Category Archives: Uncategorised

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →