The Quantum Pontiff

Glorious Dawn Record

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:00:07 -0500

I get a lot of press releases forward to me which usually get forwarded directly into my gmail archive. But this one I'm happy to pass along: Third Man Records is releasing A Glorious Dawn. You know the Carl Sagan remix (w/ guest appearance of the Hawkmeister) that I've been looping over and over again while I work:

Third Man Records is over the moon to announce the 7-inch release of "A Glorious Dawn" on November 9th.
...
The release is timed to coincide with the 75th anniversary of Sagan's birth. Also happening that day is a reception in United States' Congress with speeches by senators, NASA officials and assorted scientists, all hosted by the Planetary Society, which was co-founded by Sagan.

Third Man Records, in conjunction with United Record Pressing, fabricated a special "Cosmos Colored Vinyl" of which 150 copies will be available...50 randomly inserted into mail orders for "A Glorious Dawn" and the remainder to be made available at the Third Man Records Nashville store front at noon on November 9th.

The one-sided single features a very special etching on the flipside. Reproduced from the original artwork, the etching copies the etching included with the Voyager Golden Record, set off into space in 1977 as the most elaborate message-in-a-bottle idea ever imagined. With its inclusion of Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was The Night" it goes without saying that the Voyager Golden Record is one of Third Man's favorite releases of all-time..

I fell asleep last night listening to an episode of Cosmos. Maybe that explains da alienz in my dreamz?

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A Tactic Named Sue

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:14:44 -0500

A ~~puppet~~ commenter informs me that El Naschie is suing Nature. El Naschie, you may remember, was the journal editor of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals who was accused of not reviewing his own papers in the journal. To be expected, I suppose. But the commenter that pointed this out is entertaining:

Sarah Limbrick [Pontiff: writer of the above linked article about the suit] would surely be interested to know what the leading libel expert in England had to say about the Nature article complained of. He said he is in a state of disbelief that the worlds most respectable scientific journal Nature should publish an article which bears all the hallmarks of the tabloid press. Another interesting point is the conspiracy theory linking the plagiarism of El Naschies work published in Scientific American with the Nature article as well as a far worse article published in Die Zeit. Interestingly all of these three publications are owned by Macmillan. I understand from confidential sources that a mega surprise will be released at the trial engulfing highly reputed names some of whom are Nobel laureates.

OOooh, Nobel laureates in a libel case and conspiracy theories to boot! That's bigger than the Scopes monkey trial!

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Seattle Signs

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:14:49 -0500

Not helpful:
In Seattle if a road bends ever so slightly you are on a new street, but the above is...confusing.

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Living the Relativistic Life

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:01:54 -0500

Over the summer I started running a not so insignificant amount: 6 miles in the morning on the weekdays and 10 to 15 miles on the weekends (insert commenter telling me why this is wrong.) So, one or two or more hours out running around beautiful Seattle (My favorite route is Queen Anne to Fremont to Ballard Locks, around Magnolia and back up Queen Anne.) Which brings us to the subject of time. During my runs it seems that my watch, which runs using mechanical energy, decided that it had a new setting: relativistic mode. In other words I'd go out and run for two hours, and when I got back my watch would be ten minutes behind the clock at my home. At first I thought, cool! I get to experience time dilation in person! And then I thought: boy I'm fast. And then finally: I'm always late.

Damn you relativity!

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12th Annual SqUiNT, Feb 18-21 2010

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:26:54 -0500

SqUinT will be held in Santa Fe, NM from Feb 18-21, 2010. The submission page is now open and available at http://panda.unm.edu/SQuInT. Note that speakers outside the network should contact the organizers if they wish to inquire about attending. It's an El Nino year, so New Mexico should have some good snow this year :)

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TQC 2010 First Announcement

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:18:28 -0500

The 5th Conference on the Theory of Quantum Computation, Communication and Cryptography has put up its first announcement. It will be held at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom, from 13th - 15th April 2010. The first upcoming deadline to be aware of is the submission deadline of Monday January 4, 2010:

The 5th Conference on Theory of Quantum Computation, Communication, and Cryptography
---- TQC 2010 ----
University of Leeds, UK
13 - 15 April 2009
http://tqc2010.leeds.ac.uk
====================================================================
Quantum computation, quantum communication, and quantum cryptography are subfields of quantum information processing, an interdisciplinary field of information science and quantum mechanics. TQC 2010 focuses on theoretical aspects of these subfields. The objective of the conference is to bring together researchers so that they can interact with each other and share problems and recent discoveries. The conference will be held from April 13-15, 2010, at the University of Leeds. It will consist of invited talks,
contributed talks, and a poster session.

