For a while I’ve joked that at the rate storage rates are increasing for hard drives, it will soon be possible that instead of having an MP3 player with all you favorite songs on it, you will simply have a device with “music.” All of music.
Now I learn, via Michael Nielsen’s blog, that Joanna Karczmarek is starting a project to put the entire arXiv.org into bittorrent files. Currently she is offering the hep-th section from all of 2004 via a bit torrent. So, I guess, coming soon to a laptop near you: “physics.” I wonder if this will be the impetus for me to get a new laptop with a monsterous hard drive.
Best Abstract Ever
Ken Brown sends me a nomination for the “best abstract ever”:
Malberg and O’Neil, PRL 39,1333 (1977), “Pure Electron Plasma, Liquid, and Crystal”
Abstract: We speculate on the possibility of liquefying and crystallizing a magnetically confined pure electron plasma.
Fifty Dimensional Computers
Sometimes there are conflicts that run deeply in side of me because of my original training as a physicist. One thing I have never understood in classical computer science is why the locality and three dimensionality of our world don’t come into play in the theory of computational complexity. I mean sure, I can understand how you would like to divorce the study of the complexity of algorithms from the underlying medium. Sure I can also understand that those who study architectures spend copious amounts of time dealing with exactly how resources scale due to the constraints of locality and dimensionality. But isn’t it true that a true theory of the complexity of information processing should, at it’s most fundamental level, make reference to the dimensionality and connective of the space in which the computer is built? Perhaps the complexity of cellular automata gets some way towards this goal, but somehow it doesn’t feel like it goes all of the way. Most importantly the usual conditions of uniformity of the cellular automata seem to me to be overly restrictive of a theory of computational complexity which doesn’t ignore issues of dimensionality and locality.
Another interesting spinoff of this line of reasoning is to think about how computation changes when the topology of spacetime is not trivial and even when the topology of spacetime is itself something which can change with time. What is the power of a computer which can change the very notion of the topology of the underlying circuit connectivity?
SQuInT
For those of you who don’t know, SQuInT stands for “Southwest Quantum Information and Technology” and has been having a conference in the Southwest united states for seven years (and even longer if you count some “pre”-SQuInTs.) SQuInT is becoming more and more unique in that it is one of the rare conferences which tries to bring together the different parts of physics which are all involved in trying to build a quantum computer. They even have a few talks by silly theorists like me. My talk wasn’t as good as I had hoped. 30 minutes is pretty darn stringent.
The highlight of the conference, besides the night spent watching the old couples work the dance floor at the “exclusive” resort in Tuscon where the conference was held, was to hear about the work of Robert Schoelkopf from Yale on combining cavity quantum electrodynamics with superconducting qubits. Traditional cavity QED is done with cavities coupling to neutral atoms (in either a microwave or optical regime.) Some of the earliest quantum computing implementations were performed in cavity QED by Jeff Kimble’s lab at Caltech. What Robert talked about was using a cavity to couple to a hybrid superconducting qubit. He showed some really nice results demonstrating the vacuum Rabi oscillations from his coupling of the cavity to his superconducting qubit. An amazing aspect of this system is that the effective dipole moment of the superconducting qubit is about ten thousand times stronger than in neutral atoms. Why is this important for quantum computing? It’s probably most important because one of the most difficult tasks for many solid state quantum computing systems is the ability to perform readout of the state of the qubit with a high reliability and without destroying the system. Robert’s scheme shows a reasonable chance of performing such a task. For those of you who wish to bet with me on what the final quantum computer will look like, the SQuInT conference and Robert’s results in particular have made me recalculate my odds. Please send me an email if you would like to place a bet ; )
Been Around the World and I, I, I…
Yep, I’m still alive. Back from the SQuINt conference in Tuscon, Arizona. Back in Santa Fe for exactly 7 hours. Ugh. Hopefully I will have a chance to post during a layover during my travel to Washington tomorrow.
Turing Awards
….and the winners of the 2004 Turing award are Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn inventors of TCP (transmision-control protocol.) Needless to say the fact that you are reading this message at all says a lot about their impact.
Addiction
There must be a conservation of addictions in the world. Since QIP, I’ve totally given up drinking Diet Coke because John Cortese told me a story about a coworker who went into epipleptic siezures because of the aspertame in the Diet Coke. I’ve gone from around 8 cans of Diet Coke a day to zero. Boy that Turkey sure is feeling cold.
So what have I replaced Diet Coke with? Well tea and coffee, of course. But I’ve also become addicted to the radio station KEXP i.e www.kexp.org.
I’m thinking of performing an expriment where I give up listening to KEXP and see if I start craving Diet Coke.
Word of the Day
Economists are the source of many of my favorite words. Here is another neat one:
Leptokurtic: pertaining to a probability distribution more heavily concentrated around the mean, i.e., having a sharper, narrower peak, than the normal distribution with the same variance.
Arxiv Data
In fairness, here are all of the different categories from ArXiv.org:
One can certainly see the effect of different fields slowly adopting the arxiv, but it seems that even by around 1996, the use of the arxiv was becoming pretty ubiquitous. Here are the percentages from 1997 to 2004:
An interesting trend I was not aware of until plotting this was the rise of the physics category. I’m guessing that this is due to the rise of biophysics. Yes, people, the future is biology! Ack, and the future is bleak for me if I don’t get back to Powerpoint!
The Rise of Quant-Ph
As a break from talk writing, I decided to take a look at the number of papers posted to the quant-ph archive versus the number of papers posted to the hep-th archive on the ArXiv.org Soon we (quant-ph) will take over the world, no?
Pretty astounding that quant-ph is now almost as active as hep-th.