Thermodynamics of quantum channels
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You would hardly think that a quantum channel could have any sort of thermodynamic behavior. We were surprised, too. Continue reading
Search Results for: thermodynamics
Long live Yale’s cemetery
Call me morbid, but, the moment I arrived at Yale, I couldn’t wait to visit the graveyard. I visited campus last February, to present the Yale Quantum Institute (YQI) Colloquium. The YQI occupies a building whose stone exterior honors Yale’s Gothic … Continue reading
Theoretical physics has not gone to the dogs.
I was surprised to learn, last week, that my profession has gone to the dogs. I’d introduced myself to a nonscientist as a theoretical physicist. “I think,” he said, “that theoretical physics has lost its way in symmetry and beauty … Continue reading
So long, and thanks for all the Fourier transforms
The air conditioning in Caltech’s Annenberg Center for Information Science and Technology broke this July. Pasadena reached 87°F on the fourth, but my office missed the memo. The thermostat read 62°. Hyperactive air conditioning suits a thermodynamicist’s office as jittery … Continue reading
What’s the worst that could happen?
The archaeologist Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun’s burial site in 1922. No other Egyptian pharaoh’s tomb had survived mostly intact until the modern era. Gold and glass and faience, statues and pendants and chariots, had evaded looting. The discovery would revolutionize … Continue reading
A finger painting for John Preskill
I’d completed about half my candidacy exam. Four Caltech faculty members sat in front of me, in a bare seminar room. I stood beside a projector screen, explaining research I’d undertaken. The candidacy exam functions as a milepost in year … Continue reading
Catching up with the quantum-thermo crowd
You have four hours to tour Oxford University. What will you visit? The Ashmolean Museum, home to da Vinci drawings, samurai armor, and Egyptian mummies? The Bodleian, one of Europe’s oldest libraries? Turf Tavern, where former president Bill Clinton reportedly … Continue reading
The math of multiboundary wormholes
Xi Dong, Alex Maloney, Henry Maxfield and I recently posted a paper to the arXiv with the title: Phase Transitions in 3D Gravity and Fractal Dimension. In other words, we’ll get about ten readers per year for the next few … Continue reading
Rock-paper-scissors, granite-clock-idea
I have a soft spot for lamassu. Ten-foot-tall statues of these winged bull-men guarded the entrances to ancient Assyrian palaces. Show me lamassu, or apkallu—human-shaped winged deities—or other reliefs from the Neo-Assyrian capital of Nineveh, and you’ll have trouble showing … Continue reading
Paradise
The word dominates chapter one of Richard Holmes’s book The Age of Wonder. Holmes writes biographies of Romantic-Era writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Shelley, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge populate his bibliography. They have cameos in Age. But their scientific counterparts star. “Their natural-philosopher” counterparts, … Continue reading
