{"id":2847,"date":"2016-07-02T18:30:15","date_gmt":"2016-07-02T22:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2847"},"modified":"2016-12-10T04:34:51","modified_gmt":"2016-12-10T09:34:51","slug":"did-einstein-kill-schrodingers-cat-a-quantum-state-of-mind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2847","title":{"rendered":"“Did Einstein Kill Schr\u00f6dinger’s Cat? A Quantum State of Mind”"},"content":{"rendered":"

No, I didn’t invent that title. \u00a0And no, I don’t know of any interesting sense in which “Einstein killed Schr\u00f6dinger’s cat,” though arguably there are senses in which Schr\u00f6dinger’s cat killed Einstein.<\/p>\n

The above was, however, the title given to\u00a0a fun\u00a0panel discussion<\/a> that Daniel Harlow, Brian Swingle, and I participated in on Wednesday evening, at the spectacular facility of the New York Academy of Sciences on the 40th floor of 7 World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. \u00a0The moderator was\u00a0George Musser of Scientific American<\/em>. \u00a0About 200 people showed up, some of whom we got to meet at the reception afterward.<\/p>\n

(The link<\/a> will take you to streaming video of the event, though you’ll need to scroll to 6:30 or so for the thing to start.)<\/p>\n

The subject of the panel was the surprising recent connections between quantum information and quantum gravity, something that Daniel, Brian, and I all talked about different aspects of. \u00a0I admitted at the outset that, not only was I not a real expert on the topic (as Daniel and Brian are), I wasn’t even a physicist, just a computer science humor mercenary or whatever the hell I am. \u00a0I then proceeded, ironically, to explain the Harlow-Hayden argument for the computational hardness of creating a firewall, despite Harlow sitting right next to me (he chose to focus on something else). \u00a0I was planning also to discuss Lenny Susskind’s conjecture relating the circuit complexity of quantum states to the AdS\/CFT correspondence, but I ran out of time.<\/p>\n

Thanks so much to my fellow participants, to George for moderating, and especially to Jennifer Costley, Crystal Ocampo, and everyone else at NYAS for organizing the event.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No, I didn’t invent that title. \u00a0And no, I don’t know of any interesting sense in which “Einstein killed Schr\u00f6dinger’s cat,” though arguably there are senses in which Schr\u00f6dinger’s cat killed Einstein. The above was, however, the title given to\u00a0a fun\u00a0panel discussion that Daniel Harlow, Brian Swingle, and I participated in on Wednesday evening, at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10,31,5,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventures-in-meatspace","category-announcements","category-complexity","category-quantum"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2847"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2848,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2847\/revisions\/2848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}