The Quantum Pontiff

Particle physicists have always considered themselves the kings of physics. Murray Gell-Mann famously called solid state physics by the moniker “squalid state physics.” In the ivory towers where scientists picture themselves as selfless serfs in the service of knowledge, particle theorists have long occupied the attic. At the same time, there is another community of the mathematically inclined who claim that they do their work for the greater good of knowledge: programmers. In particular the open source spirit of programming, that good code is in some way eternal and should be shared and contributed to the greater cause, gives good coders an air of superiority not dissimilar to that found in particle theorist.

And when I think about these two fields, I begin to think that perhaps quantum computing is today’s version of the selfless king in search of knowledge. Not only are we learning about the fundamental ways in which quantum information and computation differs from classical information and computation, I think many of us in the quantum computing community also feel that our work will have some greater consequence once a quantum computer is eventually built. We are, therefore, I think a rather smug community not very dissimilar to particle theory or the ethic of the eternally beautiful algorithm. Whether this smugness will be our undoing, our triumph, or our own psychosis with which we will beat ourselves over the head is another question.

In some bizarre twist straight from the pages of a Pynchon novel, the Air Force in 1994 became interested in chemicals that might annoy the bad guy and in particular (thanks to a memo made available at the memory hole):

Chemicals that effect [sic] human behavior so that discipline and morale in enemy units is adversely effected [sic]. One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior.

As a weak minded liberal I guess I should be happy that the military was finally heeding the hippy mantra “make love not war,” but still..

Who is the most thanked person in computer science? According to an analysis of the CiteSeer database performed by Giles and Councill, the most thanked person in computer science is Olivier Danvy. I was also interested to see that the institutions I’ve been a member of, Caltech, Berkeley, and the Santa Fe Institute, are all in the top ten of most thanked educational institutions (third, seventh, and fourth respetively.) I can understand why the Santa Fe Institute is high on the most thanked list, their extensive visitor and workshop programs are a great way to generate acknowledgements, but I was a bit shocked by how high Caltech was on this list.

On the plane I got quized by a neighboring passenger about tsunami dynamics ("oh, you’re a physicist?") Here is what I recall from Physics 12:

The waves created by tsunamis are very long wavelength. While typical ocean waves are around a hundreds of meters long, tsunamis produce wavelengths of up to a hunderds of kilometers. Since the wavelength of the tsunami is on the order of the depth of the ocean, tsunami waves are shallow water waves (most ocean waves have wavelength of hundreds of meters and are so are different beasts called deep water waves.) The speed of this type of wave (if you want to be fancy you say “celerity” here) is around the square root of the accleration due to gravity times the water depth (typically a few kilometers). This is why tsunami waves move at speeds of a few hundred meters per second and is also why tsunamis which hit the land aren’t moving at this speed (because the ocean depth gets shallower as you approach land and so the tsunami slows down.)

Quoteth Saint Lennon:

And so this is Christmas, and what have you done?
Another year over, and a new one just begun.
And so this is Christmas, I hope you have fun,
The near and the dear ones, the old and the young.

A very Merry Christmas,
And a Happy New Year.
Let’s hope it’s a good one,
Without any fear.

And so this is Christmas, for weak and for strong,
For rich and for poor ones, the war is so wrong.
And so happy Christmas, for black and for white,
For yellow and red ones, let’s stop all the fight.

A very Merry Christmas,
And a Happy New Year.
Let’s hope it’s a good one,
Without any fear.

So this is Christmas, and what have you done?
Another year over, and a new one just begun.
And so happy Christmas, I hope you have fun,
The near and the dear ones, the old and the young.

A very Merry Christmas,
And a Happy New Year.
Let’s hope it’s a good one,
Without any fear.

I am a sucker for all creative protest tactics.

From a New York Times article:

After a bitter and protracted recount fight in the Washington state governor’s race, elections officials announced today that the Democratic candidate, Christine O. Gregoire, was now leading her Republican opponent by a miniscule margin of only 10 votes, a stunning reversal of the Nov. 2 election results.

