Brian addresses a question that has been bothering me for many years now: we know that the standard formalism of quantum physics is misleading, in the sense that it contains many states that could never be realistically accessed. Does this hold back our intuition or our pedagogy for what QM means?
Recently stumbled on a lovely old essay by Prof. Brian Swingle: "The Illusion of Hilbert Space":
(seems to only be available online by the link in this forum post, don't let that scare you away)
forums.fqxi.org/d/1559-the-i...
My pleasure-- and where it comes to this subject I am an amateur too, so we are on the same page!
I had never heard of this paper that seemed to accurately predict the Higgs boson mass based on asymptotic safety. This naively looks like a very impressive success for that program, am I missing some reason it's not talked about more?
arxiv.org/abs/0912.0208
arXiv is being spun out from Cornell University and is looking for an inaugural CEO. jobs.chronicle.com/job/37961678...
New post:
wmorong.github.io/wills-blog/b...
I’m sure we will hear from others who are much more qualified to directly speak about Tony Leggett’s contributions and legacy. Here is a view from the relative sidelines, of how much I learned from him about the fields in which I've worked and studied...
Work like this makes me hope that there is some deeper unifying theme
www.nature.com/articles/nat...
I've been thinking about this too-- it's an interesting subject
bsky.app/profile/wmor...
Assuming you refer to (PRX Quantum 5, 010337), they use the term "partially fault-tolerant" rather than "early fault-tolerance", which does seem more appropriate for this case.
Interesting point. My mental model says one should only call a scheme FT (early or otherwise) if it is capable of correcting arbitrary errors (from some reasonable model such as random depolarizing) at a sufficiently low rate. The second bucket of applications I would call something like pre-FT QEC.
When the social media algorithm has finally been perfected, this is the only kind of post that I will ever see.
Awful for academics but great news for Borges fans
Not a physicist, but perhaps?
bsky.app/profile/carl...
Karmela's ability to weave threads from physics, culture, and society together into original insights always astounds me. Looking forward to this.
I'm a big fan of the GHZ record as a view into the development of quantum computers, and Mario Krenn's page tracking the evolution of this record:
mariokrenn.wordpress.com/2021/01/29/r...
For a fun exercise, count the number of Nobel laureates who are represented..
New on arxiv: a group from IBM claim a new record for the largest GHZ state, of 120 qubits* arxiv.org/abs/2510.09520
* terms and conditions (postselection) apply
Thank for you your feedback! I will try to improve this in the future, but meanwhile if there are any specific terms in this article that it would help to have more explained please ask away.
And thanks to you for reminding me that I had a half-finished little blog post on the subject
🧪 New blog post: What makes quantum physics special (or "strange" or "weird")? I take a whirlwind tour through 80 years of attempts to pinpoint the answer, from early thought experiments to recent developments inspired by thinking about quantum computers.
wmorong.github.io/wills-blog/b...
well, at least he knows?
So, the number of gates required in going from 15 to 21 increases by hundreds... but asymptotically, we eventually expect this to scale roughly like O((log N)^2), is that correct? Do you have any sense of the approximate size where this asymptotic scaling starts to be a more reasonable estimate?
Imposter syndrome! Just push through it.
Really appreciate that all the talks were immediately and freely available, with a nice platform that makes it easy to navigate and see the slides. Hope other conference organizers take note!
A screenshot of a google search result for "2*pi*(8 kpc)/(220 km/s)" which is roughly the time it takes the Sun to go around the Galaxy. In the screenshot, google's calculator has popped up and parsed the expression correctly, but then returns the result 3 899 243.9 years, and answer which is off by 2 orders of magnitude.
PSA to scientists: Google calculator appears to no longer do basic unit conversion correctly!
n.b. the correct answer here is 223.4 Myr, a factor of about 60 larger than Google's answer.
🔭 🧪
If I "believe in" an emergent difference between quantum and classical systems, in the spirit of quantum Darwinism, should I put yes or no? Honestly not sure.
Then there are claims that other quantities like contextuality are really the secret sauce:
www.nature.com/articles/nat...
Not clear to me that we get a complete answer from these developments, though, either technically or conceptually.
Well, one noteworthy claim is that you can do universal QC with little entanglement at any given time:
journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...
Why do quantum computers work? Although it's missing some modern developments, I think this twenty-year old (!) article from Steane is still provocative. His answer: entanglement allows them to avoid representing unnecessary intermediate results in some calculations.
arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph...
