# 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 architecture and whose sleekness defies it. The YQI has theory and experiments, seminars and colloquia, error-correcting codes and small-scale quantum computers, mugs and laptop bumper stickers. Those assets would have drawn me like honey. But my host, Steve Girvin, piled molasses, fudge, and cookie dough on top: “you should definitely reserve some time to go visit Josiah Willard Gibbs, Jr., Lars Onsager, and John Kirkwood in the Grove Street Cemetery.”

Gibbs, Onsager, and Kirkwood pioneered statistical mechanics. Statistical mechanics is the physics of many-particle systems, energy, efficiency, and entropy, a measure of order. Statistical mechanics helps us understand why time flows in only one direction. As a colleague reminded me at a conference about entropy, “You are young. But you will grow old and die.” That conference featured a field trip to a cemetery at the University of Cambridge. My next entropy-centric conference took place next to a cemetery in Banff, Canada. A quantum-thermodynamics conference included a tour of an Oxford graveyard.1 (That conference reincarnated in Santa Barbara last June, but I found no cemeteries nearby. No wonder I haven’t blogged about it.) Why shouldn’t a quantum-thermodynamics colloquium lead to the Grove Street Cemetery?

Home of the Yale Quantum Institute

The Grove Street Cemetery lies a few blocks from the YQI. I walked from the latter to the former on a morning whose sunshine spoke more of springtime than of February. At one entrance stood a gatehouse that looked older than many of the cemetery’s residents.

“Can you tell me where to find Josiah Willard Gibbs?” I asked the gatekeepers. They handed me a map, traced routes on it, and dispatched me from their lodge. Snow had fallen the previous evening but was losing its battle against the sunshine. I sloshed to a pathway labeled “Locust,” waded along Locust until passing Myrtle, and splashed back and forth until a name caught my eye: “Gibbs.”

One entrance of the Grove Street Cemetery

Josiah Willard Gibbs stamped his name across statistical mechanics during the 1800s. Imagine a gas in a box, a system that illustrates much of statistical mechanics. Suppose that the gas exchanges heat with a temperature-$T$ bath through the box’s walls. After exchanging heat for a long time, the gas reaches thermal equilibrium: Large-scale properties, such as the gas’s energy, quit changing much. Imagine measuring the gas’s energy. What probability does the measurement have of outputting $E$? The Gibbs distribution provides the answer, $e^{ - E / (k_{\rm B} T) } / Z$. The $k_{\rm B}$ denotes Boltzmann’s constant, a fundamental constant of nature. The $Z$ denotes a partition function, which ensures that the probabilities sum to one.

Gibbs lent his name to more than probabilities. A function of probabilities, the Gibbs entropy, prefigured information theory. Entropy features in the Gibbs free energy, which dictates how much work certain thermodynamic systems can perform. A thermodynamic system has many properties, such as temperature and pressure. How many can you control? The answer follows from the Gibbs-Duheim relation. You’ll be able to follow the Gibbs walk, a Yale alumnus tells me, once construction on Yale’s physical-sciences complex ends.

Back I sloshed along Locust Lane. Turning left onto Myrtle, then right onto Cedar, led to a tree that sheltered two tombstones. They looked like buddies about to throw their arms around each other and smile for a photo. The lefthand tombstone reported four degrees, eight service positions, and three scientific honors of John Gamble Kirkwood. The righthand tombstone belonged to Lars Onsager:

NOBEL LAUREATE*

[ . . . ]

*ETC.

Onsager extended thermodynamics beyond equilibrium. Imagine gently poking one property of a thermodynamic system. For example, recall the gas in a box. Imagine connecting one end of the box to a temperature-$T$ bath and the other end to a bath at a slightly higher temperature, $T' \gtrsim T$. You’ll have poked the system’s temperature out of equilibrium. Heat will flow from the hotter bath to the colder bath. Particles carry the heat, energy of motion. Suppose that the particles have electric charges. An electric current will flow because of the temperature difference. Similarly, heat can flow because of an electric potential difference, or a pressure difference, and so on. You can cause a thermodynamic system’s elbow to itch, Onsager showed, by tickling the system’s ankle.

To Onsager’s left lay John Kirkwood. Kirkwood had defined a quasiprobability distribution in 1933. Quasiprobabilities resemble probabilities but can assume negative and nonreal values. These behaviors can signal nonclassical physics, such as the ability to outperform classical computers. I generalized Kirkwood’s quasiprobability with collaborators. Our generalized quasiprobability describes quantum chaos, thermalization, and the spread of information through entanglement. Applying the quasiprobability across theory and experiments has occupied me for two-and-a-half years. Rarely has a tombstone pleased anyone as much as Kirkwood’s tickled me.

The Grove Street Cemetery opened my morning with a whiff of rosemary. The evening closed with a shot of adrenaline. I met with four undergrad women who were taking Steve Girvin’s course, an advanced introduction to physics. I should have left the conversation bled of energy: Since visiting the cemetery, I’d held six discussions with nine people. But energy can flow backward. The students asked how I’d come to postdoc at Harvard; I asked what they might major in. They described the research they hoped to explore; I explained how I’d constructed my research program. They asked if I’d had to work as hard as they to understand physics; I confessed that I might have had to work harder.

I left the YQI content, that night. Such a future deserves its past; and such a past, its future.

With thanks to Steve Girvin, Florian Carle, and the Yale Quantum Institute for their hospitality.

1Thermodynamics is a physical theory that emerges from statistical mechanics.

# “A theorist I can actually talk with”

Haunted mansions have ghosts, football teams have mascots, and labs have in-house theorists. I found myself posing as a lab’s theorist at Caltech. The gig began when Oskar Painter, a Caltech experimentalist, emailed that he’d read my first paper about quantum chaos. Would I discuss the paper with the group?

Oskar’s lab was building superconducting qubits, tiny circuits in which charge can flow forever. The lab aimed to control scores of qubits, to develop a quantum many-body system. Entanglement—strong correlations that quantum systems can sustain and everyday systems can’t—would spread throughout the qubits. The system could realize phases of matter—like many-particle quantum chaos—off-limits to most materials.