The scope of the conference includes, but is not limited to:
* quantum algorithms
* models of quantum computation
* quantum complexity theory
* simulation of quantum systems
* quantum cryptography
* quantum communication
* quantum estimation and measurement
* quantum noise
* quantum coding theory
* fault-tolerant quantum computing
* entanglement theory

Invited Speakers:

* Julia Kempe (Tel-Aviv University)
* Kae Nemoto (NII, Tokyo)
* Frank Verstraete (University of Vienna)
* Ronald de Wolf (CWI, Amsterdam)
* Anton Zeilinger (University of Vienna)

Post Proceedings:

As has happened for previous TQCs, a post-conference proceedings volume
will be published in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science, to
which selected speakers will be invited to contribute.

Program Committee:

Andrew Childs (University of Waterloo)
Matthias Christandl (Ludwig-Maximilians-University)
Wim van Dam (University of California, Santa Barbara; Chair)
Nilanjana Datta (University of Cambridge)
Aram Harrow (University of Bristol)
Peter Hoyer (University of Calgary)
Rahul Jain (National University of Singapore)
Elham Kashefi (University of Edinburgh)
Debbie Leung (University of Waterloo)
Hoi-Kwong Lo (University of Toronto)
Juan Pablo Paz (University of Buenos Aires)
Francesco Petruccione (University of KwaZulu-Natal)
Martin Rotteler (NEC, Princeton)
Miklos Santha (Universit? Paris Sud)
Simone Severini (University College London; Co-chair)
Seiichiro Tani (NTT, Tokyo)
Jean-Pierre Tillich (INRIA, Rocquencourt)
Pawel Wocjan (University of Central Florida)
Takashi Yamamoto (Osaka University)

Local (University of Leeds) organising committee:

Katie Barr (Physics and Astronomy)
Katherine Brown (Physics and Astronomy)
Barry Cooper (Maths)
Peter Crompton (Maths)
Vladimir V. Kisil (Maths)
Viv Kendon (Physics and Astronomy; Chair)
Neil Lovett (Physics and Astronomy)
Rob Wagner (Physics and Astronomy)

Conference series steering committee:

Yasuhito Kawano (NTT, Tokyo, Japan)
Michele Mosca (IQC, University of Waterloo, and Perimeter Institute, Waterloo, Canada)
Vlakto Vedral (CQC, University of Oxford, UK, and CQT, National University of Singapore)

Important Dates:

* Submission deadline: Monday 4th January 2010 (23:59 local time)
* Notification of acceptance/rejection: Thursday 11th February 2010
* Conference: April 13-15, 2010
* Post-proceedings submission deadline: End of May 2010
* Final copy deadline: End of August 2010
* Published: November 2010

To receive announcements, calls for papers, and reminders of deadlines, subscribe to the mailing list by following this link:

http://lists.leeds.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/tqc2010

(You may also use this link to unsubscribe at any time.)

To contact the organisers, please send emailto: tqc2010 [at] leeds.ac.uk.

Looks good but what is the Maths department ;) ?

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Where Quantum Computing Theory Is Done

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:37:53 -0500

Update 4/5/09: The wandering Australian does an analysis by institution.

Today, because I have way to many deadlines fast approaching, I needed to waste some time (procrastineerering), I decide to take a look at the last years worth of scited papers on the quant-ph section of scirate.com. The question I wanted to investigate is where quantum computing theory is occurring worldwide. So I took the top scited papers scoring over 10 scitations (42 papers in all) and looked at the affiliations of the authors: each co-author contributed a fractional score to their particular region (authors with multiple affiliations had their votes split.) And yes, I decided to lump all of Europe together and combined Japan and China (sorry). The results are as follows:

US: 40.07%
Europe: 30.68%
Canada: 18.75%
Singapore: 5.54%
China/Japan: 3.77%
Australia: 1.19%

Of course these results are subject to a plethora of problems: I mean the idea that one can extrapolate from a half rate voting website is silly! But that's what blogs are for, no? So let's plunge in :)

To me it was interesting to see that the U.S. is doing as well as it is, considering that fact that there have been considerably less hires of junior faculty in the U.S. in quantum computing that elsewhere. In looking at this it seems pretty clear to me at lot of this has to do with two institutions: Caltech (the IQI) and MIT. Another interesting fact for me was that Canada did not score as high as I would have expected, considering the vast resources that exist at the University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute. Finally it was quite impressive to look at the number of European contributions from the U.K.: far higher than I had appreciated.

