Category Archives: Reflections

Distinguished guests reflect on their work and the world of science.

Science books for kids matter (or used to)

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The elementary school I attended hosted an annual book fair, and every year I went with my mother to browse. I would check out the sports books first, to see whether there were any books about baseball I had not already read (typically, no). There was also a small table of science books, and in 1962 when I was in the 4th grade, one of them caught my eye: a lavishly illustrated oversized “Deluxe Golden Book” entitled The World of Science.

My copy of The World of Science by Jane Werner Watson, purchased in 1962 when I was in the 4th grade.

My copy of The World of Science by Jane Werner Watson, purchased in 1962 when I was in the 4th grade.

As I started leafing through it, I noticed one of the cutest girls in my class regarding me with what I interpreted as interest. Right then I resolved to buy the book, or more accurately, to persuade my mother to buy it, as the price tag was pretty steep. Impressing girls is a great motivator.

The title page.

The title page.

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How did I come to know Jeff Kimble

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I heard of Jeff Kimble long before I met him in person. Legend had it that he was extremely rigorous with research and very tough on nonsense. So when I decided to approach him in October of 1996, at the annual OSA meeting in Rochester for a possible postdoc position, I was as nervous as I was excited. As a graduate student, I had learned theory of quantum optics from Marlan Scully, and learned advanced experimental techniques from Jan Hall. The experiences working with Jan laid a critical foundation for my scientific work. Likewise, Jeff had spent a sabbatical with Jan in 1985 that enabled their work on squeezing, as well as Jeff’s subsequent research in cavity QED, which provided me some comfort with this tall stranger. But, here was a guy who dealt with the annihilation operator as deftly in the lab as on paper; so I was hesitant. Then I listened to Jeff’s lecture on flying qubits and single-photon quantum logic gates – his speech for the Max Born Award. Armed with courage after surviving my own very first invited talk at OSA, I decided to give it a try.

I still remember most of our discussions from that first meeting, but none is as clear as my recollection of the pain from Jeff’s handshake. His grip was more than just firm; it actually squeezed the bones of my hand. So naturally, I took the handshake as a sign that he really wanted me to join his group. When an offer of a Caltech fellowship arrived three months later, I accepted it without hesitation. In 1997, I had no way of knowing that Jeff’s way of doing science would leave a profound mark on my career and that his deep friendship would continue to enrich my life and that of my family for many years.

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The X Windows Solution

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A Sun 3/60 Workstation in the late 1980s.

I recently did an interview for an educational video about quantum physics. The filmmaker, who needed some cutaway shots to stitch the interview segments together, suggested a shot of me walking through the server room in my building. I complied, gazing with interest and concern as I strolled past the machines. But I felt very uncomfortable about the phoniness of this scene, because I had never been in the server room before and had no idea what I was looking at.

The experience reminded me, though, of the one time in my life when I felt like I was near the cutting edge of the digital revolution, nearly 20 years ago, as the World Wide Web was just emerging as the Next Big Thing.

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The Future Of Education

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I’m a senior software engineer at Knewton, a company that aims to personalize education through adaptive learning technology. Also, in my free time I write stories and design games to teach kids about computer science as DrTechniko. My How To Train Your Robot game, for example, lets kids “program” their parents to do tasks for them. It’s intuitive and fun for kids because they get to “command” their parents. At the same time the parents get a good workout by the end of the class.

But, why do I care about kids and computer science education?

  • Computer science combines problem solving with practical outcomes for a society that is increasingly high-tech.
  • Creative problem solving needs to become the no.1 skill that schools teach today. Information is already available everywhere. Kids need to know how to put this together and solve real, challenging problems.
  • We need to feel comfortable with technology and control it. If we don’t teach this culture to our five-year-olds, then we can’t grow as a society and civilization. We have to “learn to drive a car and let go of the horse”. The lawyer of 2034 needs to know how to program. Everything around her will be programmable.

All of us working to revolutionize education have such goals in mind and we want to break the current educational stereotypes, because they won’t get us there. Instead, every kid becomes a “copy” coming out of a factory-like assembly line called the school. Only recently have we began to develop the tools that allow students to personalize the way they learn new things. The next step is to give kids the tools they need to learn how to learn the things they need in order to unleash their creative potential.

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Showtime for Sophomores

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Exciting a square Chladni plate with a violin bow.

One of the many unique features of Caltech is our core curriculum. All of our undergraduates are required to take five terms of physics and five terms of math (all three terms freshman year and the fall and winter terms sophomore year) — though this will change for the class entering in the fall of 2013.

