Collaborate Disseminate
via Philip Ball writing at Quanta Magazine – the web-based publication of the Simons Foundation – comes this superb piece on the current state of quantum computation, and the – apparently – rather long road ahead. Certainly, a Saturday Must Read!
Perm… Continue reading Quantum of Saturday
Image via Ludwig Maximilian Universitat München LMU
via the clearly motivated John Timmer, writing at the equally hard working Ars Technica organization, comes this quantum sciences focused prose, detailing the embiggenment of same. Todays MustRe… Continue reading Quantum Systems, The Embiggenment
Today is March 14th, or Pi Day because 3.14 is March 14th rendered in month.day date format. A very slightly better way to celebrate the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is July 22nd, or 22/7 written in day/month order, a fractional approximation of pi that’s been used for thousands of years and is a better fit than 3.14. Celebrating Pi Day on July 22nd also has the advantage of eschewing middle-endian date formatting.
But Pi Day is completely wrong. We should be celebrating Tau Day, to celebrate the ratio of the circumference to the radius instead of …read more
Continue reading Archimedes Would Have Known Better If He Could Count To A Million
Learning about how quantum computers work doesn’t have to be boring. Continue reading This Game Teaches You How to Build a Quantum Computer
IBM has been offering quantum computing as a cloud service since last year when it came out with a 5 qubit version of the advanced computers. Today, the company announced that it’s releasing 20-qubit quantum computers, quite a leap in just 18 months. A qubit is a single unit of quantum information. The company also announced that IBM researchers had successfully built a 50 qubit… Read More Continue reading IBM makes 20 qubit quantum computing machine available as a cloud service
The results of a new study are close, but slightly faster than, the generally accepted rate. Continue reading The Expansion of the Universe Appears Faster Than We Thought
Universal quantum computers don’t exist, but that hasn’t stopped D-Wave from carving out its own place in the quantum computing market. Today, the 17-year-old company is announcing its forth quantum chip, the 2000Q, doubling the number of qubits on its exiting 1000Q chip. The Burnaby, British Columbia based company’s chips fall under a specific class of quantum… Read More Continue reading D-Wave ups its quantum annealing game to 2000 qubits
The story of Schrodinger’s cat is well known, and one of quantum theory’s most popular phrases on the world stage. You can find his cat on t-shirts, bumper stickers, internet memes and the like. However, few know the origins of the cat, and how it came into being. I suspect many do not understand it beyond the “dead and alive at the same time” catchphrase as well. Not surprisingly, it was Einstein who was at the center of the idea behind Schrodinger’s cat. In a vibrant discussion between the two via letters across the Atlantic, Schrodinger echoed Einstein’s …read more
Continue reading Will the Real Schrodinger’s Cat Please Stand Up
Richard Feynmann noted more than once that complementarity is the central mystery that lies at the heart of quantum theory. Complementarity rules the world of the very small… the quantum world, and surmises that particles and waves are indistinguishable from one other. That they are one and the same. That it is nonsensical to think of something, or even try to visualize that something as an individual “particle” or a “wave.” That the particle/wave/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is in this sort of superposition, where it is neither particle nor wave. It is only the act of trying to measure what it is …read more
We all know that it’s not the volts that kill you, it’s the amps. But exactly how many electrons per second are there in an amp? It turns out that nobody really knows. But according to a press release from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), that’s all going to change in 2018.
The amp is a “metrological embarrassment” because it’s not defined in terms of any physical constants. Worse, it’s not even potentially measurable, being the “constant current which, if maintained in two straight parallel conductors of infinite length, of negligible circular cross-section, and placed 1 …read more
