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New York Times Film Review Fail

This morning Mrs. Pontiff read me a review out of the New York Times for the film “A Serious Man.” The opening paragraph of the review gives you an idea why she thought it might be relevant to me:

Did you hear the one about the guy who lived in the land of Uz, who was perfect and upright and feared God? His name was Job. In the new movie version, “A Serious Man,” some details have been changed. He’s called Larry Gopnik and he lives in Minnesota, where he teaches physics at a university. When we first meet Larry, in the spring of 1967, his tenure case is pending, his son’s bar mitzvah is approaching, and, as in the original, a lot of bad stuff is about to happen, for no apparent reason.

Cool, a physicist playing Job. But then she read me the second paragraph and it all soured for me:

At work, Larry specializes in topics like Schr√∂dinger’s Paradox and the Heisenberg Principle — complex and esoteric ideas that can be summarized by the layman, more or less, as “God knows.” Because we can’t. Though if he does, he isn’t saying much.

Egads New York Times (okay maybe that should be a singular “egad” given the context) what are you trying to do to this old physics curmudgeon and literature major pedant early in the morning, give him a heart attack?!?
Dear Mr. New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott, the proper words you were looking for here are “Schr√∂dinger’s Cat Paradox” and “Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.” If you’re going to take a mocking tone in your review about “complex and esoteric ideas” it would be useful, you know, if you actually got the names of those “complex and esoteric ideas” correct. Second isn’t it sad how a film critic can get away with calling these two ideas “complex”? Compared to what Mr. Scott? Compared to the proof of the PCP theorem? Compared to doing a calculation in quantum field theory? Um, I don’t think so. And finally, because standing on this upside down can is getting kind of wobbly, isn’t it a little presumptuous of you to say that God knows the position and the momentum of a particle? I mean might it be that even God doesn’t know the hidden variables of our universe. Or even, heaven forbid, that there are no such variables, and that *gasp* he is not in control of the universe that he supposedly created?

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Apple Pie From Scratch

Via physicsandcake, on some days I wish I was as dorky and as elegant as Carl Sagan:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe:, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known

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Quantum Postdocs and Beyond

Well it seems that it is that time of year again when grad students and postdocs begin to think about job applications. Last year I had the great pleasure of going through the process (yet one more time!) so yes, I feel your pain. But, at least on the postdoc side of equation for quantum computing, things don’t look as bad to me as I’ve seen in the past. I’ve already posted about Microsoft Station Q postdocs and the Center for Quantum Information and Control postdocs. Here are a few more to add to the mix.
Continue reading “Quantum Postdocs and Beyond”

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Broken Glass Everywhere. If it Ain't About Quantum Money, I Just Don't Care

Note the new location (updated 9/28/09)
The Optimizer is coming to town, which is always fun:

TIME: 1:30-2:30 pm, Tuesday, September 29, 2009
PLACE: CSE 305
SPEAKER: Scott Aaronson (MIT)
ABSTRACT:
Ever since there’s been money, there have been people trying to counterfeit it, and governments trying to stop them. In a remarkable 1969 manuscript, Stephen Wiesner raised the possibility of money whose authenticity would be guaranteed by the laws of quantum physics. However, Wiesner’s money can only be verified by the bank that printed
it — and the natural question of whether one can have secure quantum money that *anyone* can check has remained open for forty years. In this talk, I’ll tell you about progress on the question over the last year.
– I’ll show that no “public-key” quantum money scheme can have security based on quantum physics alone: like in most cryptography, one needs a computational hardness assumption.
– I’ll show that one can have quantum money that remains hard to counterfeit, even if a counterfeiter gains black-box access to a device for checking the money.
– I’ll describe a candidate quantum money scheme I proposed last spring, and how that scheme was broken a few weeks ago by myself, Farhi, Gosset, Hassidim, Kelner, Lutomirski, and Shor.
– I’ll describe a new quantum money scheme we propose in the same work. Our new scheme has the strange property that not even the bank can prepare the same bill twice.
Reference for the first two results: S. Aaronson, “Quantum copy-protection and quantum money,” in Proceedings of CCC’2009, http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/noclone-ccc.pdf. The “AFGHKLS” paper should be posted to the arXiv soon.

