Category Archives: Reflections

An intellectual tornado

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Hello?… The first thing I remember feeling moments later was panic.

Five years before that day, I was a graduating senior at MIT pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics with Computer Science (18C for all the fellow nerds out there). I had been close to some of the most brilliant people I have ever met, like my undergraduate adviser Michael Sipser and my undergraduate research mentor in bioinformatics, Bonnie Berger. I had applied to several graduate schools to study mathematics, but had been summarily rejected by most of them. It was a humbling experience, which ultimately led me to the day I got the call. I remember clearly what day it was: February 6th, 2008. I was eating breakfast with two friends at a local diner in Davis, CA. Yes, the one place which had enthusiastically accepted me to their Ph.D. program was the Mathematics Department at UC Davis. In fact, being an international student from Greece, and given the tight State budget of California at the time (all the time), it was a miracle that UC Davis said yes. True, I had a good GPA and lots of research experience at MIT, but I did not have any direction. I did not apply to work with any particular Professor, I just applied by school name and reputation. And if it weren’t for Prof. Berger’s suggestion to apply to UC Davis, I would have applied to the top 5 graduate schools in Applied Mathematics and would be trading stocks in New York right now. I was naive.
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Supremacy Now?

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Martin Zwierlein

In May 1994, Artur Ekert visited Caltech to give a seminar about quantum cryptography. Near the end of the talk, Ekert revealed an exciting new development — just weeks earlier, Peter Shor had announced the discovery of an efficient quantum algorithm for finding the prime factors of large composite integers, a problem for which no efficient classical algorithm is known.

Perhaps I’ve embellished the memory over time, but I recall being awestruck by this news. I spent the next month at the Isaac Newton Institute attending a workshop about quantum black holes, and though it was a very good workshop and I had some great discussions, I spent most of my time there secretly trying to understand Shor’s paper, which Ekert had emailed to me. This took some effort, because I knew little about algorithms or computational complexity at that time (even less than I know now), but by the end of the workshop I felt I understood the ideas behind Shor’s algorithm pretty well. I did not yet realize that I was in the midst of a career transition from particle physics to quantum information science.
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Closure

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Frank Wilczek

There are two kinds of particle physicists: those who wanted the Higgs boson to be discovered, and those who wanted the Higgs boson not to be discovered.

At a conference last fall, I sat at the same dinner table with Frank Wilczek. Inevitably, the conversation came around to the prospects for discovering the Higgs boson in 2012. “It would be much more exciting if the Higgs isn’t found,” I insisted. Frank did not claim to disagree, but was adamant: “I want closure.”*

In the late fall of 1974, I had applied to graduate school, but did not yet know where I would be accepted. Roberta (then my fiance, now my wife) and I were in Boston for the day, so we decided to stop by Harvard to look around. We noticed Steve Weinberg was in his office, and though I had never met Weinberg and had no appointment, we barged in. I introduced Roberta and announced I was interested in coming to Harvard the following year.
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More to come

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John Wheeler. Photo by the New York Times/Redux.

As a sophomore at Princeton I took a class called Honors Physics from a man named Johnny Wheeler. He wore a suit and tie to class, loved explosions, and created vivid art in real time with colored chalk. Implausibly old, he had worked on nuclear fission with Niels Bohr. He was 61.

The lectures were long on inspiration and short on information about how to do the homework. I was in awe of Wheeler. Some students thought he sucked.

One day I arrived late to find Wheeler conducting a poll. We were voting on the future of science: is there “more to come” or “less to come”? I don’t remember the count, but “more to come” won handily. Wheeler was pleased.

Later, at a student-faculty lunch, Wheeler seemed troubled. He had been asked to explain the essence of quantum mechanics in five words or less, and was stumped. Frank Calaprice, a nuclear physicist within earshot, interjected helpfully, “What we expect to measure?” I was silent.

The question was absurd. It was fascinating. I still think about it. I can’t answer it.

This year I taught a course on quantum statistical physics to Caltech sophomores. I wore khakis and always used the white chalk. Though I’m 59, few students seemed awed. Some thought I sucked. Maybe I did sometimes.

Johnny Wheeler never blogged. If he had, some readers would have been awed. Some would have thought he sucked.

But Johnny would not have reminisced about a class he took 40 years ago. He knew there was more to come.

Welcome to Quantum Frontiers! We hope that the posts to come will be long on inspiration, even if short on information about how to do your homework. Enjoy!