How could Oskar’s lab characterize the entanglement, the entanglement’s spread, and the phases? Expert readers will suggest measuring an entropy, a gauge of how much information this part of the system holds about that part. But experimentalists have had trouble measuring entropies. Besides, one measurement can’t capture many-body entanglement; such entanglement involves too many intricacies. Oskar was searching for arrows to add to his lab’s measurement quiver.

In-house theorist?

I’d proposed a protocol for measuring a characterization of many-body entanglement, quantum chaos, and thermalization—a property called “the out-of-time-ordered correlator.” The protocol appealed to Oskar. But practicalities limit quantum many-body experiments: The more qubits your system contains, the more the system can contact its environment, like stray particles. The stronger the interactions, the more the environment entangles with the qubits, and the less the qubits entangle with each other. Quantum information leaks from the qubits into their surroundings; what happens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas. Would imperfections mar my protocol?

I didn’t know. But I knew someone who could help us find out.

Justin Dressel works at Chapman University as a physics professor. He’s received the highest praise that I’ve heard any experimentalist give a theorist: “He’s a theorist I can actually talk to.” With other collaborators, Justin and I simplified my scheme for measuring out-of-time-ordered correlators. Justin knew what superconducting-qubit experimentalists could achieve, and he’d been helping them reach for more.

How about, I asked Justin, we simulate our protocol on a computer? We’d code up virtual superconducting qubits, program in interactions with the environment, run our measurement scheme, and assess the results’ noisiness. Justin had the tools to simulate the qubits, but he lacked the time.

Know any postdocs or students who’d take an interest? I asked.

Chapman University’s former science center. Don’t you wish you spent winters in California?

José Raúl González Alonso has a smile like a welcome sign and a coffee cup glued to one hand. He was moving to Chapman University to work as a Grand Challenges Postdoctoral Fellow. José had built simulations, and he jumped at the chance to study quantum chaos.

José confirmed Oskar’s fear and other simulators’ findings: The environment threatens measurements of the out-of-time-ordered correlator. Suppose that you measure this correlator at each of many instants, you plot the correlator against time, and you see the correlator drop. If you’ve isolated your qubits from their environment, we can expect them to carry many-body entanglement. Golden. But the correlator can drop if, instead, the environment is harassing your qubits. You can misdiagnose leaking as many-body entanglement.

Our triumvirate identified a solution. Justin and I had discovered another characterization of quantum chaos and many-body entanglement: a quasiprobability, a quantum generalization of a probability.

The quasiprobability contains more information about the entanglement than the out-of-time-ordered-correlator does. José simulated measurements of the quasiprobability. The quasiprobability, he found, behaves one way when the qubits entangle independently of their environment and behaves another way when the qubits leak. You can measure the quasiprobability to decide whether to trust your out-of-time-ordered-correlator measurement or to isolate your qubits better. The quasiprobability enables us to avoid false positives.

Physical Review Letters published our paper last month. Working with Justin and José deepened my appetite for translating between the abstract and the concrete, for proving abstractions as a theorist’s theorist and realizing them experimentally as a lab’s theorist. Maybe, someday, I’ll earn the tag “a theorist I can actually talk with” from an experimentalist. For now, at least I serve better than a football-team mascot.

# Symmetries and quantum error correction

It’s always exciting when you can bridge two different physical concepts that seem to have nothing in common—and it’s even more thrilling when the results have as broad a range of possible fields of application as from fault-tolerant quantum computation to quantum gravity.

Physicists love to draw connections between distinct ideas, interconnecting concepts and theories to uncover new structure in the landscape of scientific knowledge. Put together information theory with quantum mechanics and you’ve opened a whole new field of quantum information theory. More recently, machine learning tools have been combined with many-body physics to find new ways to identify phases of matter, and ideas from quantum computing were applied to Pozner molecules to obtain new plausible models of how the brain might work.

In a recent contribution, my collaborators and I took a shot at combining the two physical concepts of quantum error correction and physical symmetries. What can we say about a quantum error-correcting code that conforms to a physical symmetry? Surprisingly, a continuous symmetry prevents the code from doing its job: A code can conform well to the symmetry, or it can correct against errors accurately, but it cannot do both simultaneously.

By a continuous symmetry, we mean a transformation that is characterized by a set of continuous parameters, such as angles. For instance, if I am holding an atom in my hand (more realistically, it’ll be confined in some fancy trap with lots of lasers), then I can rotate it around and about in space:

A rotation like this is fully specified by an axis and an angle, which are continuous parameters. Other transformations that we could think of are, for instance, time evolution, or a continuous family of unitary gates that we might want to apply to the system.

On the other hand, a code is a way of embedding some logical information into physical systems:

By cleverly distributing the information that we care about over several physical systems, an error-correcting code is able to successfully recover the original logical information even if the physical systems are exposed to some noise. Quantum error-correcting codes are particularly promising for quantum computing, since qubits tend to lose their information really fast (current typical ones can hold their information for a few seconds). In this way, instead of storing the actual information we care about on a single qubit, we use extra qubits which we prepare in a complicated state that is designed to protect this information from the noise.

## Covariant codes for quantum computation

A code that is compatible with respect to a physical symmetry is called covariant. This property ensures that if I apply a symmetry transformation on the logical information, this is equivalent to applying corresponding symmetry transformations on each of the physical systems.

Suppose I would like to flip my qubit from “0” to “1” and from “1” to “0”. If my information is stored in an encoded form, then in principle I first need to decode the information to uncover the original logical information, apply the flip operation, and then re-encode the new logical information back onto the physical qubits. A covariant code allows to perform the transformation directly on the physical qubits, without having to decode the information first:

The advantage of this scheme is that the logical information is never exposed and remains protected all along the computation.

