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A (quantum) complex legacy: Part deux
I didn’t fancy the research suggestion emailed by my PhD advisor. A 2016 email from John Preskill led to my publishing a paper about quantum complexity in 2022, as I explained in last month’s blog...
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Memories of things past
My best friend—who’s held the title of best friend since kindergarten—calls me the keeper of her childhood memories. I recall which toys we played with, the first time I visited her house,1 and which...
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Let the great world spin
I first heard the song “Fireflies,” by Owl City, shortly after my junior year of college. During the refrain, singer Adam Young almost whispers, “I’d like to make myself believe / that planet Earth...
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The Book of Mark
Mark Srednicki doesn’t look like a high priest. He’s a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB); and you’ll sooner find him in khakis than in sacred vestments. Humor...
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The Book of Mark, Chapter 2
Late in the summer of 2021, I visited a physics paradise in a physical paradise: the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP). The KITP sits at the edge of the University of California, Santa...
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Astrobiology meets quantum computation?
The origin of life appears to share little with quantum computation, apart from the difficulty of achieving it and its potential for clickbait. Yet similar notions of complexity have recently garnered...
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The power of awe
Mid-afternoon, one Saturday late in September, I forgot where I was. I forgot that I was visiting Seattle for the second time; I forgot that I’d just finished co-organizing a workshop partially about...
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What geckos have to do with quantum computing
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...
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The rain in Portugal
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...
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Let gravity do its work
One day, early this spring, I found myself in a hotel elevator with three other people. The cohort consisted of two theoretical physicists, one computer scientist, and what appeared to be a normal...
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My favorite rocket scientist
Whenever someone protests, “I’m not a rocket scientist,” I think of my friend Jamie Rankin. Jamie is a researcher at Princeton University, and she showed me her lab this June. When I first met Jamie,...
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Happy 200th birthday, Carnot’s theorem!
In Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 novel The Wind in the Willows, a Mole meets a Water Rat who lives on a River. The Rat explains how the River permeates his life: “It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts,...
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Finding Ed Jaynes’s ghost
You might have heard of the conundrum “What do you give the man who has everything?” I discovered a variation on it last October: how do you celebrate the man who studied (nearly) everything?...
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Ten lessons I learned from John Preskill
Last August, Toronto’s Centre for Quantum Information and Quantum Control (CQIQC) gave me 35 minutes to make fun of John Preskill in public. CQIQC was hosting its biannual conference, also called...
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How writing a popular-science book led to a Nature Physics paper
Several people have asked me whether writing a popular-science book has fed back into my research. Nature Physics published my favorite illustration of the answer this January. Here’s the story behind...
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Quantum automata
Do you know when an engineer built the first artificial automaton—the first human-made machine that operated by itself, without external control mechanisms that altered the machine’s behavior over...
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The most steampunk qubit
I never imagined that an artist would update me about quantum-computing research. Last year, steampunk artist Bruce Rosenbaum forwarded me a notification about a news article published in Science. The...
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A (quantum) complex legacy: Part trois
When I worked in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a friend reported that MIT’s postdoc association had asked its members how it could improve their lives. The friend confided his suggestion to me: throw more...
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What distinguishes quantum from classical thermodynamics?
Should you require a model for an Oxford don in a play or novel, look no farther than Andrew Briggs. The emeritus professor of nanomaterials speaks with a southern-English accent as crisp as...
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Make use of time, let not advantage slip
During the spring of 2022, I felt as though I kept dashing backward and forward in time. At the beginning of the season, hay fever plagued me in Maryland. Then, I left to present talks in southern...
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