Tag: scottaaronson

For years, I’ve had a private term I’ve used with my family. To give a few examples of its use: No, I never applied for that grant. I spent two hours struggling to log in […]

For the past few days, I was bummed about the sooner-than-expected loss of Steven Weinberg. Even after putting up my post, I spent hours just watching old interviews with Steve on YouTube and reading his […]

Steven Weinberg was, perhaps, the last truly towering figure of 20th-century physics. In 1967, he wrote a 3-page paper saying in effect that as far as he could see, two of the four fundamental forces […]

Alright everyone: Victor Galitski has an impassioned rant against out-of-control quantum computing hype, which I enjoyed and enthusiastically recommend, although I wished Galitski had engaged a bit more with the strongest arguments for optimism (e.g., […]

Happy 4th to those in the US! The group of Chaoyang Lu and Jianwei Pan, based at USTC in China, has been on a serious quantum supremacy tear lately. Recall that last December, USTC announced […]

Happy birthday to Alan Turing! This week I’m participating virtually in STOC’2021, which today had a celebration of the 50th anniversary of NP-completeness (featuring Steve Cook, Richard Karp, Leonid Levin, Christos Papadimitriou, and Avi Wigderson), […]

The other night Dana and I watched “The Internet’s Own Boy,” the 2014 documentary about the life and work of Aaron Swartz, which I’d somehow missed when it came out. Swartz, for anyone who doesn’t […]

I now have a feature article up at Quanta magazine, entitled “What Makes Quantum Computing So Hard To Explain?” I.e., why do journalists, investors, etc. so consistently get central points wrong, even after the subject […]

Yesterday, I had fun doing an open-ended Q&A at the Astral Codex Ten weekly online meetup. See here for the YouTube video. The questions were mainly about quantum computing, but ranged over various other topics […]

Holy crap. In case you’re wondering how I spent such a milestone of a day: well, I spent hours of it at an important virtual grant review meeting with the Department of Defense. Alas, when […]