Category Archives: Uncategorised

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

I’m feeling bad about having used $p$-values in my paper about Bell inequalities, despite considering them bullshit. The reason we decided to do it is because we wanted the paper to be useful for experimentalists, and all of them use … Continue reading →

A friend of mine, Flavien Hirsch, invented a fascinating paradox in probability, called Hilbert’s Hotel and Gödel’s Freezer. Technically speaking it is the same thing as the Sleeping Beauty problem, which I’ve written about here, but I find it much … Continue reading →

I’ve recently proved a theorem that is probably well-known to anyone that studied number theory. I didn’t know it before, though, and it was a lot of fun, so I decided to write it up here in case there are … Continue reading →

A long time ago I had a conversation with Daniel Nagaj about the following problem: given access to an unknown unitary gate $U$, is it possible to build the gate control-$U$ out of it? Nagaj argued that it was impossible, … Continue reading →

I’ve just attended a nice online talk by Charles Bédard about his somewhat recent paper, where he studies the explicitly local model of quantum mechanics developed by Deutsch and Hayden, with a twist by Raymond-Robichaud. I think it’s a neat … Continue reading →