Clik here to view.
Is Alice burning? The black hole firewall controversy
Quantum correlations are monogamous. Bob can be highly entangled with Alice or with Carrie, but not both. Back in the early 1990s, I was very interested in the quantum physics of black holes and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Introduction to Quantum Information
First slide, viewed on my laptop. I’m lazy. The only reason I ever do anything is that sometimes in a weak moment I agree to do something, and after that I don’t have the nerve to back out. And that’s...
View ArticleClik here to view.
One, two, three, four, five…
As this year comes to a close, people around the world will be counting down the last few seconds of 2012. But, how come we never count up the first few seconds of the new year? What is it about the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Science books for kids matter (or used to)
The elementary school I attended hosted an annual book fair, and every year I went with my mother to browse. I would check out the sports books first, to see whether there were any books about baseball...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A poll on the foundations of quantum theory
Erwin Schrödinger. Discussions of quantum foundations often seem to involve his much abused cat. The group of physicists seriously engaged in studies of the “foundations” or “interpretation” of quantum...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Unsolvable
Why go swimming, if you can do math instead inside a room with no windows? Back in 1997, during my visit to beautiful Mar del Plata in Argentina, I was asked to solve a math problem that I soon...
View ArticleClik here to view.
De divina proportione
As a mathematician, I often wonder if life would have been easier were I born 2,400 years ago. Back then, all you had to do to become eternally famous was to show that ( I am looking at you Πυθαγόρα!)...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Post-Quantum Cryptography
As an undergraduate, I took Introduction to Algorithms from Ron Rivest. One of the topics he taught was the RSA public-key cryptosystem which he had created with Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman. At the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Largest prime number found?
Over the past few months, I have been inundated with tweets about the largest prime number ever found. That number, according to Nature News, is . This is certainly a very large prime number and one...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Project X Squared
Alicia Hardesty: full-time fashion designer, part-time nerd. Have you seen the movie Frankenweenie? It’s a black and white cartoon (an experiment in itself these days) with a very important message:...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Public Lecture on Quantum Information
Sooner or later, most scientists are asked to deliver a public lecture about their research specialties. When successful, lecturing about science to the lay public can give one a feeling of deep...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Entanglement = Wormholes
One of the most enjoyable and inspiring physics papers I have read in recent years is this one by Mark Van Raamsdonk. Building on earlier observations by Maldacena and by Ryu and Takayanagi. Van...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Quantum Matter Animated!
by Jorge Cham What does it mean for something to be Quantum? I have to confess, I don’t know. My Ph.D was in Robotics and Kinematics, so my neurons are deeply trained to think in terms of classical...
View ArticleClik here to view.
We are all Wilsonians now
Ken Wilson Ken Wilson passed away on June 15 at age 77. He changed how we think about physics. Renormalization theory, first formulated systematically by Freeman Dyson in 1949, cured the flaws of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Monopoles passing through Flatland!
Like many mathematically inclined teenagers, I was charmed when I first read the book Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott.* It’s a story about a Sphere who visits a two-dimensional world and tries to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
On the importance of choosing a convenient basis
The benefits of Caltech’s proximity to Hollywood don’t usually trickle down to measly grad students like myself, except in the rare occasions when we befriend the industry’s technical contingent. One...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Squeezing light using mechanical motion
This post is about generating a special type of light, squeezed light, using a mechanical resonator. But perhaps more importantly, it’s about an experiment (Caltech press release can be found here)...
View ArticleClik here to view.
More Brainteasers
As promised, I’m back to tell you more about myself and tickle your brain! I’m terribly sorry for giving such a short description of my background in my last post. If I had to describe myself in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Building a Computer: Part I
During my senior year in high school, I was fortunate enough to participate in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. At the awards banquet I was seated with fourteen others and we each...
View ArticleClik here to view.
My 10 biggest thrills
Wow! Evidence for gravitational waves produced during cosmic inflation. BICEP2 results for the ratio r of gravitational wave perturbations to density perturbations, and the density perturbation...
View Article