Best title of the year on quant-ph? Or Worst title of the year on quant-ph?

Is Quantum Suicide Painless? On an Apparent Violation of The Principal Principle

According to the Book of Revelations, 144,000 is the total number choosen by the Lord for the Tribulation. The current world population is 6.4 billion people. Hence the chance I will be saved is around 0.002 percent. Better than winning the lottery, but about the same odds as dying by exposure to a sharp inanimate mechanical object.

Arrived in Seattle yesterday afternoon, just in front of Seattle’s notorious traffic.

As many of you may know, Washington is in the middle of a huge fight over recounting ballots for their governers race. Currently the Republican, Dino Rossi, is in the lead by 42 votes.

Anyway, I’m fairly convinced that the governor of Washington being a Republican is the sixth seal. Or is the 14th?

Yesterday: Santa Fe->Las Vegas->Sacramento->Yreka. Winter sunsets in the state of Jefferson make Mt. Shasta look incredible.

Today: Yreka->Portland.

If you were a quantum computer, would the mystery you be working on not be the mystery of quantum theory but the mystery of the classical world?

RESEARCH EXPERIENCES FOR UNDERGRADUATES AT THE SANTA FE INSTITUTE
SUMMER 2005 PROGRAM ANNOUNCEMENT

Description:

Undergraduate students work with faculty mentors on an individual research project focused on some aspect of complex systems. SFI’s broad program of research is aimed at understanding both the common features of complex systems and at comprehending the enormous diversity of specific examples. Possible focus areas include adaptive computation; computational aspects of complexity; energy and information in biological computation; scaling laws in complex phenomena; network structure and dynamics; robustness and innovation in biological and social systems; and the dynamics of human social interactions including state and market formation, economics as a complex system, and the evolution of language.

This program is highly individualized. Each student works with one or more faculty mentors on a specific, mutually selected project. The project may be based on a suggestion from the SFI mentor, an idea from the student intern, or a combination of the two. The initial weeks of the program will be devoted to meeting potential mentors and determining the choice of project.

Participants are expected to be in residence approximately 10 weeks, within an early-June to mid-August time frame.

Support:

Housing and a partial board plan will be provided, at no cost to the student, in single-occupancy rooms with shared bathrooms at St. John’s College. Modest living stipends will also be provided to interns during their stay, along with some support of round-trip travel expenses from the home institution. Because Santa Fe lacks a full public transportation system, autos are provided to participants on a shared basis. Those interns who can bring their private transportation are urged to do so.

Eligibility:

Undergraduate students who are citizens or permanent residents of the US are eligible to apply under the guidelines of the National Science Foundation’s Research Experience for Undergraduates program. In addition, thanks to modest level of funding from SFI’s International Program, some internships for students who are citizens of selected international regions are also eligible to apply.

For the purposes of this program, an undergraduate student is a student who is enrolled in a degree program (part-time or full-time) leading to a bachelor’s degree. Students who are transferring from one institution to another and are enrolled at neither institution during the intervening summer may participate. College seniors graduating in 2005 are not eligible for this program; nor are graduating high school students who have not yet enrolled as undergraduates.

Mathematical or computational skills or experience (particularly knowledge of the rudiments of the Unix operating system and/or a programming language, such as C) are favorably considered.

To Apply:

For further details about SFI’s Research Experience for Undergraduates program, including full eligibility and application requirements, please visit our website at http://www.santafe.edu/reu05.html.

Deadline:

All application materials must be received at SFI no later than February 18, 2005.

Women and minorities are especially encouraged to apply.

For further information about the program, please e-mail reuinfo@santafe.edu, or call (505)-946-2746.

On my wall I have a picture of from the Viking mission to Mars (signed by John Bardeen.) It looks like the southern California Mojave desert with a red tinge. This picture, on the other hand, makes me wish there was snow on Mars so I could go skiing:

CREDIT: NASA/JPL/Cornell

Don’t Become a Scientist! by Jonathan Katz:

I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs.