But here’s the catch: Eastin and Knill famously proved that error-correcting codes can be at most covariant with respect to a finite set of transformations, ruling out universal computation with transversal gates. In other words, the computations we can perform using this scheme are very limited because we can’t perform any continuous symmetry transformation.

Interestingly, however, there’s a loophole: If we consider macroscopic systems, such as a particle with a very large value of spin, then it becomes possible again to construct codes that are covariant with respect to continuous transformations.

How is that possible, you ask? How do we transition from the microscopic regime, where covariant codes are ruled out for continuous symmetries, to the macroscopic regime, where they are allowed? We provide an answer by resorting to approximate quantum error correction. Namely, we consider the situation where the code does not have to correct each error exactly, but only has to reconstruct a good approximation of the logical information. As it turns out, there is a quantitative limit to how accurately a code can correct against errors if it is covariant with respect to a continuous symmetry, represented by the following equation:

where specifies how inaccurately the code error-corrects ( means the code can correct against errors perfectly), n is the number of physical subsystems, and the and are measures of “how strongly” the symmetry transformation can act on the logical and physical subsystems.

Let’s try to understand the right-hand side of this equation. In physics, continuous symmetries are generated by what we call physical charges. These are physical quantities that are associated with the symmetry, and that characterize how the symmetry acts on each state of the system. For instance, the charge that corresponds to time evolution is simply energy: States that label high energies have a rapidly varying phase whereas the phase of low-energy states changes slowly in time. Above, we indicate by the range of possible charge values on the logical system and by the corresponding range of charge values on each physical subsystem. In typical settings, this range of charge values is related to the dimension of the system—the more states the system has, intuitively, the greater range of charges it can accommodate.

The above equation states that the inaccuracy of the code must be larger than some value given on the right-hand side of the equation, which depends on the number of subsystems n and the ranges of charge values on the logical system and physical subsystems. The right-hand side becomes small in two regimes: if each subsystem can accommodate a large range of charge values, or if there is a large number of physical systems. In these regimes, our limitation vanishes, and we can circumvent the Eastin-Knill theorem and construct good covariant error-correcting codes. This allows us to connect the two regimes that seemed incompatible earlier, the microscopic regime where there cannot be any covariant codes, and the macroscopic regime where they are allowed.

## From quantum computation to many-body physics and quantum gravity

Quantum error-correcting codes not only serve to protect information in a quantum computation against noise, but they also provide a conceptual toolbox to understand complex physical systems where a quantum state is delocalized over many physical subsystems. The tight connections between quantum error correction and many-body physics have been put to light following a long history of pioneering research at Caltech in these fields. And as if that weren’t enough, quantum error correcting codes were also shown to play a crucial role in understanding quantum gravity.

There is an abundance of natural physical symmetries to consider both in many-body physics and in quantum gravity, and that gives us a good reason to be excited about characterizing covariant codes. For instance, there are natural approximate quantum error correcting codes that appear in some statistical mechanical models by cleverly picking global energy eigenstates. These codes are covariant with respect to time evolution by construction, since the codewords are energy eigenstates. Now, we understand more precisely under which conditions such codes can be constructed.

Perhaps an even more illustrative example is that of time evolution in holographic quantum gravity, that is, in the AdS/CFT correspondence. This model of quantum gravity has the property that it is equivalent to a usual quantum field theory that lives on the boundary of the universe. What’s more, the correspondence which tells us how the bulk quantum gravity theory is mapped to the boundary is, in fact, a quantum error-correcting code. If we add a time axis, then the picture becomes a cylinder where the interior is the theory of quantum gravity, and where the cylinder itself represents a traditional quantum field theory:

Since the bulk theory and the boundary theory are equivalent, the action of time evolution must be faithfully represented in both pictures. But this is in apparent contradiction with the Eastin-Knill theorem, from which it follows that a quantum error-correcting code cannot be covariant with respect to a continuous symmetry. We now understand how this is, in fact, not a contradiction: As we’ve seen, codes may be covariant with respect to continuous symmetries in the presence of systems with a large number of degrees of freedom, such as a quantum field theory.

## What’s next?

There are some further results in our paper that I have not touched upon in this post, including a precise approximate statement of the Eastin-Knill theorem in terms of system dimensions, and a fun machinery to construct covariant codes for more general systems such as oscillators and rotors.

We have only scratched the surface of the different applications I’ve mentioned, by studying the properties of covariant codes in general. I’m now excited to dive into more detail with our wonderful team to study deeper applications to correlations in many-body systems, global symmetries in quantum gravity, accuracy limits of quantum clocks and precision limits to quantum metrology in the presence of noise.

This has been an incredibly fun project to work on. Such a collaboration illustrates again the benefit of interacting with great scientists with a wide range of areas of expertise including representation theory, continuous variable systems, and quantum gravity. Thanks Sepehr, Victor, Grant, Fernando, Patrick, and John, for this fantastic experience.

# Science Communication Camp: a unique experience

Take a group of curious, open-minded people, place them in an idyllic setting and let them brainstorm on various facets of science communication for a weekend. If you also supplement this with impeccable organization and lively, cool and interesting hosts, you have the recipe for ultimate success!

The 4th annual Science Communication Camp took place at the Brandeis-Bardin campus of the American Jewish University on November 2nd-4th. The warm welcome by the organizers at the registration desk, the settling in at the on-campus, cozy rooms and the campus tour set the tone for the weekend. The guests? Research scientists, scientists that do outreach via academia, freelance science writers, policy makers on health and other scientific issues, science museum personnel, people doing research for magazines like National Geographic, YouTubers, educators, you name it!

I was excited to attend because although I am a biologist working in a lab, right now, one of my goals is to get more women interested in science and show non-science people how exciting our work can be. What a diverse and interesting group of people with whom to exchange views!

The weekend included a series of workshops, along with outdoor activities and group sessions – all capped off by a campfire on the final night. During the very lively and witty workshop on science script-writing, Teagan Wall let us in on her world of TV script-writing and meticulously showed us how to break down a scenario. Collectively, we came up with an inspiring episode of Bill Nye Saves the World (Teagan has written for that show). We included a humorous discussion about conventional and unconventional batteries and also raised awareness about how many smartphone batteries are thrown away.