So what conclusion should you draw from this? Probably none at all, considering the suspect methodology, but if you want something to write home about it's probably: the U.S. is behind the combined juggernaut of Canada and Europe :)

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Is College Tuition a Bubble?

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:46:07 -0500

Over at Life as a Physicist, the Physicist for Life gets on a well deserved soap box and laments certain comments concerning articles about a recent College Board study: Trends in College Pricing 2009. The gist of the Physicist for Life's comments concern the fact that one should not be surprised at rising tuition costs at public universities, given that state budgets have been shot to all hell in the present downturn.

But what I find interesting, and what I've never been able to figure out, is the larger trend (ignore the last two years, please). Why are tuition prices increasing at such a fast rate for four year colleges? For example, see slide 5 of this presentation where one sees that over the last three decades, the inflation adjusted price of college has more than tripled at public four year universities and gone up nearly as much a private four year universities. So that is question number one for me. Question number two is really related, and is where is this money going? (And of course the real question, as a pseudo-professor, how do I get some of it?)

Speculation below the fold.

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What To Do When There Is Nothing Else?

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:27:58 -0500

Michael Green's appointment to replace Stephen Hawking as the Lucasian chair, has, quite predictably, brought back into the spotlight the ever simmering STRING WARS!!!OMG!!!STRINGTHEORYRLZ!!. Okay, maybe not the spotlight, per se, but I did find the article about Green in the Guardian interesting (via the so wrong it hurts fellow):

But that was one of their arguments, that the academy is so biased towards string theory - hiring mostly string theorists, crowning mostly string theorists - that it has driven out all other ways of seeing (Smolin compared it to deciding that there was only one way to fight cancer, and pouring all available resources into that one way). "People do what they feel is going to be productive," says Green. "It's all very well to say they should be doing something else. But there is nothing else."

Now, of course, this is all part of a long series of arguments about the validity of string theory as an approach to a physical theory merging gravity and the standard model. Yawn, that is *so* 00s.

What it did make me think, however, was what the equivalent argument would be in a different field. And because, while I posses my fair share of extralusionary intelligence, I thought, oh I'd better stick to my own field when I think about this. So what would the equivalent be in quantum computing?

I hereby declare that there are only two valid approaches to building a quantum computer: ion trap quantum computers and superconducting based quantum computers. It's all very well to say that we should be spending our time working on other "ideas" for quantum computers. But there is nothing else.

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How do you feel about Bacon?

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 12:00:40 -0500

Spotted on the pick your own religion chart.

Also: Bacon Jam!

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ArXiv in the Cloud Coming?

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:04:48 -0500

Via the arXiv api newsgroup comes the rumor that soon, perhaps, the arXiv will be available for full download sometime in the future:

or a full copy of (or particular subsets of) PDF for arXiv papers, we are in the process of setting up a service in the Cloud, which will offer the option for bulk download. I'll let you know when that
becomes available.

Cool! All of physics since ~~recorded~~ arXiv time on my hard drive :)

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Quantum LSD

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:44:39 -0500

Oh man sometimes even I, a staunch Caltech grad, wish I could be at MIT. The MIT QIP seminar this next Monday looks...intriguing (Monday 10/26 at 4:00 in 36-428 silly MITers and their numbered buildings, so cold.):

David Kaiser (MIT)

How the Hippies Saved Physics

Abstract:

In recent years, the field of quantum information science-an amalgam of topics ranging from quantum encryption, to quantum computing, quantum teleportation, and more-has catapulted to the cutting edge of physics, sporting a multi-billion-dollar research program, tens of thousands of published research articles, and a variety of device prototypes. This tremendous excitement marks the tail end of a long-simmering Cinderella story. Long before the big budgets and dedicated teams, the field smoldered on the scientific sidelines. In fact, the field's recent breakthroughs derive, in part, from the hazy, bong-filled excesses of the 1970s New Age movement. Many of the ideas that now occupy the core of quantum information science once found their home amid an anything-goes counterculture frenzy, a mishmash of spoon-bending psychics, Eastern mysticism, LSD trips, CIA spooks chasing mind-reading dreams, and comparable "Age of Aquarius" enthusiasms. For the better part of two decades, the concepts that would,in time, blossom into developments like quantum encryption were bandied about in late-night bull sessions and hawked by proponents of a burgeoning self-help movement-more snake oil than stock option. This talk describes the field's bumpy transition from New Age to cutting edge.