Time to start a war on Ph.D.’s in physics.

In 1986 Sheldon Glashow of Harvard University was asked to summarize the theory of everything in no more than seven words. He replied, “Oh, Lord, why have you forsaken me?”

Nothing is more mysterious in quantum theory than the fact that states are rays in a Hilbert space and that the probability law comes from the modulus squared of overlap between the input and output states. I like to phrase this question as “Why Hilbert space?” Of course there may be no “why"! To quote Feynman: “Do not ask yourself, if you can possibly avoid that, ‘how can it be like that?’ because you will lead yourself down a blind alley in which no one has ever escaped.” But let’s assume that there is something “beyond quantum theory.” What could such a structure look like? There are many paths we can imagine for what such a structure could look like. But all of these structures must in some limit or even exactly given an explanation for the Hilbert space structure and measurement postulate for quantum theory. So here it makes a certain sense to begin thinking about what exactly quantum theory is and what exactly quantum theory is not before we embark on exploring what is beyond quantum theory. But I think today, thanks in large part to years of foundational people yelling and screaming as well as the comfort developed with quantum theory from practicing quantum information science, we understand intimately what quantum theory is and what quantum theory is not. Perhaps it is time to move on!

After going through many phases of thinking about where quantum theory comes from, I’ve now entered a new phase. My earliest phases in thinking about quantum theory stressed the information theoretic notions of quantum theory. Thinking like a computer scientist, statistician, or information theorist leads one to a much cleaner idea of what quantum theory is and what quantum theory is not. The quantum state should never, for example, be mixed up with a realistic description of a system. Noncontextuality and the nonlocal nature of quantum correlations are best understood as telling us how we can and can’t think about the information in quantum systems. And, while these points of view are certainly enlightening, this point of view can be taken too far. For example, I have spent a considerable amount of time trying to understand if the correlations produced by measuring entangled quantum states can be seen to arise because these correlations are best for, say, winning some information theoretic game. The best success of this type of reasoning, I think, is the result of William Wootters (two ohs two tees), who showed in his Ph.D. thesis that for real quantum theory the quantum measurement postulate follows from the question of how to best send distinguishable signals through a channel with angular symmetries. But it may be, and this is where my change of heart has occured, that quantum theory does not arise because it is “best at some game” or “natural under information constraints.” This does not mean that we don’t listen to what quantum theory is and isn’t saying from an information theory perspective, but it does mean that we need to move on and look for a deeper structure behind quantum theory.

How might we do this? Well my new phase is based on a philosophical argument I have discussed here before: the nonlocal nature of quantum correlations implies that any deeper theory which explains quantum theory must take seriously that our notions of spacetime topology are wrong. If all our descriptions of quantum theory must have parts which explain nonlocality, then what is the difference in such a description between having nonlocal quantities and saying that our notion of spacetime topology is wrong. In fact I might go so far as to suggest that the failure to quantize gravity (shut up string theorists…just kidding) is evidence that this is the correct approach. Since general realtivity is our theory of spacetime structure, the reason, in this view, for why we can’t quantize general relativity is that general relativity, or some deeper theory of spacetime, is what gives rise the quantum theory. So now, in my new phase, instead of looking for the game quantum theory is best at playing, I think about the geometric constructions which might give birth to Hilbert space and the quantum probability law. I think the most inspiring connection to date of this idea are results in topological field theories, where the topology of the manifold is a dynamic quantity. And there are many who argue that gravity might be a similar such theory where we have a topological field theory with the extra structure of local degress of freedom. A beautiful paper along these lines (but not far enough along these lines) is Quantum Quandaries: a Category-Theoretic Perspective by John Baez.