Rachel Ignotofsky, author and illustrator of the magnificent bestseller book Women in Science, 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World gave a passionate, vivid and fun introduction into the world of science illustration. As a biologist, I really liked Rachel’s illustrations of lab equipment.

In her keynote speech, Maryn McKennna, author of widely read books such as Superbug and Big Chicken, walked us through her fascinating career that got her from pure news journalism to science journalism, doing research all around the globe.

Entertainment wasn’t missing from the mix. UCLA earth scientists, wildlife preservation experts, and other scientists, invited us to delve into their world. The highlight for me was the unique opportunity to touch a fragment of an asteroid that was magnetic! The night magic continued while Magician Siegfried Tiebe presented amazing tricks with humor and lightness, like a pleasant breeze.

The campfire, s’mores and singing in a small group, accompanied by the melodies of a lovely guitar and the stargazing (for the few night owls), concluded the final night in an ideal way.

Saying goodbye had a bittersweet feeling, but I was filled with new ideas, gifted with a broader outlook and also had my suitcase filled with three new books that were kindly provided to us.

Congratulations to IQIM for sponsoring such a great event that allows people from the Caltech community to broaden their horizons and launch, or better define, their path in the science communication realm.

A polar vortex had descended on Chicago.

I was preparing to fly in, scheduled to present a seminar at the University of Chicago. My boyfriend warned, from Massachusetts, that the wind chill effectively lowered the temperature to -50 degrees F. I’d last encountered -50 degrees F in the short story “To Build a Fire,” by Jack London. Spoiler alert: The protagonist fails to build a fire and freezes to death.

The story exemplifies naturalism, according to my 11th-grade English class. The naturalist movement infiltrated American literature and art during the late 19th century. Naturalists portrayed nature as as harsh and indifferent: The winter doesn’t care if Jack London’s protagonist dies.

The protagonist lingered in my mind as my plane took off. I was flying into a polar vortex for physics, the study of nature. Physics doesn’t care about me. How can I care so much about physics? How can humans generally?

Peeling apart that question, I found more layers than I’d packed for protection against the polar vortex.

Intellectualism formed the parka of the answer: You can’t hug space, time, information, energy, and the nature of reality. You can’t smile at them and watch them smile back. But their abstractness doesn’t block me from engaging with them; it attracts me. Ideas attract me; their purity does. Physics consists partially of a framework of ideas—of mathematical models, of theorems and examples, of the hypotheses and plots and revisions that underlie a theory.

The framework of physics needs construction. Some people compose songs; some build businesses; others bake soufflés; I used to do arts and crafts. Many humans create—envision, shape, mold, and coordinate—with many different materials. Theoretical physics overflows with materials and with opportunities to create. As humans love to create, we can love physics. Theoretical-physics materials consist of ideas, which might sound less suited to construction than paint does. But painters glob mixtures of water, resin, acrylic, and pigment onto woven fabric. Why shouldn’t ideas appeal as much as resin does? I build worlds in my head for a living. Doesn’t that sound romantic?

Painters derive joy from painting; dancers derive joy from moving; physics offers outlets for many skills. Doing physics, I use math. I learn history: What paradoxes about quantum theory did Albert Einstein pose to Niels Bohr? I write papers and blog posts, and I present seminars and colloquia. I’ve moonlighted as a chemist, studied biology, dipped into computer science, and sought to improve engineering. Beyond these disciplines, physics requires uniquely physical skills: the identification of questions about the natural world, the translation of those questions into math, and the translation of mathematical results into statements about the natural world. In college, I hated having to choose a major because I wanted to study everything. Physics lets me.

My attraction to physics worried me in college. Jim Yong Kim became Dartmouth’s president in my junior year. Jim, who left to helm the World Bank, specializes in global health. He insisted that “the world’s troubles are your troubles,” quoting former Dartmouth president John Sloan Dickey. I was developing a specialization in quantum information theory. I wasn’t trying to contain ebola, mitigate droughts, or eradicate Alzheimer’s disease. Should I not have been trying to save the world?

I could help save the world, a mentor said, through theoretical physics.1 Society needs a few people to develop art, a few to write music, a few to curate history, and a few to study the nature of the universe. Such outliers help keep us human, and the reinforcement of humanity helps save the world. You may indulge in physics, my mentor said, because physics affords the opportunity to do good. If I appreciate that opportunity, how can I not appreciate physics?

The opportunity to do good has endeared physics to me more as I’ve advanced. The more I advance, the fewer women I see. According to the American Physical Society (APS), in 2017, women received about 21% of the physics Bachelor’s degrees awarded in the U.S. Women received about 18% of the doctorates. In 2010, women numbered 8% of the full professors in U.S. departments that offered Bachelor’s or higher degrees in physics. The APS is conducting studies, coordinating workshops, and offering grants to improve the gender ratio. Departments, teachers, and mentors are helping. They have my gratitude. Yet they can accomplish only so much, especially since many are men. They can encourage women to change the gender ratio; they can’t change the ratio directly. Only women can, and few women are undertaking the task. Physics affords an opportunity to do good—to improve a field’s climate, to mentor, and to combat stereotypes—that few people can tackle. For that opportunity, I’m grateful to physics.

Physics lifts us beyond the Platonic realm of ideas in two other ways. At Caltech, I once ate lunch with Charlie Marcus. Marcus is a Microsoft researcher and a professor of physics at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute. His lab is developing topological quantum computers, in which calculations manifest as braids. Why, I asked, does quantum computing deserve a large chunk of Marcus’s life?

Two reasons, he replied. First, quantum computing straddles the border between foundational physics and applications. Quantum science satisfies the intellect but doesn’t tether us to esoterica. Our science could impact technology, industry and society. Second, the people. Quantum computing has a community steeped in congeniality.

