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Inflation on the back of an envelope
Last Monday was an exciting day! After following the BICEP2 announcement via Twitter, I had to board a transcontinental flight, so I had 5 uninterrupted hours to think about what it all meant. Without...
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When I met with Steven Spielberg to talk about Interstellar
Today I had the awesome and eagerly anticipated privilege of attending a screening of the new film Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan. One can’t help but be impressed by Nolan’s fertile visual...
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Bell’s inequality 50 years later
This is a jubilee year.* In November 1964, John Bell submitted a paper to the obscure (and now defunct) journal Physics. That paper, entitled “On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox,” changed how we...
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Quantum gravity from quantum error-correcting codes?
The lessons we learned from the Ryu-Takayanagi formula, the firewall paradox and the ER=EPR conjecture have convinced us that quantum information theory can become a powerful tool to sharpen our...
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The mentors that shape us
Three years and three weeks ago I started my first blog. I wasn’t quite sure what to call it, so I went to John for advice. I had several names in mind, but John quickly zeroed in on one: Quantum...
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Toward physical realizations of thermodynamic resource theories
“This is your arch-nemesis.” The thank-you slide of my presentation remained onscreen, and the question-and-answer session had begun. I was presenting a seminar about thermodynamic resource theories...
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Quantum Chess
Two years ago, as a graduate student in Physics at USC, I began work on a game whose mechanics were based on quantum mechanics. When I had a playable version ready, my graduate adviser, Todd Brun, put...
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It’s CHAOS!
My brother and I played the video game Sonic the Hedgehog on a Sega Dreamcast. The hero has spiky electric-blue fur and can run at the speed of sound.1 One of us, then the other, would battle monsters....
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Local operations and Chinese communications
The workshop spotlighted entanglement. It began in Shanghai, paused as participants hopped the Taiwan Strait, and resumed in Taipei. We discussed quantum operations and chaos, thermodynamics and field...
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The entangled fabric of space
We live in the information revolution. We translate everything into vast sequences of ones and zeroes. From our personal email to our work documents, from our heart rates to our credit rates, from our...
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Glass beads and weak-measurement schemes
Richard Feynman fiddled with electronics in a home laboratory, growing up. I fiddled with arts and crafts.1 I glued popsicle sticks, painted plaques, braided yarn, and designed greeting cards. Of the...
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Entropy Avengers
As you already know if you read my rare (but highly refined!) blog samples, I have spent a big chunk of my professorial career teaching statistical mechanics. And if you teach statistical mechanics,...
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Standing back at Stanford
This T-shirt came to mind last September. I was standing in front of a large silver-colored table littered with wires, cylinders, and tubes. Greg Bentsen was pointing at components and explaining...
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Paradise
The word dominates chapter one of Richard Holmes’s book The Age of Wonder. Holmes writes biographies of Romantic-Era writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Shelley, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge populate...
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Rock-paper-scissors, granite-clock-idea
I have a soft spot for lamassu. Ten-foot-tall statues of these winged bull-men guarded the entrances to ancient Assyrian palaces. Show me lamassu, or apkallu—human-shaped winged deities—or other...
View ArticleA quantum podcast
A few months ago I sat down with Craig Cannon of Y Combinator for a discussion about quantum technology and other things. A lightly edited version was published this week on the Y Combinator blog. The...
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I get knocked down…
“You’ll have to have a thick skin.” Marcelo Gleiser, a college mentor of mine, emailed the warning. I’d sent a list of physics PhD programs and requested advice about which to attend. Marcelo’s and my...
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Chasing Ed Jaynes’s ghost
You can’t escape him, working where information theory meets statistical mechanics. Information theory concerns how efficiently we can encode information, compute, evade eavesdroppers, and communicate....
View ArticleMy QIP 2019 After-Dinner Speech
Scientists who work on theoretical aspects of quantum computation and information look forward each year to the Conference on Quantum Information Processing (QIP), an annual event since 1998. This...
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Symmetries and quantum error correction
It’s always exciting when you can bridge two different physical concepts that seem to have nothing in common—and it’s even more thrilling when the results have as broad a range of possible fields of...
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