Today at tea we were arguing whether Newton deserves a higher place among the metric of genius then Einstein. I am a sucker for the personal side of science, but to me, the larger problem is the question of which revolution shook our view of the universe the most. There have been three revolutions in physics: Newton, Einstein, and Quantum. Newton said “there is order and math governs our universe” Einstein said “time and space are not what you think they are and further these so basic concepts are maleable.” Quantum said “here an operating system for all our physical laws.” Now which of these revolutions had the greatest shock towards our view of the universe?

Certainly, before Newton, the very idea of physical law was at best a blur. So the revolution of seeing the world before and after Newton is very much a nothing out of something experience. With Einstein, we have a revolution where we had previous concepts, concepts that seem deeply ingrained in our everyday experience, but these concepts are wrong. And with Quantum, we find that our very concepts of what is real, especially when combined with the insights of Einstein, are vastly in contrast to the way the universe works. Which revolution was greater?

From Scott Aaronson’s upcoming thesis:

For better or worse, my conception of what a thesis should be was influence by Dave Bacon, quantum computing’s elder clown, who entitled the first chapter of his own 451-page behemoth “Philosonomicon.”

Isn’t it great to be in a field where at age 29 you can be considered “elder"? In fact I was just looking at the schedule for the upcoming QIP conference at MIT and was a bit taken back by the youthfulness of the invited speaker list.

An amusing little article about beer and geology. Speaking of mountains and beer, anyone remember the Rainier Beer ads with the motorcycle whose engine noise sounded out the words “RRRRaiaiaiaiaiaineeeeeeeeeer Beeeeeeeeeer"?

From today’s New York Times, a few questions for Stephen Hawking

With all your intense erudition, why do you bother writing pop-science books about the universe, the latest of which is the illustrated version of ‘’On the Shoulders of Giants'’?

I want my books sold on airport bookstalls.

Half day skiing at Santa Fe Ski Basin. They need about 2 more feet of snow. The funny thing about the Ski Basin is their trail maps where they have drawn in a lift which is “planned.” The planned lift is called the Millenium lift. Sounds like their a little behind schedule.

From the a New York times article on the first string revolution

Dr. Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., described it this way: “String theory is not like anything else ever discovered. It is an incredible panoply of ideas about math and physics, so vast, so rich you could say almost anything about it.”

And thus spoke Voltaire:

The way to become boring is to say everything.

Oh boy: four hours in the San Diego airport! Thought my flight was at two. It’s at six.

Blessed be wireless access at airports.

At the workshop here a claim was made that the world has now spent over one billion dollars in the field of quantum information science since the discovery of Shor’s algorithm in 1994. How many billions more before a useful quantum computer is built?

If you concentrate hard enough on the book you’re reading on the planeride, you won’t even hear the two women behind you discuss the fate of their souls. But you have to concentrate really hard.

Now I’m in San Diego for a workshop resembling a particle theory experiment. In this case we’re smashing together quantum algorithm people with signal processing people in hopes that this collision will produce some new particle of knowledge unknown to man.

There is nothing quite like the silence of snow. This morning the sound of snow woke me up before my alarm went off. Two new inches of new fluffy right outside my bedroom window. Quick to the qubit-mobile and off to Taos for $20 all day skiing! Taos had around three inches of new snow and I spent most of the morning skiing a run on the backside until my legs felt like jello. When my legs felt like jello, well this reminded me of jello shots. At Taos they used to have a tree where people would stop and have a martini. That’s right, a tree. That’s right, martinis. The locals would supply a community batch of martinis. Well, lawsuits and all, you know, and now the martini tree is no more. Instead I grabbed lunch and headed upstairs to the Martini Tree Bar. There I discovered what the straight version of a cool tradition had become: a bar with pool tables, foosball, video game machines, and air hockey. Anyone who visits me will therefore be immediately challenged to one of these games. Better practice.

In the afternoon I made the acquaintance of “K squared,” the son of a national medal of science winner, and, apparently, on a permanent ski vacation. What a life. The fun thing was that K^2 kept giving me puzzles to work on as we went up the lifts. Hard to ski when you’re trying to reason through a logic puzzle. Well at least it makes a good excuse for a few of my terrific crashes.

