Quantum Thought Leaders

Dear Twitter Anti-Zionists, For five months, ever since Oct. 7, I’ve read you obsessively. While my current job is supposed to involve protecting humanity from the dangers of AI (with a side of quantum computing theory), I’m ashamed to say that half the days I don’t do any science; instead... Read more
Published on: 2024-03-25
Imagine a billiard ball bouncing around on a pool table. High-school level physics enables us to predict its motion until the end of time using simple equations for energy and momentum conservation, as long as you know the initial conditions … Continue reading →... Read more
Understanding a character’s origins enriches their narrative and motivates their actions. Take Batman as an example: without knowing his backstory, he appears merely as a billionaire who might achieve more by donating his wealth rather than masquerading as a bat … Continue reading →... Read more
Even if you don’t recognize the name, you probably recognize the saguaro cactus. It’s the archetype of the cactus, a column from which protrude arms bent at right angles like elbows. As my husband pointed out, the cactus emoji is … Continue reading →... Read more
In fact, don’t try to take kids to Washington DC if you can possibly avoid it. This is my public service announcement. This is the value I feel I can add to the world today. Dana and I decided to take the kids to DC for spring break. The trip,... Read more
Published on: 2024-03-15
So I’ve been locked out of Facebook and Messenger, possibly forever. It started yesterday morning, when Facebook went down for the entire world. Now it’s back up for most people, but I can’t get in—neither with passwords (none of which work), nor with text messages to my phone (my phone... Read more
Published on: 2024-03-06
Editor’s Note: This post was co-authored by Hsin-Yuan Huang (Robert) and Richard Kueng. John Preskill, Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech, has been named the 2024 John Stewart Bell Prize recipient. The prize honors John’s contributions in … Continue reading →... Read more
My husband taught me how to pronounce the name of the city where I’d be presenting a talk late last July: Aveiro, Portugal. Having studied Spanish, I pronounced the name as Ah-VEH-roh, with a v partway to a hard b. … Continue reading →... Read more
Here, as promised in my last post, is a written version of the talk I delivered a couple weeks ago at MindFest in Florida, entitled “The Problem of Human Specialness in the Age of AI.” The talk is designed as one-stop shopping, summarizing many different AI-related thoughts I’ve had over... Read more
Published on: 2024-02-12
Unrelated Announcement (Feb. 7): Huge congratulations to longtime friend-of-the-blog John Preskill for winning the 2024 John Stewart Bell Prize for research on fundamental issues in quantum mechanics! On the heels of my post on the fermion doubling problem, I’m sorry to spend even more time on the simulation hypothesis. I... Read more
Published on: 2024-02-07
This past summer, our quantum thermodynamics research group had the wonderful opportunity to visit the Dibner Rare Book Library in D.C. Located in a small corner of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, tucked away behind flashier exhibits, the Dibner is … Continue reading →... Read more
Introduction: “Once Upon a Time”…with a twist Thermodynamics problems have surprisingly many similarities with fairy tales. For example, most of them begin with a familiar opening. In thermodynamics, the phrase “Consider an isolated box of particles” serves a similar purpose … Continue reading →... Read more
Unrelated Announcement: The Call for Papers for the 2024 Conference on Computational Complexity is now out! Submission deadline is Friday February 16. Every month or so, someone asks my opinion on the simulation hypothesis. Every month I give some variant on the same answer: Recently, though, I learned a new... Read more
Published on: 2024-01-29
toise me at CERN was a box of chocolates. CERN is a multinational particle-physics collaboration. Based in Geneva, CERN is famous for having “the world’s largest and most powerful accelerator,” according to its website. So a physicist will take for … Continue reading →... Read more
NISQ is a term coined by John Preskill circa 2018 and stands for “Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum”. The term is aimed to describe quantum computers that were not just toy few qubit systems, but systems of a slightly larger scale. This … Continue reading →... Read more
Published on: 2024-01-03
When my brother and I were little, we sometimes played video games on weekend mornings, before our parents woke up. We owned a 3DO console, which ran the game Gex. Gex is named after its main character, a gecko. Stepping … Continue reading →... Read more
“I am a Quantum Engineer, but on Sundays I have principles” — John Bell, as related Nicholas Gisin in quant-ph/0104140 Ahead of his time not just on the implications of quantum theory, but also on the moral of life in … Continue reading →... Read more
Published on: 2023-12-27
David Soloveichik, my friend and colleague in UT Austin’s Electrical and Computer Engineering department, and I are looking to hire a postdoc in “Unconventional Computing,” broadly defined. Areas of interest include but are not limited to: (1) quantum computation,(2) thermodynamics of computation and reversible computation,(3) analog computation, and(4) chemical computation. The... Read more
Published on: 2023-12-22
This fall, I’m honored to have made a new friend: the noted Chinese dissident scholar Rowena He, currently a Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at UT Austin, and formerly of Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the National Humanities Center, and other fine places. I was connected... Read more
Published on: 2023-12-20
I’m being attacked on Twitter for … no, none of the things you think. This time it’s some rationalist AI doomers, ridiculing me for a podcast I did with Eliezer Yudkowsky way back in 2009, one that I knew even then was a piss-poor performance on my part. The rationalists... Read more
Published on: 2023-12-14