Shtetl-Optimized

Update (5/6): In “honor” of the news below, Boaz Barak has written a beautiful blog post on the reasons to care about the P vs. NP question, offering his responses to several of the most common misconceptions.  Thank you so much, Boaz — this is one of the best presents I’ve ever gotten from anyone!

On Friday afternoon—in the middle of a pizza social for my undergrad advisees—I found out that I’ve received tenure at MIT.

Am I happy about the news?  Of course!  Yet even on such a joyous occasion, I found myself reflecting on a weird juxtaposition.  I learned about MIT’s tenure decision at the tail end of a fierce, weeks-long comment war over on Luboš Motl’s blog, in which I assumed the task of defending theoretical computer science and quantum information science as a whole: explaining why these fields could have anything whatsoever to contribute to our understanding of the universe.  Indeed, I took the title of this post from a comment Luboš made to me in the middle of the melee: that compared to string theorists, quantum computing researchers have as much to say about the nature of reality as toll-takers on the Golden Gate Bridge.  (Even though the Golden Gate tolls are apparently all-electronic these days, I still found Luboš’s analogy striking.  I could imagine that staring all day at the breathtaking San Francisco Bay would lead to deep thoughts about the nature of reality.)

Now, some people will ask: why should I even waste my time this way—arguing with Luboš, a blogger infamous for describing the scientists he disagrees with as garbage, worms, fungi, etc., and even calling for their “elimination”?  If I find the limits of computation in the physical universe to be a rich, fascinating, worthwhile subject; if I have hundreds of wonderful colleagues with whom to share the thrill of surprising new discoveries; if a large, growing fraction of the wider scientific community follows this field with interest; if my employer seems to want me doing it for the long haul … then why should I lose sleep just because someone, somewhere, declared that the P vs. NP problem is a random puzzle, of no deeper significance than the question of whether chess is a draw?  Or because he characterized the entire fields of quantum computing and information as trivial footnotes to 1920s physics, fit only for mediocre students who couldn’t do string theory?  Or because, on the “other side,” a persistent minority calls quantum computers an absurd fantasy, and the quest to build them a taxpayer boondoggle bordering on fraud?  Or because some skeptics, going even further, dismiss quantum mechanics itself as nonsensical mumbo-jumbo that physicists made up to conceal their own failure to find a straightforward, mechanical description of Nature?  Likewise, why should it bother me if some anti-complexites dismiss the quest to prove P≠NP as a fashionable-but-irrelevant journey to formalize the obvious—even while others denounce the Soviet-style groupthink that leads the “CS establishment” to reject the possibility that P=NP?  After all, these various naysayers can’t all be right!  Doesn’t it comfort me that, of all the confidently-asserted reasons why everything my colleagues and I study is dead-end, cargo-cult science, so many of the reasons contradict each other?

Sure, but here’s the thing.  In seven years of teaching and blogging, I’ve learned something about my own psychology.  Namely, if I meet anyone—an undergrad, an anonymous blog commenter, anyone—who claims that the P vs. NP problem is beside the point, since it’s perfectly plausible that P=NP but the algorithm takes n¹⁰⁰⁰⁰ time—or that, while quantum mechanics works fine for small systems, there’s not the slightest reason to expect it to scale up to larger ones—or that the limits of computation are plainly no more relevant to fundamental physics than the fact that cucumbers are green—trying to reason with that person will always, till the end of my life, feel like the most pressing task in the world to me.

Why?  Because, I confess, a large part of me worries: what if this other person is right?  What if I really do have to jettison everything I thought I knew about physics, computation, and pretty much everything else since I was a teenager, toss all my results into the garbage can (or at least the “amusing recreations can”), and start over from kindergarten?  But then, as I fret about that possibility, counterarguments well up in my mind.  Like someone pinching himself to make sure he’s awake, I remember all the reasons why I was led to think what I think in the first place.  And I want the other person to go through that experience with me—the experience, if you like, of feeling the foundations of the universe smashed to pieces and then rebuilt, the infinite hierarchy of complexity classes collapsing and then springing back into place, decades’ worth of books set ablaze and then rewritten on blank pages.  I want to say: at least come stand here with me—in this place that I spent twenty years of late nights, false starts, and discarded preconceptions getting to—and tell me if you still don’t see what I see.

That’s how I am; I doubt I can change it any more than I can change my blood type.  So I feel profoundly grateful to have been born into a world where I can make a comfortable living just by being this strange, thin-skinned creature that I am—a world where there are countless others who do see what I see, indeed see it a thousand times more clearly in many cases, but who still appreciate what little I can do to explore this corner or that, or to describe the view to others.  I’d say I’m grateful to “fate,” but really I’m grateful to my friends and family, my students and teachers, my colleagues at MIT and around the world, and the readers of Shtetl-Optimized—yes, even John Sidles.  “Fate” either doesn’t exist or doesn’t need my gratitude if it does.

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Two years ago, when I attended the FQXi conference on a ship from Norway to Denmark, I (along with many other conference participants) was interviewed by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, who produces a late-night TV program called “Closer to Truth.”  I’m pleased to announce (hat tip: Sean Carroll) that four videos from my interview are finally available online:

• Is the Universe a Computer?

(like a politician, I steer the question toward “what kind of computer is the universe?,” then start talking about P vs. NP, quantum computing, and the holographic principle)

• What Does Quantum Theory Mean?

(here I mostly talk about the idea of computational intractability as a principle of physics)

• Quantum Computing Mysteries

(basics of quantum mechanics and quantum computing)

• Setting Time Aright (about the differences between time and space, the P vs. PSPACE problem, and computing with closed timelike curves)

(No, I didn’t choose the titles!)

For regular readers of this blog, there’s probably nothing new in these videos, but for those who are “just tuning in,” they provide an extremely simple and concise introduction to what I care about and why.  I’m pretty happy with how they came out.

Once you’re finished with me (or maybe even before then…), click here for the full list of interviewees, which includes David Albert, Raphael Bousso, Sean Carroll, David Deutsch, Rebecca Goldstein, Seth Lloyd, Marvin Minsky, Roger Penrose, Lenny Susskind, Steven Weinberg, and many, many others who might be of interest to Shtetl-Optimized readers.

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Back in February, I gave a talk with the above title at the Annual MIT Latke-Hamentaschen Debate.  I’m pleased to announce that streaming video of my talk is now available!  (My segment starts about 10 minutes into the video, and lasts for 10 minutes.)  You can also download my PowerPoint slides here.

Out of hundreds of talks I’ve given in my life, on five continents, this is the single talk of which I’m the proudest.

Of course, before you form an opinion about the issue at hand, you should also check out the contributions of my fellow debaters.  On the sadly-mistaken hamentasch side, my favorite presentation was that of mathematician Arthur Mattuck, which starts in at 56 minutes and lasts for a full half hour (!! – the allotted time was only 8 minutes).  Mattuck relates the shapes of latkes and hamentaschen to the famous Kakeya problem in measure theory—though strangely, his final conclusions seem to provide no support whatsoever for the hamentaschen, even on Mattuck’s own terms.

Finally, what if you’re a reader for whom the very words “latke” and “hamentaschen” are just as incomprehensible as the title of this blog?  OK, here are some Cliff Notes:

• Latkes are fried potato pancakes, traditionally eaten by Jews on Hannukah.
• Hamentaschen are triangular fruit-filled cookies, traditionally eaten by Jews on Purim.
• Beginning at the University of Chicago in 1946, many universities around the world have held farcical annual “debates” between faculty members (both Jewish and non-Jewish) about which of those two foods is better.  (The reason I say “farcical” is simply that, as I explain in my talk, the truth has always been overwhelmingly on one side.)  The debaters have invoked everything from feminist theory to particle physics to bolster their case.

Thanks very much to Dean of Admissions Stu Schmill for moderating, and to MIT Hillel for organizing the debate.