I knew that the hippies drove the computer revolution but did not know that they are also responsible for quantum information science :)

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Bayesians Say the Cutest Things

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:44:31 -0500

The Dutch book argument of Bruno de Finetti is an argument which is supposed to justify subjective probabilities. What one does in this argument is gives probabilities an operational definition in terms of the amount one is willing to bet on some event. Thus a probability p is mapped to your being willing to make a bet on the event at 1-p to p odds. In the Dutch book argument one shows that if one takes this operational meaning and in addition allows for the person you are betting to take both sides of the bet, then if you do not follow the axiomatic laws of probability, then the person betting against you can construct a Dutch book: a set of bets in which the person you are betting against always wins. For the best explanation and derivation of this result that I know, consult the notes written by Carl Caves: Probabilities as betting odds and the Dutch book.

Now I have many issues with the Dutch book argument, the first and foremost being that it is a ridiculous setup. I mean how often do you place a bet in which you are willing to give both sides of the bet (buy and sell)? "Yes, I would like to either buy or sell a lottery ticket please?" Sure you can do it, but there are many reasons why money has a value outside of the single bet being placed, and therefore buying (giving someone your money and getting paid back if you win the bet) versus selling (recieving money and then having to pay off the bet if you lose) are not symmetric in any world where the unit being exchanged has a temporal value and the bet is placed before the event is resolved. I am, indeed, a one-sided Bayesian. I will leave it up to the reader to construct the axioms of probability by which I work.

Amusingly, at least to me, this objection does not seem to be raised much in the literature on the Dutch book argument. But the other day I found a great quote relevant to this objection which I just have to share. This is from Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Russell and Norvig. In this book they discuss but don't prove the de Finetti's argument. Then they say

One might think that this betting game is rather contrived. For example, what if one refuses to bet? Does that end the argument? The answer is that the betting game is an abstract model for decision-making situation in which every agent is unavoidably involved at every moment. Every action (including inaction) is a kind of bet, and every outcome can be seen as a payoff of the bet. Refusing to bet is like refusing to allow time to pass.

You heard it here first people: if you want to stop time all you have to do is not bet! Crap I have homework due tomorrow what should I do? Well certainly you should not bet, because we all know that refusing to bet is refusing to allow time to pass. ROFL Baysians are so cute when they try to justify themselves.

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Chairs

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:31:15 -0500

Two notes on chairs. Michael Green is the new Lucasian chair of Mathematics replacing the esteemed Stephen Hawking. Green helped sparked the great optimism in string theory by discovering with John Schwarz the Green-Schwarz anomaly cancellation mechanism.

Elsewhere, the Perimeter Institute has named ten new distinguished research chairs, among them a host of the quantum computing afflicted:

Dorit Aharonov is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She has made major contributions to the theoretical foundations of quantum computation, in particular in the context of understanding and counteracting the effects of 'noisy' environments on delicate quantum systems performing computations, the identification of a quantum to classical phase transition in fault tolerant quantum computers, the development of new tools and approaches for the design of quantum algorithms, and the study of ground states of many body quantum Hamiltonians for various classes of Hamiltonians, from a computational complexity point of view. In 2006 she was awarded the Krill prize for excellence in scientific research. Dr. Aharonov is on the faculty of Perimeter Scholars International.

Patrick Hayden holds the Canada Research Chair in the Physics of Information at McGill University. His research focuses on finding efficient methods for performing the communication tasks that will be required for large-scale quantum information processing. This includes the development of methods for reliably sending quantum states through 'noisy' media and for protecting quantum information from unauthorized manipulation. He has also applied these techniques to the question of information loss from black holes. Among Dr. Hayden's honors, he is a past Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow and Rhodes Scholar.

Christopher Isham is a Senior Research Investigator and Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London. He is a former Senior Dean of the College. Dr Isham has made many important contributions in the fields of quantum gravity and the foundations of quantum mechanics. Motivated by the 'problem of time' in quantum gravity, he developed a new approach to quantum theory known as the 'HPO formalism' that enables the theory to be extended to situations where there is no normal notion of time (such as in Einstein's theory of general relativity). Since the late 1990s, Dr. Isham has been developing a completely new approach to formulating theories of physics based on the mathematical concept of a 'topos'. This gives a radically new way of understanding the traditional problems of quantum theory as well as providing a framework in which to develop new theories that would not have been conceived using standard mathematics. From 2001-2005, Dr. Isham was a member of Perimeter Institute's Scientific Advisory Committee; during the last year he was the Chair of the Committee.

