What was that famous Feynman quote again? "Nature isn't classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better... oh, wait a second... just ask Garnet Chan and he'll simulate it for you on a classical computer!"
Ben would be a great name for a dead guy
Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains
Being observed today so I guess I'll go through the slit on the left
The Good Samaritan, by Joseph Highmore, 1744, 📸 by @patricksmith04
But the real fun thing in my quantum class today is that all the students came in costume ... as me. They are the best.
this is the real reason why the mayans stopped counting in 2012
Thinking of patenting my favorite method for ranking researchers: reading their papers and deciding whether they are good.
If you run with your idea and think about Fourier analysis, then energy being frequency means more energy is like a resource to make more complicated shapes in the time domain.
This is actually a “penny drop” for me thanks. The closest I’d come to understanding energy (besides formal ways like conserved charge of time translation etc) is that it’s the amount of “stuff that can happen” in a physical system.
OMG, merely looking at the cover pic, you know you need to watch the Youtube version here
To be fair, if you look at the wave function in Grover’s algorithm it really does try every combination. It’s just that you have to extract the properties of the state by sampling it, so the rest of the algorithm involves exponentially many rounds of signal boosting to make the sampling succeed.
We also found energy eigenstates for a free particle and the infinite square well. The former are continuous, while the latter are discrete, which is a crucial lesson. QM doesn’t say that Nature is discrete, only that certain observables have a discrete spectrum.
Alignment chart meme for the interpretations of quantum mechanics. LG: Bohmian, NG: everything else, CG: QBism, LN: Many Worlds, TN: Copenhagen, CN: Objective Collapse, LE: Superdeterminism, NE: Retrocausality, CE: Quantum Mysticism
I made a quantum foundations alignment chart — go forth and fight about it!
(also, "good" is not an endorsement)
Intuitive video explaining how linear regression can be viewed in a probablisitic framework, including popular regularization choices
www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7se...
A depressing thing I’ve found is that the left is just in denial about this. I’ve met quite a few people where if I mention Fox News they say “I’ve never watched it”. How will you understand your own country if you don’t from time to time?
Somehow the speed up is both quadratic and exponential
This is not quantum-related but the parallels with quantum computing are uncanny: a company has declared that it has resurrected an extinct species from the last ice age, but all they actually did was change 14 genes of the grey wolf's DNA. 🧵
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
What if Wigner's friend was Schrodinger's cat?
A beautiful story of abstract mathematics extending into physics and engineering and resulting in 33% more efficient lighting. Better algorithms were the key, as they usually are, speeding up calculations by 1000x. www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/03/24/t...
The attitude we desperately need in Tech
I think there could be other reasons to build quantum computers, if more serious investigations were done into them. Power consumption and time to solution mainly. I think supremacy over classical is mostly a dead end, especially for NISQ.
I should add: not just simulate, but to better accuracy than they have reported. And in a scalable way.
Just to be clear, I don’t think we claimed anywhere that D-Wave has no advantage. We see that as something they still have the burden of proving (if it’s even conceivably provable). We just showed it’s possible to simulate a large range of the same protocols.
Actually we just haven’t tried that one yet … maybe it’s hard, maybe not. It’s an open question.
Maybe the question should be why D-Wave’s was timed to land just before APS :^)
Yeah I can ask my coauthors again but I certainly had no personal idea about the timing. It is pretty wild.
Could perhaps have done it sooner but one of the key methods we used was only invented by a different group last fall. I’ve been emphasizing to journalists that it’s a fast-moving, dynamic field!
In fact, we posted when we did because of APS Physics Summit coming up and the first author wanted to speak on it. The timing with Science’s publication was a coincidence. It’s been surprising to us too.
👇 quite worthwhile to read the whole thread