Update: Luboš has a new blog post announcing that he finally found a chapter in Quantum Computing Since Democritus that he likes!  Woohoo!  Whether coincidentally or not, the chapter he likes makes exactly the same points about quantum mechanics that I also make in my pro-latke presentation.

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On Sunday afternoon, Dana, Lily, and I were in Copley Square in Boston for a brunch with friends, at the Mandarin Oriental hotel on Boylston Street.  As I now recall, I was complaining bitterly about a number of things.  First, I’d lost my passport (it’s since been found).  Second, we hadn’t correctly timed Lily’s feedings, making us extremely late for the brunch, and causing Lily to scream hysterically the entire car ride.  Third, parking (and later, locating) our car at the Prudential Center was a logistical nightmare.  Fourth, I’d recently received by email a profoundly silly paper, claiming that one of my results was wrong based on a trivial misunderstanding.  Fifth … well, there were other things that were bothering me, but I don’t remember what they were.

Then the next day, maybe 50 feet from where we’d been, the bombs went off, three innocent human beings lost their lives and many more were rendered permanently disabled.

Drawing appropriate morals is left as an exercise for the reader.

Update (Friday, 7AM): Maybe the moral is that you shouldn’t philosophize while the suspects are still on the loose. Last night (as you can read anywhere else on the web) an MIT police officer was tragically shot and killed in the line of duty, right outside the Stata Center, by one of the marathon bombers (who turn out to be brothers from Chechnya). After a busy night—which also included robbing a 7-Eleven (visiting a 7-Eleven that was coincidentally also robbed—no novelist could make this stuff up), carjacking a Mercedes two blocks from my apartment, and randomly throwing some more pressure-cooker bombs—one of the brothers was killed; the other one escaped to Watertown. A massive hunt for him is now underway. MIT is completely closed today, as is Harvard and pretty much every other university in the area—and now, it seems, all stores and businesses in the entire Boston area. The streets are mostly deserted except for police vehicles. As for us, we heard the sirens through much of the night, but didn’t know what they were about until this morning. Here’s hoping they catch the second asshole soon.

Another Update (Friday, 9AM): As the sorry details emerge about these Tsarnaev brothers, it occurs to me that there’s another moral we can draw: namely, we can remind ourselves that the Hollywood image of the evil criminal genius is almost entirely a myth. Yes, evil and genius have occasionally been found in the same person (as with a few of the Nazi scientists), but it’s evil and stupidity that are the far more natural allies. Which is the most optimistic statement I can think to make right now about the future of the human race.

Yet More Updates (Friday, 3PM): The whole Boston area is basically a ghost town now, with the streets empty on a beautiful spring day and the sound of helicopters filling the air.  I was just up on my roofdeck to watch, and never saw anything like it.  I can’t help thinking that it sets a terrible precedent to give a couple doofus amateur terrorists the power to shut down an entire metropolitan area.  Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan points to a spectacularly stupid tweet by one Nate Bell:

I wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi-capacity magazine?

This sounds like a gun nut projecting his own disturbed psychology onto other people.  I’m not actually scared, but if I was, owning a gun would do nothing whatsoever to make me less scared (quite the contrary).  What would make me think I could win a gunfight against a frothing lunatic—or that I’d want to find out?  When it comes to violence, the only thing that calms my nerves is a democratic state having a near-monopoly on it.

What else?  It was chilling to watch the Tsarnaev brothers’ aunt, the one in Toronto, babble incoherently on TV about how wonderful her nephews were (a striking contrast to the remorseful uncle in Maryland).  If it emerges that anyone else in this family (including the parents, or the older brother’s wife) had any foreknowledge about the killing spree, then I very much hope they’ll face justice as well.

In other news, Lily had an eventful day too: she finally figured out how to squeeze her toy ball with her hands.