Marcus’s response delighted me: His reasons for caring about quantum computing coincided with two of mine. Reason two has expanded, in my mind, to opportunities for engagement with people. Abstractions attract me partially because intellectualism runs in my family. I grew up surrounded by readers, encouraged to ask questions. Physics enables me to participate in a family tradition and to extend that tradition to the cosmos. My parents now ask me the questions—about black holes and about whether I’m staying warm in Chicago.

Beyond family, physics enables me to engage with you. This blog has connected me to undergraduates, artists, authors, computer programmers, science teachers, and museum directors across the world. Scientific outreach inspires reading, research, art, and the joy of learning. I love those outcomes, participating in them, and engaging with you.

Why fly into a polar vortex for the study of nature—why care about physics that can’t care about us? In my case, primarily because of the ideas, the abstraction, and the chances to create and learn. Partially for the chance to help save the world through humanness, outreach, and a gender balance. Partially for the chance to impact technology, and partially to connect with people: Physics can strengthen ties to family and can introduce you to individuals across the globe. And physics can— heck, tomorrow is February 14th—lead you to someone who cares enough to track Chicago’s weather from Cambridge.

1I’m grateful that Jim Kim, too, encouraged me to pursue theoretical physics.

# Humans can intuit quantum physics.

One evening this January, audience members packed into a lecture hall in MIT’s physics building. Undergraduates, members of the public, faculty members, and other scholars came to watch a film premiere and a panel discussion. NOVA had produced the film, “Einstein’s Quantum Riddle,” which stars entanglement. Entanglement is a relationship between quantum systems such as electrons. Measuring two entangled electrons yields two outcomes, analogous to the numbers that face upward after you roll two dice. The quantum measurements’ outcomes can exhibit correlations stronger than any measurements of any classical, or nonquantum, systems can. Which die faces point upward can share only so much correlation, even if the dice hit each other.

Dice feature in the film’s explanations of entanglement. So does a variation on the shell game, in which one hides a ball under one of three cups, shuffles the cups, and challenges viewers to guess which cup is hiding the ball. The film derives its drama from the Cosmic Bell test. Bell tests are experiments crafted to show that classical physics can’t describe entanglement. Scientists recently enhanced Bell tests using light from quasars—ancient, bright, faraway galaxies. Mix astrophysics with quantum physics, and an edgy, pulsing soundtrack follows.

The Cosmic Bell test grew from a proposal by physicists at MIT and the University of Chicago. The coauthors include David Kaiser, a historian of science and a physicist on MIT’s faculty. Dave co-organized the premiere and the panel discussion that followed. The panel featured Dave; Paola Cappellaro, an MIT quantum experimentalist; Alan Guth, an MIT cosmologist who contributed to the Bell test; Calvin Leung, an MIT PhD student who contributed; Chris Schmidt, the film’s producer; and me. Brindha Muniappan, the Director of Education and Public Programs at the MIT Museum, moderated the discussion.

think that the other panelists were laughing with me.

Brindha asked what challenges I face when explaining quantum physics, such as on this blog. Quantum theory wears the labels “weird,” “counterintuitive,” and “bizarre” in journalism, interviews, blogs, and films. But the thorn in my communicational side reflects quantum “weirdness” less than it reflects humanity’s self-limitation: Many people believe that we can’t grasp quantum physics. They shut down before asking me to explain.

Examples include a friend and Quantum Frontiers follower who asks, year after year, for books about quantum physics. I suggest literature—much by Dave Kaiser—he reads some, and we discuss his impressions. He’s learning, he harbors enough curiosity to have maintained this routine for years, and he has technical experience as a programmer. But he’s demurred, several times, along the lines of “But…I don’t know. I don’t think I’ll ever understand it. Humans can’t understand quantum physics, can we? It’s too weird.”

Quantum physics defies many expectations sourced from classical physics. Classical physics governs how basketballs arch, how paint dries, how sunlight slants through your window, and other everyday experiences. Yet we can gain intuition about quantum physics. If we couldn’t, how could we solve problems and accomplish research? Physicists often begin solving problems by trying to guess the answer from intuition. We reason our way toward a guess by stripping away complications, constructing toy models, and telling stories. We tell stories about particles hopping from site to site on lattices, particles trapped in wells, and arrows flipping upward and downward. These stories don’t capture all of quantum physics, but they capture the essentials. After grasping the essentials, we translate them into math, check how far our guesses lie from truth, and correct our understanding. Intuition about quantum physics forms the compass that guides problem solving.

Growing able to construct, use, and mathematize such stories requires work. You won’t come to understand quantum theory by watching NOVA films, though films can prime you for study. You can gain a facility with quantum theory through classes, problem sets, testing, research, seminars, and further processing. You might not have the time or inclination to. Even if you have, you might not come to understand why quantum theory describes our universe: Science can’t necessarily answer all “why” questions. But you can grasp what quantum theory implies about our universe.

People grasp physics arguably more exotic than quantum theory, without exciting the disbelief excited by a grasp of quantum theory. Consider the Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977. Voyager has survived solar winds and -452º F weather, imaged planets, and entered interstellar space. Classical physics—the physics of how basketballs arch—describes much of Voyager’s experience. But even if you’ve shot baskets, how much intuition do you have about interstellar space? I know physicists who claim to have more intuition about quantum physics than about much classical. When astrophysicists discuss Voyager and interstellar space, moreover, listeners don’t fret that comprehension lies beyond them. No one need fret when quantum physicists discuss the electrons in us.

Fretting might not occur to future generations: Outreach teams are introducing kids to quantum physics through games and videos. Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter has partnered with Google to produce QCraft, a quantum variation on Minecraft, and with the University of Southern California on quantum chess. In 2017, the American Physical Society’s largest annual conference featured a session called “Gamification and other Novel Approaches in Quantum Physics Outreach.” Such outreach exposes kids to quantum terminology and concepts early. Quantum theory becomes a playground to explore, rather than a source of intimidation. Players will grow up primed to think about quantum-mechanics courses not “Will my grade-point average survive this semester?” but “Ah, so this is the math under the hood of entanglement.”