During a talk today by Sid Redner, the question came up as to the origin of the expression “master equation.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first such use of the term was given in by A. Nordsieck et al. in Physica 7, p. 353, 1940

The required probability of an energy distribution will be a function of the numbers ni and of x, which we will denote by W(n1, n2,..; x). From this function W one can find all other distribution functions… When the probabilities of the elementary processes are known, one can write down a continuity equation for W, from which all other equations can be derived and which we will call therefore the “master” equation.

From a Caltech postdoc mailing list:

I am working on two science show teasers for Discovery and we are looking for a couple of articulate, passionate scientists who would be interested in appearing in reality television. The first show is called “Get Out of There” in which we recreate survival situations that actually occured and two scientists have to figure out how to get out/survive. The second show is called “Brain vs. Brawn” in which two contestants are both given the same challenge and one is coached on how to accomplish it by a scientist and the other by a non-scientist. The challenge we will be shooting for the pilot/teaser will be fire-walking, so ideally we will have scientist who can explain the physics behind it and the other will be a new agey-type who will focus on a more mind over matter approach. If you can recommend anyone, please contact: *******

(if you really want to know who to contact, please email me.)

Crap. Poison oak from an offtrail hike last week to look at an interesting landslide on the Klamath river. Itch.

My friend Lon Christensen is the CTO of a company called Quorum Systems in San Diego which makes chipsets which can access both GSM and WLAN networks simultaneously. If you Google for “quorum systems” you will realize why it’s important not to name your company after a technical computer science term.

The slow steady advance in ion traps! A milestone: Realization of quantum error correction,” J. Chiavernini, D. Leibfried, T. Schaetz, M. D. Barrett, R. B. Blakestad, J. Britton, W. M. Itano, J. D. Jost, E. Knill, C. Langer, R. Ozeri & D. J. Wineland, Nature 432, 602–605 (2004)

Scalable quantum computation and communication require error control to protect quantum information against unavoidable noise. Quantum error correction protects information stored in two-level quantum systems (qubits) by rectifying errors with operations conditioned on the measurement outcomes. Error-correction protocols have been implemented in nuclear magnetic resonance experiments, but the inherent limitations of this technique prevent its application to quantum information processing. Here we experimentally demonstrate quantum error correction using three beryllium atomic-ion qubits confined to a linear, multi-zone trap. An encoded one-qubit state is protected against spin-flip errors by means of a three-qubit quantum error-correcting code. A primary ion qubit is prepared in an initial state, which is then encoded into an entangled state of three physical qubits (the primary and two ancilla qubits). Errors are induced simultaneously in all qubits at various rates. The encoded state is decoded back to the primary ion one-qubit state, making error information available on the ancilla ions, which are separated from the primary ion and measured. Finally, the primary qubit state is corrected on the basis of the ancillae measurement outcome. We verify error correction by comparing the corrected final state to the uncorrected state and to the initial state. In principle, the approach enables a quantum state to be maintained by means of repeated error correction, an important step towards scalable fault-tolerant quantum computation using trapped ions.

Kiev, Ukraine, Nov. 29 (UPI) – The sign-language interpreter on a Ukrainian TV station Thursday staged a silent protest against the nation’s election by signing, “They are lying.”

During a news report on state-owned UT-1 that called Viktor Vanukovych the winner of the presidential election, Natalya Dmitruk told viewers in sign language, “I am addressing all the deaf citizens of Ukraine. Our president is (Viktor) Yushchenko. Don’t believe what they say. They are lying.”

Dmitruk then went back to signing the news report but digressed one more time at the end: “My soul is heavy that I had to repeat these lies. I will not do it again. I don’t know if we’ll see each other again.”

Spam has evolved to putting subjects which will trick you into opening the email. If you email me, don’t put “hello” in the subject, cus I probably won’t open the email. If, on the other hand, you put “eigenstate” as the subject, as did the spam I received today, I will open the email. Doh!