Category Archives: Uncategorised

The death of Quanta Magazine

Yesterday Quanta Magazine published an article written by Natalie Wolchover, Physicists Create a Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer. I’m shocked and disappointed. I thought Quanta Magazine was the most respectable source of science news, they have published several quality, in-depth … Continue reading

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Doing induction like a physicist

If something is true for dimension 2, it doesn’t mean much. We know that 2 is very special. The set of valid quantum states is a sphere, we can have a basis of unitary and Hermitian matrices for the Hilbert … Continue reading

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Do not project your relative frequencies onto the non-signalling subspace

It happens all the time. You make an experiment on nonlocality or steering, and you want to test whether the data you collected is compatible with hidden variables. You plug them into the computer and the answer is no, they … Continue reading

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Redistribution

Stuck at home with corona, I decided to try my hand at writing science fiction to pass the time. The result was not science fiction at all, but I think it’s still fun to read, so I’m posting it here. … Continue reading

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Thou shalt not optimize

It’s the kind of commandment that would actually impress me if it were in the Bible, something obviously outside the knowledge of a primitive people living in the Middle East millennia ago. It’s quite lame to have a book that … Continue reading

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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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