Tag: scottaaronson

If I haven’t blogged until now about the midterm election, it’s because I find the state of the world too depressing. Go vote, obviously, if you’re eligible and haven’t yet. How many more chances will […]

These days, I often need to remind myself that, as an undergrad, grad student, postdoc, or professor, I’ve now been doing quantum computing research for a quarter-century—i.e., well over half of the subject’s existence. As […]

Yesterday I attended a lecture by George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan, who’s currently visiting UT Austin, about his new book entitled Don’t Be a Feminist. (See also here for previous back-and-forth between me and […]

Here’s an observation that’s mathematically trivial but might not be widely appreciated. In kindergarten, we all learned Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem, which given a formal system F, constructs an arithmetical encoding of G(F) = “This […]

I’m proud to say that Nick Hunter-Jones and Matteo Ippoliti—both of whom work at the interface between quantum information science and condensed-matter physics (Nick closer to the former and Matteo to the latter)—have joined the […]

For anyone living under a rock with no access to nerd social media, Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger have finally won the Nobel Prize in Physics, for their celebrated experiments that rubbed everyone’s […]

(1) Since I didn’t blog about this before: huge congratulations to David Deutsch, Charles Bennett, Gilles Brassard, and my former MIT colleague Peter Shor, and separately to Dan Spielman, for their well-deserved Breakthrough Prizes! Their […]

As I slept fitfully, still recovering from COVID, I had one of the more interesting dreams of my life: I was desperately trying to finish some PowerPoint slides in time to give a talk. Uncharacteristically […]

The same thing Salman Rushdie learned: either you spend your entire life in hiding, or eventually it’ll come for you. Years might pass. You might emerge from hiding once, ten times, a hundred times, be […]

Back in January, you might recall, Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn’s Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF) was kind enough to earmark $200,000 for me to donate to any charitable organizations of my choice. So I posted […]