Leo Kadanoff is a theoretical physicist and applied mathematician based at the James Franck Institute at the University of Chicago. He is considered a pioneer of complexity theory, and has made important contributions to research in the properties of matter, the development of urban areas, statistical models of physical systems, and the development of chaos in simple mechanical and fluid systems. His is best known for the development of the concepts of "scale invariance" and "universality" as they are applied to phase transitions. More recently, he has been involved in the understanding of singularities in fluid flow. Among Dr. Kadanoff's many honours, he is a past recipient of the National Medal of Science (US), the Grande Medaille d'Or of the Académie des Sciences de l'Institut de France, the Wolf Foundation Prize, the Boltzmann Medal of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, and the Centennial Medal of Harvard University. He is also a past President of the American Physical Society. Dr. Kadanoff is on the faculty of Perimeter Scholars International.

Renate Loll is a Professor of Theoretical Physics and a member of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in the Faculty of Physics and Astronomy at Utrecht University. Her research centers on quantum gravity, the search for a consistent theory that describes the microscopic constituents of spacetime geometry and the quantum-dynamical laws governing their interaction. She has made major contributions to loop quantum gravity, and with her collaborators, has proposed a novel theory of Quantum Gravity via 'Causal Dynamical Triangulations.' Dr. Loll heads one of the largest research groups on nonperturbative quantum gravity worldwide, and is the recipient of a prestigious personal VICI-grant of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. She is also a faculty member of Perimeter Scholars International.

Malcolm Perry is a Professor of Theoretical Physics in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. His research centers upon general relativity, supergravity and string theory. Dr. Perry has made major contributions to string theory, Euclidean quantum gravity, and our understanding of black hole radiation. With Perimeter Institute Faculty member Robert Myers, he developed the Myers-Perry metric, which shows how to construct black holes in the higher spacetime dimensions associated with string theory. Dr. Perry's honours include an Sc. D. from the University of Cambridge. Dr. Perry is also on the faculty of Perimeter Scholars International.

Sandu Popescu is a Professor of Physics at the H. H. Wills Physics Laboratory at the University of Bristol, and a member of the Bristol Quantum Information and Computation Group. He has made numerous contributions to quantum theory, ranging from the very fundamental, to the design of practical experiments (such as the first teleportation experiment), to patentable commercial applications. His investigations into the nature of quantum behavior, with particular focus on quantum non-locality, led him to discover some of the central concepts in the emerging area of quantum information and computation. He is a past recipient of the Adams Prize (Cambridge), and the Clifford Patterson Prize of the Royal Society (UK).

William Unruh is a Professor of Physics at the University of British Columbia who has made seminal contributions to our understanding of gravity, black holes, cosmology, quantum fields in curved spaces, and the foundations of quantum mechanics, including the discovery of the Unruh effect. His investigations into the effects of quantum mechanics of the earliest stages of the universe have yielded many insights, including the effects of quantum mechanics on computation. Dr. Unruh was the first Director of the Cosmology and Gravity Program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (1985-1996). His many awards include the Rutherford Medal of the Royal Society of Canada (1982), the Herzberg Medal of the Canadian Association of Physicists (1983), the Steacie Prize from the National Research Council (1984), the Canadian Association of Physicists Medal of Achievement (1995), and the Canada Council Killam Prize. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Science.

Guifre Vidal is a Professor in the School of Physical Sciences at the University of Queensland, who has made important contributions to the development of quantum information science, with applications to condensed matter theory. His research explores the phenomenon of entanglement, the renormalization group, and the development of tensor network algorithms to simulate quantum systems. Dr. Vidal's past honors include a Marie Curie Fellowship, awarded by the European Union, and a Sherman Fairchild Foundation Fellowship. He is a Federation Fellow of the Australian Research Council.

Mark Wise is the John A. McCone Professor of High Energy Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He has conducted research in elementary particle physics and cosmology, and shared the 2001 Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics for the development of the 'Heavy Quark Effective Theory' (HQET), a mathematical formalism that enables physicists to make predictions about otherwise intractable problems in the theory of the strong interactions of quarks. He has also published work on mathematical models for finance and risk assessment. Dr. Wise is a past Sloan Foundation fellow, a fellow of the American Physical Society, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Quantum Pontiff

Glorious Dawn Record

A Tactic Named Sue

Seattle Signs

Living the Relativistic Life

12th Annual SqUiNT, Feb 18-21 2010

TQC 2010 First Announcement

Where Quantum Computing Theory Is Done

Is College Tuition a Bubble?

What To Do When There *Is* Nothing Else?

How do you feel about Bacon?

ArXiv in the Cloud Coming?

Quantum LSD

Bayesians Say the Cutest Things

Chairs

Posted Without Comment, But With a Bad Smell

What To Do When There Is Nothing Else?