Sociology restricts people to thinking quantum physics weird. But quantum theory defies classical expectations less than it could. Measurement outcomes could share correlations stronger than the correlations sourced by entanglement. How strong could the correlations grow? How else could physics depart farther from classical physics than quantum physics does? Imagine the worlds governed by all possible types of physics, called “generalized probabilistic theories” (GPTs). GPTs form a landscape in which quantum theory constitutes an island, on which classical physics constitutes a hill. Compared with the landscape’s outskirts, our quantum world looks tame.

GPTs fall under the research category of quantum foundations. Quantum foundations concerns why the math that describes quantum systems describes quantum systems, reformulations of quantum theory, how quantum theory differs from classical mechanics, how quantum theory could deviate but doesn’t, and what happens during measurements of quantum systems. Though questions about quantum foundations remain, they don’t block us from intuiting about quantum theory. A stable owner can sense when a horse has colic despite lacking a veterinary degree.

Moreover, quantum-foundations research has advanced over the past few decades. Collaborations and tools have helped: Theorists have been partnering with experimentalists, such as on the Cosmic Bell test and on studies of measurement. Information theory has engendered mathematical tools for quantifying entanglement and other quantum phenomena. Information theory has also firmed up an approach called “operationalism.” Operationalists emphasize preparation procedures, evolutions, and measurements. Focusing on actions and data concretizes arguments and facilitates comparisons with experiments. As quantum-foundations research has advanced, so have quantum information theory, quantum experiments, quantum technologies, and interdisciplinary cross-pollination. Twentieth-century quantum physicists didn’t imagine the community, perspectives, and knowledge that we’ve accrued. So don’t adopt 20th-century pessimism about understanding quantum theory. Einstein grasped much, but today’s scientific community grasps more. Richard Feynman said, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” Feynman helped spur the quantum-information revolution; he died before its adolescence. Besides, Feynman understood plenty about quantum theory. Intuition jumps off the pages of his lecture notes and speeches.

Landscape beyond quantum theory

I’ve swum in oceans and lakes, studied how the moon generates tides, and canoed. But piloting a steamboat along the Mississippi would baffle me. I could learn, given time, instruction, and practice; so can you learn quantum theory. Don’t let “weirdness,” “bizarreness,” or “counterintuitiveness” intimidate you. Humans can intuit quantum physics.

# My QIP 2019 After-Dinner Speech

Scientists who work on theoretical aspects of quantum computation and information look forward each year to the Conference on Quantum Information Processing (QIP), an annual event since 1998. This year’s meeting, QIP 2019, was hosted this past week by the University of Colorado at Boulder. I attended and had a great time, as I always do.

But this year, in addition to catching up with old friends and talking with colleagues about the latest research advances, I also accepted a humbling assignment: I was the after-dinner speaker at the conference banquet. Here is (approximately) what I said.

QIP 2019 After-Dinner Speech
16 January 2019

Thanks, it’s a great honor to be here, and especially to be introduced by Graeme Smith, my former student. I’m very proud of your success, Graeme. Back in the day, who would have believed it?

And I’m especially glad to join you for these holiday festivities. You do know this is a holiday, don’t you? Yes, as we do every January, we are once again celebrating Gottesman’s birthday! Happy Birthday, Daniel!

Look, I’m kidding of course. Yes, it really is Daniel’s birthday — and I’m sure he appreciates 500 people celebrating in his honor — but I know you’re really here for QIP. We’ve been holding this annual celebration of Quantum Information Processing since 1998 — this is the 22nd QIP. If you are interested in the history of this conference, it’s very helpful that the QIP website includes links to the sites for all previous QIPs. I hope that continues; it conveys a sense of history. For each of those past meetings, you can see what people were talking about, who was there, what they looked like in the conference photo, etc.

Some of you were there the very first time – I was not. But among the attendees at the first QIP, in Arhus in 1998, where a number of brilliant up-and-coming young scientists who have since then become luminaries of our field. Including: Dorit Aharonov, Wim van Dam, Peter Hoyer (who was an organizer), Michele Mosca, John Smolin, Barbara Terhal, and John Watrous. Also somewhat more senior people were there, like Harry Buhrman and Richard Cleve. And pioneers so eminent that we refer to them by their first names alone:  Umesh … Gilles … Charlie. It’s nice to know those people are still around, but it validates the health of our field that so many new faces are here, that so many young people are still drawn to QIP, 21 years after it all began. Over 300 students and postdocs are here this year, among nearly 500 attendees.

QIP has changed since the early days. It was smaller and more informal then; the culture was more like a theoretical physics conference, where the organizing committee brainstorms and conjures up a list of invited speakers. The system changed in 2006, when for the first time there were submissions and a program committee. That more formal system opened up opportunities to speak to a broader community, and the quality of the accepted talks has stayed very high — only 18% of 349 submissions were accepted this year.

In fact it has become a badge of honor to speak here — people put it on their CVs: “I gave a QIP contributed talk, or plenary talk, or invited talk.” But what do you think is the highest honor that QIP can bestow? Well, it’s obvious isn’t it? It’s the after-dinner speech! That’s the talk to rule them all. So Graeme told me, when he invited me to do this. And I checked, Gottesman put it on his website, and everyone knows Daniel is a very serious guy. So it must be important. Look, we’re having a banquet in honor of his birthday, and he can hardly crack a smile!

I hear the snickers. I know what you’re thinking. “John, wake up. Don’t you see what Graeme was trying to tell you: You’re too washed up to get a talk accepted to QIP! This is the only way to get you on the program now!” But no, you’re wrong. Graeme told me this is a great honor. And I trust Graeme. He’s an honest man. What? Why are you laughing? It’s true.

I asked Graeme, what should I talk about? He said, “Well, you might try to be funny.” I said, “What do you mean funny? You mean funny Ha Ha? Or do you mean funny the way cheese smells when it’s been in the fridge for too long?” He said, “No I mean really, really funny. You know, like Scott.”