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On Wednesday, I gave a fun talk with that title down the street at Microsoft Research New England.  Disappointingly, no one in the audience did seem to think quantum computing was bunk (or if they did, they didn’t speak up): I was basically preaching to the choir.  My PowerPoint slides are here.  There’s also a streaming video here, but watch it at your own risk—my stuttering and other nerdy mannerisms seemed particularly bad, at least in the short initial segment that I listened to.  I really need media training.  Anyway, thanks very much to Boaz Barak for inviting me.

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I got back a couple days ago from John Preskill‘s 60th birthday symposium at Caltech.  To the general public, Preskill is probably best known for winning two bets against Stephen Hawking.  To readers of Shtetl-Optimized, he might be known for his leadership in quantum information science, his pioneering work in quantum error-correction, his beautiful lecture notes, or even his occasional comments here (though these days he has his own group blog and Twitter feed to keep him busy).  I know John as a friend, colleague, and mentor who’s done more for me than I can say.

The symposium was a blast—a chance to hear phenomenal talks, enjoy the California sun, and catch up with old friends like Dave Bacon (who stepped down as Pontiff before stepping down as Pontiff was cool).  The only bad part was that I inadvertently insulted John in my talk, by calling him my “lodestar of sanity.”  What I meant was that, for 13 years, I’ve known plenty of physicists who can be arbitrarily off-base when they talk about computer science and vice versa, but I’ve only ever known John to be on-base about either.  If you asked him a question involving, say, both Barrington’s Theorem and Majorana fermions, he’s one of the few people on earth who would know both, seem totally unfazed by your juxtaposing them, and probably have an answer that he’d carefully tailor to your level of knowledge and interest.  In a polyglot field like quantum information, that alone makes him invaluable.  But along with his penetrating insight comes enviable judgment and felicity of expression: unlike some of us (me), John always manages to tell the truth without offending his listeners.  If I were somehow entrusted with choosing a President of the United States, he’d be one of my first choices, certainly ahead of myself.

Anyway, it turned out that John didn’t like my use of the word “sane” to summarize the above: for him (understandably, in retrospect), it had connotations of being humorless and boring, two qualities I’ve never seen in him.  (Also, as I pointed out later, the amount of time John has spent helping me and patiently explaining stuff to me does weigh heavily against his sanity.)  So I hereby rename John my Lodestar of Awesomeness.

In case anyone cares, my talk was entitled “Hidden Variables as Fruitful Dead Ends”; the PowerPoint slides are here.  I spoke about a new preprint by Adam Bouland, Lynn Chua, George Lowther, and myself, on possibility and impossibility results for “ψ-epistemic theories” (a class of hidden-variable theories that was also the subject of the recent PBR Theorem, discussed previously on this blog).  My talk also included material from my old paper Quantum Computing and Hidden Variables.

The complete program is here.  A few highlights (feel free to mention others in the comments):

• Patrick Hayden spoke about a beautiful result of himself and Alex May, on “where and when a qubit can be.”  After the talk, I commented that it’s lucky for the sake of Hayden and May’s induction proof that 3 happens to be the next integer after 2.  If you get that joke, then I think you’ll understand their result and vice versa.
• Lenny Susskind—whose bestselling The Theoretical Minimum is on my to-read list—spoke about his views on the AMPS firewall argument.  As you know if you’ve been reading physics blogs, the firewall argument has been burning up (har, har) the world of quantum gravity for months, putting up for grabs aspects of black hole physics long considered settled (or not, depending on who you ask).  Lenny gave a typically-masterful summary, which for the first time enabled me to understand the role played in the AMPS argument by “the Zone” (a region near the black hole but outside its event horizon, in which the Hawking radiation behaves a little differently than it does when it’s further away).  I was particularly struck by Lenny’s comment that whether an observer falling into a black hole encounters a firewall might be “physics’ Axiom of Choice”: that is, we can only follow the logical consequences of theories we formulate outside black-hole event horizons, and maybe those theories simply don’t decide the firewall question one way or the other.  (Then again, maybe they do.)  Lenny also briefly mentioned a striking recent paper by Harlow and Hayden, which argues that the true resolution of the AMPS paradox might involve … wait for it … computational complexity, and specifically, the difficulty of solving QSZK (Quantum Statistical Zero Knowledge) problems in BQP.  And what’s a main piece evidence that QSZK⊄BQP?  Why, the collision lower bound, which I proved 12 years ago while a summer student at Caltech and an awestruck attendee of Preskill’s weekly group meetings.  Good thing no one told me back then that black holes were involved.
• Charlie Bennett talked about things that I’ve never had the courage to give a talk about, like the Doomsday Argument and the Fermi Paradox.  But his disarming, avuncular manner made it all seem less crazy than it was.
• Paul Ginsparg, founder of the arXiv, presented the results of a stylometric analysis of John Preskill’s and Alexei Kitaev’s research papers.  The main results were as follows: (1) John and Alexei are easily distinguishable from each other, due in part to the more latter’s “Russian” use of function words (“the,” “which,” “that,” etc.).   (2) Alexei, despite having lived in the US for more than a decade, is if anything becoming more “Russian” in his function word use over time. (3) Even more interestingly, John is also becoming more “Russian” in his function word use—a possible result of his long interaction with Alexei. (4) A joint paper by Kitaev and Preskill was indeed written by both of them.  (Update: While detained at the airport, Paul decided to post an online video of his talk.)

