Thursday, January 28, 2016

Anyone Can Quantum

Caltech has been one of the leaders in the development of quantum science.  On Tuesday, January 26, and Wednesday, January 27, this week, Caltech's Institute for Quantum Information and Matter hosted a Quantum Summit.  The event began with a public program titled “One Entangled Evening” focused on the legacy and vision of Richard Feynman.  Part of the program involved showing the film below, which brings you a chess match for the ages: Paul Rudd vs Stephen Hawking in a game of Quantum Chess, narrated by Keanu Reeves from 700 years in the future. 

By the way, there really is a game called quantum chess. Quantum chess was created by USC graduate student Chris Cantwell, which will soon be promoted on Kickstarter.


3 comments:

James R said...

After our early morning skating at Schenley this year I hosted a brunch for those who were still on Christmas vacation. It was a good crowd, though the only brother that could make it was Tom. Instead of the ordinary meal with random chatting, I continued our tradition of a short talk with discussion, aka "The Harvey Lecture Series". Accompanied with participatory hand outs, we tackled one area of the quantum phenomenon. Although I called the talk "How the World Behaves", it could well have been "Anyone Can Quantum". Your post has inspired me to, perhaps, reprise the talk during a diner meal at Prince Gallitzin, if there is interest.

Pat H said...

Uncle Jim, after your talk about the quantum phenomenon at Prince Gallitzin, I wanted to find the video where I first was introduced to quantum computing. I believe this is it,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhHMJCUmq28

Pretty interesting stuff. I'm not going to lie though, for the amount of time I use the computer, I don't really understand how it work at its most basic level.

James R said...

That's a really nice video. No, I hadn't seen that one before, but it touches on some similar points from my talk and it's done well. There is a tendency, because the quantum is so counter intuitive, for videos to give as much questionable information as solid knowledge.

When I previously gave the talk at my house, your cousin Pete brought up the subject of the coming failure of Moore's Law (really, just a prediction) when the size of gates become small enough for quantum tunneling to happen. That's going to happen soon as the video says. Also, as you mentioned after the talk, private security encryption is doomed if and when we develop quantum computers; also done well in the video.

I'm not smart enough to make the jump from a video like that to my talk. My talk can be completely seen in this video, an MIT lecture by Allan Adams, here. His lecture is longer (and better), but I basically stole it. Of course, he stole it from the book, Quantum Mechanics and Experience by David Albert (Columbia physicist and philosopher). He's the one clever enough to simplify the experiments down to simple boxes with Color and Hardness.

For the amount of time I use the car (or the computer), I, also, don't know how they work at a basic level. Neither of us majored in Computer Science/Electrical Engineering. But we can know about some underlying general basics, especially when it means so much in how we should think, in general about the world and our lives.

By the way, you made my day…year? with this comment. I figured most slept through the talk.