So there it was, the gauntlet had been thrown. Some of you are too young to remember this, but the most notorious QIP after-dinner speech of them all was Scott Aaronson’s in Paris in 2006. Were you there? He used props, and he skewered his more senior colleagues with razor sharp impressions. And remember, this was 2006, so everybody was Scott’s more senior colleague. He was 12 at the time, if memory serves.

He killed. Even I appreciated some of the jokes; for example, as a physicist I could understand this one: Scott said, “I don’t care about the fine structure constant, it’s just a constant.” Ba ding!  So Scott set the standard back then, and though many have aspired to clear the bar since then, few have come close.

But remember, this was Graeme I was talking to. And I guess many of you know that I’ve had a lot of students through the years, and I’m proud of all of them. But my memory isn’t what it once was; I need to use mnemonic tricks to keep track of them now. So I have a rating system;  I rate them according to how funny they are. And Graeme is practically off the chart, that’s how funny he is. But his is what I call stealth humor. You can’t always tell that he’s being funny, but you assume it.

So I said, “Graeme, What’s the secret? Teach me how to be funny.” I meant it sincerely, and he responded sympathetically. Graeme said, “Well, if you want to be funny, you have to believe you are funny. So when I want to be funny, I think of someone who is funny, and I pretend to be that person.” I said, “Aha, so you go out there and pretend to be Graeme Smith?” And Graeme said, “No, that wouldn’t work for me. I close my eyes and pretend I’m … John Smolin!” I said, “Graeme, you mean you want me to be indistinguishable from John Smolin to an audience of computationally bounded quantum adversaries?” He nodded. “But Graeme, I don’t know any plausible cryptographic assumptions under which that’s possible!”

Fortunately, I had another idea. “I write poems,” I said. “What if I recite a poem? This would set a great precedent. From now on, everyone would know: the QIP after-dinner speech will be a poetry slam!”

Graeme replied “Well, that sounds [long pause] really [pause] boring. But how about a limerick? People love limericks.” I objected, “Graeme, I don’t do limericks. I’m not good at limericks.” But he wouldn’t back down. “Try a limerick,” Graeme said. “People like limericks. They’re so [pause] short.”

But I don’t do limericks. You see:

I was invited to speak here by Graeme.
He knows me well, just as I am.
He was really quite nice
Please don’t do a poetry slam.

Well, like I said, I don’t do limericks.

So now I’m starting to wonder: Why did they invite me to do this anyway? And I think I figured that out. See, Graeme asked me to speak just a few days ago. This must be what happened. Like any smoothly functioning organizing committee, they lined up an after-dinner speaker months in advance, as is the usual practice.

But then, just a few days before the conference began, they began to worry. “We better comb through the speaker’s Twitter feed. Maybe, years ago, our speaker said something offensive, something disqualifying.” And guess what? They found something, something really bad. It turned out that the designated after-dinner speaker had once made a deeply offensive remark about something called “quantum supremacy” … No, wait … that can’t be it.

Can’t you picture the panicky meeting of the organizers? QIP is about to start, and there’s no after-dinner speaker! So people started throwing out suggestions, starting with the usual suspects.

“No, he’s booked.”
“Are you telling me Schroedinger’s Rat has another gig that same night?”
“No, no, I mean they booked him.  A high-profile journal filed a complaint and he’s in the slammer.”
“No, same problem.”

“I’ve got it,” someone says: “How about the hottest quantum Twitter account out there? Yes, I’m talking about Quantum Computing Memes for QMA-Complete Teens!”

Are you all following that account? You should be. That’s where I go for all the latest fast-breaking quantum news. And that’s where you can get advice about what a quantumist should wear on Halloween. Your costume should combine Sexy with your greatest fear.  Right, I mean Sexy P = BQP.

Hey does that worry you? That maybe P = BQP? Does it keep you up at night? It’s possible, isn’t it? But it doesn’t worry me much. If it turns out that P = BQP, I’m just going to make up another word. How about NISP? Noisy Intermediate-Scale Polynomial.

I guess they weren’t able to smoke out whoever is behind Quantum Computing Memes for QMA-Complete Teens. So here I am.

Aside from Limericks, Graeme had another suggestion. He said, “You can reminisce. Tell us what QIP was like in the old days.” “The old days?” I said. “Yes, you know. You could be one of those stooped-over white-haired old men who tells interminable stories that nobody cares about.” I hesitated. “Yeah, I think I could do that.”

Okay, if that’s what you want, I’ll tell a story about my first QIP; that was QIP 2000, which was actually in Montreal in December 1999. It was back in the BPC era — Before Program Committee — and I was an invited speaker (I talked about decoding the toric code). Attending with me was Michael Nielsen, then a Caltech postdoc. Michael’s good friend Ike Chuang was also in the hotel, and they were in adjacent rooms. Both had brought laptops (not a given in 1999), and they wanted to share files. Well, hotels did not routinely offer Internet access back then, and certainly not wireless. But Ike had brought along a spool of Ethernet cable. So Ike and Mike both opened their windows, even though it was freezing cold. And Ike leaned out his window and made repeated attempts to toss the cable though Michael’s window before he finally succeeded, and they connected their computers.

I demanded to know, why the urgent need for a connection? And that was the day I found what most of the rest of the quantum world already knew: Mike and Ike were writing a book! By then they were in the final stages of writing, after some four years of effort (they sent the final draft of the book off to Cambridge University Press the following June).

So, QIP really has changed. The Mike and Ike book is out now. And it’s no longer necessary to open your window on a frigid Montreal evening to share a file with your collaborator.