The last line makes me ask: has anyone every written a paper with all of the letters of the alphabet for last names (and no duplicate uses!)

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Does Quantum Uncertainy Come From the Foundations of Math?

Over at Asymptotia, Len Adleman (the A in RSA, founder of DNA computation (but not the A in DNA!), and a discoverer of the APR primality testing algorithm) has a guest post about the foundations of quantum theory. Len suggests, if I understand him correctly, that one should attempt to understand the uncertainty arising in quantum theory as being of the same nature as the fact that there exists statements which cannot be proven true or false within a fixed set of powerful enough axioms.
First of all, I know I’ve heard a similar argument before, but can’t seem to find the reference! Any foundations (or other) people want to supply those as I’m sure they would be welcomed in the comment section of Asymptotia. Second, I find it interesting that Len seems most troubled by the uncertainty arising in quantum theory and not by, for example, Bell inequalities. I’m no so sure many of us are troubled by this aspect (that it is probabilistic and not deterministic) of quantum theory, in and of itself. That is to say if the world had a probabilistic local hidden variable theory, would we be arguing about the foundations of quantum theory? Third, this of course brings to mind the Kochen-Specker theorem which shows that there is no non-contextual hidden variable theory of quantum mechanics. Indeed contextuality reminds one a lot of a “choice of axiomatic system.” It would indeed be neat if one could make this into a more established result. But in particular one would need to argue why Hilbert space best captures the idea of a set of axioms. Finally, because I think Bell inequalities are essential for understanding what makes quantum theory truely unique (yes I’m biased), I’m curious as to whether mathematicians have ever considered the notion of “local axioms”, i.e. axioms which live in spacetime?

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New D-Wave CEO?

Hm, looks like D-wave has a new CEO. Not sure when this occurred (?), but a reader sends along an email with an announcement from a recruiting (?) firm:

Lonergan Partners is pleased to announce that Vern Brownell has been named President and Chief Executive Officer of D-Wave Systems….
Vern Brownell joins D-Wave from Egenera, were he held various executive roles including CEO. Egenera was founded by Mr. Brownell in 2000 based on his experiences as the Chief Technology Officer at Goldman Sachs, where he and his staff of 1,300 were responsible for worldwide technology infrastructure including computing platforms, datacenters, data networking, telecommunications, and trading-floor operations. Prior to his tenure at Goldman, Brownell served in various management and engineering roles at Stratus Computer, Ztel, and Digital Equipment. He holds an MBA degree from Anna Maria College and a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology.

Now I have a new goal in life. Make sure I maintain more followers on twitter than the D-wave CEO, @vbrownell! (And hope he didn’t see my tweets today about quantum computing!) But CTO of Goldman Sachs…that’s the big times 🙂

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QIP 2010 and CSQ 2010

Two conferences. Renato Renner sends along a note about QIP 2010. The paper submission deadline is one month away:

QIP 2010 will be held in Zurich, Switzerland, January 18-22.
The submission deadline for contributed talks is 22 October 2009.
For more information, please see http://www.qip2010.ethz.ch
We look forward to welcoming you to Zurich,
the organizers

Also a conference on superconducting qubits in San Diego:

Please note our conference coming next spring; Coherence in Superconducting Qubits, to be held April 25-28, 2010, in San Diego, CA.
The agenda and registration are described at http://csq.myconferencehost.com/?page=1.

Zurich in winter, San Diego in spring…life must be good for the traveling postdoc.

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Netflix Prize Awarded

The Netflix prize for movie rankings has been awarded with the winner being BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos. This is very cool, but since it’s Monday I think we need a good dose of reality. So here is the first comment on the New York Times Bit blog:

This sounds like an interesting project, but they ought to emphasize acquiring more movies for their online streaming than telling people what to watch. – kt

Good work, BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos, but could you work on that tube that delivers my potato chips without me having to get up to go to the kitchen?