For those who don’t yet know from their other social media: a week ago the cryptographer Yilei Chen posted a preprint, eprint.iacr.org/2024/555, claiming to give a polynomial-time quantum algorithm to solve lattice problems. For example, it claims to solve the GapSVP problem, which asks to approximate the length of the...
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Published on: 2024-04-16
Many people ask why I became a theoretical physicist. The answer runs through philosophy—which I thought, for years, I’d left behind in college. My formal relationship with philosophy originated with Mr. Bohrer. My high school classified him as a religion … Continue reading →...
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Published on: 2024-04-15
I can’t find it now, but nearly 20 years ago, in the midst of an unusually stupid debate in the comment section of Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch’s blog, someone chimed in: “the argument about who’s the world’s most badass theoretical computer scientist is officially over. Wigderson owns you. You...
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Published on: 2024-04-10
Pissing away my life in a haze of doomscrolling, sporadic attempts to “parent” two rebellious kids, and now endless conversations about AI safety, I’m liable to forget for days that I’m still mostly known (such as I am) as a quantum computing theorist, and this blog is still mostly known...
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Published on: 2024-04-03
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...
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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 →...
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Published on: 2024-03-25
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 →...
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Published on: 2024-03-21
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 →...
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Published on: 2024-03-18
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,...
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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...
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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 →...
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Published on: 2024-02-20
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 →...
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Published on: 2024-02-19
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...
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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...
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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 →...
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Published on: 2024-02-06
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 →...
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Published on: 2024-02-01
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...
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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 →...
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Published on: 2024-01-22
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 →...
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Published on: 2023-12-28