Speaking of which, the great Alexei Kitaev himself—the $3 million man—spoke about Berry curvature for many-body systems, but unfortunately I had to fly back early (y’know, 2-month-old baby) and missed his talk.  Maybe someone else can provide a summary.

Happy 60th birthday, John!

Two unrelated announcements.

1. Everyone who reads this blog should buy Sean Carroll’s two recent books: From Eternity to Here (about the arrow of time) and The Particle at the End of the Universe (about the Higgs boson and quantum field theory more generally).  They’re two of the best popular physics books I’ve ever read—in their honesty, humor, clarity, and total lack of pretense, they exemplify what every book in this genre should be but very few are.  If you need even more inducement, go watch Sean hit it out of the park on the Colbert Report (and then do it again).  I can’t watch those videos without seething with jealousy: given how many “OK”s and “y’know”s lard my every spoken utterance, I’ll probably never get invited to hawk a book on Colbert.  Which is a shame, because as it happens, my Quantum Computing Since Democritus book will finally be released in the US by Cambridge University Press on April 30th!  (It’s already available in the UK, but apparently needs to be shipped to the US by boat.)  And it’s loaded with new material, not contained in the online lecture notes.  And you can preorder it now.  And my hawking of Sean’s books is in no way whatsoever related to any hope that Sean might return the favor with my book.

2. Recent Turing Award winner Silvio Micali asks me to advertise the Second Cambridge Area Economics and Computation Day (CAEC’13), which will be held on Friday April 26 at MIT.  Anything for you, Silvio!  (At least for the next week or two.)

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In 7+ years of blogging, one lesson I’ve learned is to go easy on the highly-personal stuff.  But sometimes one does need to make an exception.  Lily Rebecca Aaronson was born today (Jan. 20), at 6:55am, to me and Dana, weighing 3.3kg.  (After seeing her placenta, the blog category “Adventures in Meatspace” never seemed more appropriate.)  I’m blogging from the postpartum ward, which has free wifi and excellent food—we’ll probably stay here as long as they’ll let us.

Given that her parents are both complexity theorists, one question people will have is whether Lily demonstrates any early aptitude in that field.  All I can say is that, so far, she’s never once confused quantum computing with classical exponential parallelism, treated relativization as acting on a complexity class rather than on its definition, or made any other mathematical mistake that I can see.  (She has, on the other hand, repeatedly mistaken her hand for food.)

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I’m in Edinburgh this week to visit my wonderful old friends Elham Kashefi and Rahul Santhanam, and to give a series of talks.  It’s my first visit to my “ancestral homeland,” and as you can see above, I’ve enjoyed visiting my namesake monument and eating some freshly-ground haggis.