Boy, it was cold that week in Montreal. [How cold was it?] Well, we went to lunch one day during the conference, and were walking single file down a narrow sidewalk toward the restaurant, when Harry Buhrman, who was right behind me, said: “John, there’s an icicle on your backpack!” You see, I hadn’t screwed the cap all the way shut on my water bottle, water was leaking out of the bottle, soaking through the backback, and immediately freezing on contact with the air; hence the icicle. And ever since then I’ve always been sure to screw my bottle cap shut tight. But over the years since then, lots of other things have spilled in my backpack just the same, and I’d love to tell you about that, but …

Well, my stories may be too lacking in drama to carry the evening ….  Look, I don’t care what Graeme says, I’m gonna recite some poems!

I can’t remember how this got started, but some years ago I started writing a poem whenever I needed to introduce a speaker at the Caltech physics colloquium. I don’t do this so much anymore. Partly because I realized that my poetry might reveal my disturbing innermost thoughts, which are best kept private.

Actually, one of my colleagues, after hearing one of my poems, suggested throwing the poem into a black hole. And when we tried it … boom …. it bounced right back, but in a highly scrambled form! And ever since then I’ve had that excuse. If someone says “That’s not such a great poem,” I can shoot back, “Yeah, but it was better before it got scrambled.”

But anyway, here’s one I wrote to honor Ben Schumacher, the pioneer of quantum information theory who named the qubit, and whose compression theorem you all know well.

Ben.
He rocks.
I remember
When
He showed me how to fit
A qubit
In a small box.

I wonder how it feels
To be compressed.
And then to pass
A fidelity test.
Or does it feel
At all, and if it does
Would I squeal
Or be just as I was?

If not undone
I’d become as I’d begun
And write a memorandum
On being random.
Had it felt like a belt
Of rum?

And might it be predicted
Longing for my session
Of compression?

I’d crawl
To Ben again.
And call,
Don’t stall!
Make me small!”

[Silence]

Yeah that’s the response I usually get when I recite this poem — embarrassed silence, followed by a few nervous titters.

So, as you can see, as in Ben Schumacher’s case, I use poetry to acknowledge our debt to the guiding intellects of our discipline. It doesn’t always work, though. I once tried to write a poem about someone I admire very much, Daniel Gottesman, and it started like this:

When the weather’s hottest, then
I call for Daniel Gottesman.
My apples are less spotted when
Daniel eats the rottenest ten …

It just wasn’t working, so I stopped there. Someday, I’ll go back and finish it. But it’s tough to rhyme “Gottesman.”

More apropos of QIP, some of you may recall that about 12 years ago, one of the hot topics was quantum speedups for formula evaluation, a subject ignited by a brilliant paper by Eddie Farhi, Jeffrey Goldstone, and Sam Gutmann. They showed there’s a polynomial speedup if we use a quantum computer to, say, determine whether a two-player game has a winning strategy. That breakthrough inspired me to write an homage to Eddie, which went:

We’re very sorry, Eddie Farhi
Can’t run it on those mean machines
Until we’ve actually got ‘em.

You’re not alone, so go on home,
Tell Jeffrey and tell Sam:
Come up with something classical
Or else it’s just a scam.

Unless … you think it’s on the brink
A quantum-cal device.
That solves a game and brings you fame.
Damn! That would be nice!

Now, one thing that Graeme explained to me is that the white-haired-old-man talk has a mandatory feature: It must go on too long. Maybe I have met that criterion by now. Except …

There’s one thing Graeme neglected to say. He never told me that I must not sing at QIP.

You see, there’s a problem: Tragically, though I like to sing, I don’t sing very well at all. And unfortunately, I am totally unaware of this fact. So I sometimes I sing in public, despite strongly worded advice not to do so.

When I was about to leave home on my way to QIP, my wife Roberta asked me, “When are you going to prepare your after-dinner talk?” I said, “Well, I guess I’ll work on it on the plane.” She said, “LA to Denver, that’s not a long enough flight.” I said, “I know!”

What I didn’t say, is that I was thinking of singing a song. If I had, Roberta would have tried to stop me from boarding the plane.

So I guess it’s up to you, what do you think? Should we stop here while I’m (sort of) ahead, or should we take the plunge. Song or no song? How many say song?

All right, that’s good enough for me! This is a song that I usually perform in front of a full orchestra, and I hoped the Denver Symphony Orchestra would be here to back me up. But it turns out they don’t exist anymore. So I’ll just have to do my best.

If you are a fan of Rodgers and Hammerstein, you’ll recognize the tune as a butchered version of Some Enchanted Evening, But the lyrics have changed. This song is called One Entangled Evening.

One entangled evening
We will see a qubit
And another qubit
Across a crowded lab.

And somehow we’ll know
We’ll know even then
This qubit’s entangled
Aligned with its friend.

One entangled evening
We’ll cool down a circuit
See if we can work it
At twenty milli-K.

A circuit that cold
Is worth more than gold
For qubits within it.
Will do as they’re told.

Quantum’s inviting, just as Feynman knew.
The future’s exciting, if we see it through

One entangled evening
Anyons will be braiding
The noise that haunts the lab.

Then our quantum goods
Will work as they should
Solving the problems

Once we have dreamt it, we can make it so.
Once we have dreamt it, we can make it so!

The song lyrics are meant to be uplifting, and I admit they’re corny. No one can promise you that, in the words of another song, “the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” That’s not always the case.

At this time in the field of quantum information processing, there are very big dreams, and many of us worry about unrealistic expectations concerning the time scale for quantum computing to have a transformative impact on society. Progress will be incremental. New technology does not change the world all at once; it’s a gradual process.

But I do feel that from the perspective of the broad sweep of history, we (the QIP community and the broader quantum community) are very privileged to be working in this field at a pivotal time in the history of science and technology on earth. We should deeply cherish that good fortune, and the opportunities it affords. I’m confident that great discoveries lie ahead for us.

It’s been a great privilege for me to be a part of a thriving quantum community for more than 20 years. By now, QIP has become one of our venerable traditions, and I hope it continues to flourish for many years ahead. Now it’s up to all of you to make our quantum dreams come true. We are on a great intellectual adventure. Let’s savor it and enjoy it to the hilt!

Thanks for putting up with me tonight.

[And here’s proof that I really did sing.]