Tag: Real science

science / science - 1 month ago

Ten lessons I learned from John Preskill

Last August, Toronto’s Centre for Quantum Information and Quantum Control (CQIQC) gave me 35 minutes to make fun of John Preskill in public. CQIQC was hosting its biannual conference, also called CQIQC, in Toronto. The conference features the awardi...

science / science - 2 months ago

Finding Ed Jaynes’s ghost

You might have heard of the conundrum “What do you give the man who has everything?” I discovered a variation on it last October: how do you celebrate the man who studied (nearly) everything? Physicist Edwin Thompson Jaynes impacted disciplines from...

science / science - 3 months ago

Happy 200th birthday, Carnot’s theorem!

In Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 novel The Wind in the Willows, a Mole meets a Water Rat who lives on a River. The Rat explains how the River permeates his life: “It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) wa...