Earlier today, I was delighted to meet the matrix-multiplication-exponent-lowerer and unwilling Shtetl-Optimized celebrity Andrew Stothers, and to treat him to lunch.  (I’d promised to buy Andrew a beer if I was ever in Edinburgh, to apologize for the blog-circus I somehow dragged him into, but he only wanted a diet Coke.)  I’m now convinced that Andrew’s not publicizing his lowering of ω was mostly a very simple matter of his not being in contact with the theoretical computer science community.  One factor might be that, here at U. of Edinburgh, the math and CS buildings are on different campuses two miles away from each other!

I apologize for the light-to-nonexistent blogging.  To tide you over until I have time to post something real, here are some extremely-interesting quantum information papers that appeared on the arXiv just recently: A multi-prover interactive proof for NEXP sound against entangled provers by Tsuyoshi Ito and my postdoc Thomas Vidick, and Bell’s Theorem Without Free Will by Tobias Fritz.

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A few months ago, I got a surprise call from Subra Suresh, director of the National Science Foundation, who told me I was going to share this year’s Alan T. Waterman Award with Robert Wood of Harvard.  (At first I assumed it was a telemarketing call, since pretty much no one calls my office phone; I use my iPhone exclusively and have trouble even operating my desk phone.)  Dr. Suresh explained that this was the first time the Waterman would ever be awarded to two people the same year, but that the committee was unanimous in supporting both me and Rob.  Looking up my co-winner, I quickly learned that Rob was a leader in the field of robot bees (see here for video)—and that his work, despite having obvious military applications, had been singled out by Sean Hannity as the latter’s #1 example of government waste (!).  That fact, alone, made me deeply honored to share the award with Rob, and eager to meet him in person.

Happily, I finally got to do that this past Thursday, at the Waterman award ceremony in Washington DC.  The festivities started in the morning, with talks by me and Rob to the National Science Board.  (I just performed my usual shtick.  I was hoping Rob would bring some actual RoboBees, but he said he no longer does that due to an unfortunate run-in with airport security.)  Then, after lunch and meetings at the NSF, it was back to the hotel to change into a tux, an item I’d never worn before in my life (not even at my wedding).  Fortunately, my dad was there to help me insert the cufflinks and buttons, a task much more complicated than anything I was allegedly getting the award for.  Then Dana and I were picked up by a limo, to begin the arduous mile-long journey from Dupont Circle to the State Department for the awards dinner.

Besides me and Rob, there were three other awardees that night:

• Leon Lederman, the 89-year-old Nobel physicist whose popular book (The God Particle) I enjoyed as a kid, received the Vannevar Bush Award.
• Lawrence Krauss, physicist and popular science writer, and National Public Radio’s science desk shared the National Science Board Public Service Award.  Some readers of science blogs might recognize Lawrence Krauss from his recent brouhaha over literally nothing with the philosopher of science David Albert.  (For whatever it’s worth, I have little to add to Sean Carroll’s diplomatic yet magisterial summary of the issues over on Cosmic Variance.)

Speaking of diplomacy, the awards dinner was held in the “diplomatic reception rooms” on the top floor of the State Department’s Harry S. Truman Building.   These were pretty awesome rooms: full of original portraits of George Washington, Ben Franklin, etc., as well as antique furniture pieces like a desk that Thomas Jefferson allegedly used while writing the Declaration of Independence.  I could easily eat dinner there on a regular basis.

Carl Wieman, the Nobel physicist and Associate Director for Science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, read out a congratulatory message from President Obama.  I feel certain the President remembered I was the same dude he shook hands with a while back.

