaining as the extended versions of the Lord of the Rings?
NYTimes Flubs it Up
From the New York Times this Sunday:
Hearings on how Kansas schoolchildren should be taught about the origins of life – the fourth and final session concluded on Thursday in Topeka – quickly morphed from science lesson to vocabulary quiz.
Repeat after me: the theory of evolution is not a theory of the origin of life. The theory of evolution is not a theory of the origin of life. Bleh. Shame on you New York Times.
The Zen of Working on the Bus
When I was a graduate student in Berkeley, I lived in two locations which had a bit of a walk to get to my office on campus (around twenty minutes.) While this may sound like a horribly unproductive waste of time, I found that almost all of my research got done because of this walk. In my walk to work I would often start thinking about a problem I was working on. Sometimes I would make significant progress on the walk. One reason for this may be that I had to do all the thinking in my head (no pad of paper, no whiteboard.) More importantly, though, I think the walk almost always woke my brain up and got it primed to continue to work thoughout the day.
When I moved to Caltech and then to Santa Fe, I lived in locations where I would drive to work or where the walk was for a very short distance. I definitely noticed that it was more difficult to get my brain working in the morning because of this.
So it’s quite fun, now, taking the bus to work. Beside the pain of riding the bus in one of the sideway seats (so that the hurky-jerky motion of the bus makes your back muscles big and strong), the thirty minute trip to campus has been extremely productive. Just this morning I found a polynomial time reduction for a problem I’ve been working on while the bus rounded a corner. In fact, I may just add this to my list of criteria for discovering if you are a theoretical physicist:
- You might be a theoretical physicist if someone describes prison to you as a very isolating place and you ask “Do they give you a pen and paper?”
- You might be a theoretical physicist if you find that you can work on a problem so hard that the clock on your desk mysteriously skips two or three hours when you thought only ten minutes had passed.
- You might be a theoretical physicist if you discover that in locations where most people are listening to their iPods, you are inverting a three by three matrix in your head.
Paying Doh
Life feels strange when it begins to feel like an episode of the Simpsons. Today I actually payed a “Monorail tax” of two hundred plus bucks to register my card.
Marge: According to this book, the monorail goes over 150 miles an hour! What if something goes wrong?
Homer: “What if.” What if I stepped in the shower and slipped on a bar of soap? … Oh, my God! I’d get killed!
Quantum CMOS?
If you go back and look at the early days of the semiconductor revolution, you see that there were many ideas for how to build gate sets out of n-type and p-type transistors. One set of ideas was known as NMOS technology and other set of ideas was known as CMOS technology. In almost every modern computer chip CMOS technology currently reigns supreme. One of the main reasons for this has to do with the power dissipation properties of these technologies. CMOS circuits dissipate a lot less energy than NMOS circuits. Basically one may think that CMOS circuits dissipate energy only when the circuit voltages are being switched wheras NMOS circuits are often running in a situation where they are dissipating energy even in between the switching of the voltages. As you can guess, this makes quite a bit of difference in the power consumption details of these devices.
So what is the equivalent technological detail for a quantum computer? Here the concept of the transistors used to build a circuit is modified to the concept of a fault-tolerant quantum gate. So if we look at fault-tolerant gate constructions and consider their energetics, are there technologies that minimize energy dissipation?
Wowha II
Some days, it just seems that anything I search for gives me interesting results. The previous search was for information on some properties of the golden ratio. Now I just did a searching for “harmonic series fractal” which remarkably sent me to the same site and this fun page which opens with
An open letter to significant scientists begging them to embrace and embed the arrival of self-aware consciousness in the Earth’s magnetic body, by redesigning power systems which now bleed our collective coherence bubble.
Wowha
Wave Mechanics Allow Embedding to Draw You into Gravity Centers: HOW TO INHABIT ANYTHING