Each fall, about 170 sophomores take Physics 2a, a course on vibrations, waves, and quantum mechanics, while the remaining 60 or so sophomores take Physics 12a, a souped up course covering similar material at a level more appropriate for physics concentrators.

This term I am teaching Physics 2a. While 170 students is a lot more than in most courses I teach at Caltech, the workload is manageable, in part because I share the lecturing duties with another professor, and in part because we have a staff of capable and hard working Teaching Assistants who handle recitation sections and grade the homework and quizzes.

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Quantum = Pink

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Need we say more?

What color do you imagine when you close your eyes and think “Quantum”? If you are to buy a case for your quantum computer, have you already picked your favorite color? (Okay, maybe it’s too early for that.)
Below I argue that the collective unconscious has already made the choice for you: it is going to be pink.

Excited?

Fear not. We will easily differentiate ourselves from warm and fluffy pink slippers. Our color is pink on black. Closer to purple, actually. We have good heritage: purple with white was the color of kings. But kings are no more, so let’s admit it: People think that “spooky” quantum phenomena have a purple glow around them. The disaster movie “Quantum Apocalypse” has a mysterious purple vortex approach Earth. Sci-fi now has “quantum cannons” shooting pink aura at the enemies, unleashing the chaos of uncertainty. You can’t fly your battlecruiser if you’re no longer certain you still have a battlecruiser.
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Individual quantum systems

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When I went to school in the 20th century, “quantum measurements” in the laboratory were typically performed on ensembles of similarly prepared systems. In the 21st century, it is becoming increasingly routine to perform quantum measurements on single atoms, photons, electrons, or phonons. The 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics recognizes two of the heros who led these revolutionary advances, Serge Haroche and Dave Wineland. Good summaries of their outstanding achievements can be found at the Nobel Prize site, and at Physics Today.

Serge Haroche developed cavity quantum electrodynamics in the microwave regime. Among other impressive accomplishments, his group has performed “nondemolition” measurements of the number of photons stored in a cavity (that is, the photons can be counted without any of the photons being absorbed). The measurement is done by preparing a Rubidium atom in a superposition of two quantum states. As the Rb atom traverses the cavity, the energy splitting of these two states is slightly perturbed by the cavity’s quantized electromagnetic field, resulting in a detectable phase shift that depends on the number of photons present. (Caltech’s Jeff Kimble, the Director of IQIM, has pioneered the development of analogous capabilities for optical photons.)
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Redemption: Part II

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Last week, a journey began to find the solution to a problem I could not solve as a seventeen year-old boy. That problem became an obsession of mine during the last days of the International Math Olympiad of 1997, the days when I also met the first girl I ever kissed. At the time, I did not have the heart to tell the girl that I had traveled across the Atlantic to compete with the best and brightest and had come up short. I told her that I had solved the problem, but that the page with my answer had been lost. I told my parents the same thing and to everyone at school who would ask me why I did not return with a medal from the Math Olympics. The lie became so powerful that I did not look at that problem again until now. So, you may be wondering why a blog about Quantum Information Science at Caltech includes posts on problems from Math Olympiads. And why I would open the book on the page with that one problem after fifteen years… Continue reading →

Geniuses wanted

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Cousin Leonidas. He wasn’t always this angry.

Growing up in Spata (no, not Sparta – but feel free to ignore this remark) there was not much to do in the evenings. After school was done and volleyball practice was over (with my two brothers we made up half of the school team) my dad would come pick us up for a fun three hours of track and field practice. Just another lazy evening. Who am I kidding… It was exhausting! But, throwing a javelin with exuberant fury was also therapeutic (it’s a Greek thing). Yet, here lied the problem: The adrenaline high from a good five hours of sports every day would not dissipate simply because of physical exhaustion. I don’t know about my brothers, but my brain was on fire and the two pounds of pasta my mom would put on my plate (almost) every night, could not induce a strong enough food coma. Even working on the next day’s homework did not do the trick of putting me to sleep (though it did help significantly). By then, it was past midnight and I was wide awake.
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Apollo

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Neil Armstrong (1930-2012)

I was an eight-year-old second grader on April 12, 1961, when my father showed me a screaming headline with two-inch-high lettering in the afternoon newspaper: RUSSIAN 1ST SPACEMAN. Sensing a historic moment, I saved the front page and pasted it into a scrapbook. That was the first of many headlines I saved through the years of the “space race.”
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