Author Archives: Mateus Araújo

Tsirelson Memorial Workshop

(thanks to Flavio Baccari for the photo) After more than two years of the world conspiring against me and Miguel, we finally managed to pull it off: the workshop in honour of Boris Tsirelson happened! In my opinion and of … Continue reading

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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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