Author Archives: Mateus Araújo

The horrifying world of confidence intervals

We often see experimental results reported with some “error bars”, such as saying that the mass of the Higgs boson is $125.10 \pm 0.14\, \mathrm{GeV/c^2}$. What do these error bars means, though? I asked some people what they thought it … Continue reading

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What happened to QIP?

QIP is one of the most famous and prestigious conference series in quantum information. It has been going on since 1998, and getting a paper accepted by them is considered very good for your career. I have often attended, and … Continue reading

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A satisfactory derivation of the Born rule

Earlier this year I wrote a post complaining about all existing derivations of the Born rule. A couple of months later yet another derivation, this time by Short, appeared on the arXiv. Purely out of professional duty I went ahead … Continue reading

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Violating the Tsirelson bound

I started writing the previous post as an introduction to another subject, but it got too long and I decided to publish it separately. What I actually wanted to talk about is the following question: what happens if you are … Continue reading

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DIQKD is here!

This has been a momentous week for quantum information science. The long-awaited for experimental demonstration of device-independent quantum key distribution (DIQKD) is finally here! And not one only demonstration, but three in a row. First, the Oxford experiment came out, … Continue reading

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Floating-point arithmetic and semidefinite programming

Another day working with MATLAB, another nasty surprise. I was solving a SDP that was already working well, did a minor change, and suddenly it started taking minutes to reach a solution, when usually it took seconds. After a long … Continue reading

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Relativity is your friend

I’ve just finished reading Andy Weir’s new book “Project Hail Mary”. Great story, I heartily recommend it to anyone who is into hard sci-fi. There’s minor plot point that I found hilarious: an alien civilization managed to do interstellar travel … Continue reading

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Climbing a space elevator

I was arguing on the internet about the possibility of building a space elevator; someone was claiming that carbon nanotubes were going to make it possible and we’d build one in the near future. I’m very skeptical, first because we’re … Continue reading

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Being Referee #2

It has happened to all of us. You spend months refining your latest result, carefully writing it up as a well-polished manuscript. You argue with your coauthors about everything: from which version of the proof is more enlightening, to the … Continue reading

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Why I am unhappy about all derivations of the Born rule (including mine)

There are a lot of derivations of the Born rule in the literature. To cite just a few that I’m most familiar with, and illustrate different strategies: by Everett, Deutsch, Wallace, Żurek, Vaidman, Carroll and Sebens, me, and Mandolesi. I’m … Continue reading

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