Anyway, cutting past dinner and dessert, here was my short acceptance speech:

Thanks for this honor, and huge congratulations to my co-winners, wherever in the alphabet they might lie [a reference to my getting called up before Rob Wood, simply because Aaronson<Wood lexicographically].  I like to describe my research, on the limits of quantum computers, as the study of what we can’t do with computers we don’t have.  Why would I or anyone else study such a bizarre thing?  Mostly because we’re inspired by history.  In the 1930s, before electronic computers even existed, a few people like Alan Turing were already trying to understand mathematically what such devices would or wouldn’t be able to do.  Their work ultimately made possible the information age.  Today, we don’t know exactly where curiosity about (say) quantum computers or the P versus NP question is going to lead, but I’m grateful to live in a country that’s able to support this kind of thing.  I thank the NSF and the Obama administration for supporting basic science even in difficult times.  I thank Subra Suresh (my former dean at MIT), and my phenomenal program officer Dmitry Maslov.  I thank the teachers and mentors to whom I owe almost everything, including Chris Lynch, Bart Selman, Avi Wigderson, and Umesh Vazirani.  I thank my wonderful colleagues at MIT—including my department head Anantha Chandrakasan, who’s here now—and my students and postdocs.  I thank my collaborators, and the entire theory of computing and quantum information communities, which I’m so proud to be part of.  I thank my students in 6.045 for understanding why I had to miss class today.  Most of all, I thank four people who are here with me now—my mom, dad, and my brother David, who’ve always believed in me, whether justified or not, and my wife, Dana Moshkovitz Aaronson, who’s enriched my life ever since she came into it three years ago.  Thank you.

The next day, I had the privilege of giving a quantum computing talk to more than 100 students at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in nearby Alexandria, VA.  Visiting TJ had special meaning for me, since while I was suffering through high school, TJ was my “dream school”: I wished my parents lived in the DC area so that I could go there.  I told the TJ students never to forget just how good they had it.  (To this day, when I meet fellow American-raised scientists, and they tell me they’re surprised I had such an unhappy time in high school, since they themselves had a great time, I always ask them which high school they went to.  In a large fraction of cases, the answer turns out to be TJ—and when it isn’t, it’s often the Bronx High School of Science or another similar place.)  As should surprise no one, the students had vastly more detailed questions about my talk than did the National Science Board (for example, they wanted to know whether I thought progress in group theory would lead to new quantum algorithms).

Without doubt, the most surreal aspect of this trip was the contrast between what was going on in my “real” and “virtual” lives.  Again and again, I’d be shaking hands with the Undersecretary of Defense, Director of the National Institute of Prestigiousness, etc. etc., and warmly accepting these fine people’s congratulations.  Then I’d sneak away for a minute to moderate my blog comments on my iPhone, where I’d invariably find a fresh round of insults about my “deeply ignorant lesser brain” from entanglement denier Joy Christian.

Perhaps the funniest contrast had to do with a MathOverflow question that I posted just before I left for DC, and which was quickly answered, just as I had hoped.  During the limo ride back from the dinner, I got the following polite inquiry from a blog commenter calling himself “Mike”:

Hey Scott, I’m wondering how you got the courage to post that question on [MathOverflow]. In truth it wasn’t that hard of a question and if you have trouble solving it then…well, no offense, but you see what I mean. Reputation matters.

As I contemplated Mike’s question, a profound sense of peace came over me.  Probably for the first time in my life, I realized just how lucky I really am.  I’m lucky that I feel free to ask naïve, simpleminded questions, toss out speculations, and most importantly, admit when I don’t know something or made a mistake, without worrying too much about whether those actions will make me look foolish before the “Mikes” of the world.  If I want to work on a problem myself, I can do that; if I prefer giving the problem out to others, I can do that as well.  Let Mike, with his greater wisdom, sit in judgment of me for my failure to see all the answers that no doubt are obvious to him.  I don’t mind.  In science, like in everything else, I’ll continue being an unabashed doofus—partly because it seems to work OK, but mostly just because it’s the only way I know.

Thanks so much to all of you for your support.

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I’m blogging from Machu Picchu, the famed summer home of the Inca emperors, nestled so deeply in the Andean mountains of Peru that the Spanish conquistadores never managed to find and destroy it. (I’m in Peru to attend the LATIN’2012 conference next week. It’s a business trip, I swear!)

I’ll be happy to post photos later if anyone wants.  In the meantime, this just seemed like as good a time as any to break radio silence.

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