{"id":543,"date":"2011-02-16T16:04:06","date_gmt":"2011-02-16T21:04:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=543"},"modified":"2017-01-12T20:30:02","modified_gmt":"2017-01-13T01:30:02","slug":"my-tedxcaltech-talk-on-p-vs-np-and-quantum-computing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=543","title":{"rendered":"My TEDxCaltech talk"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A month ago, Caltech hosted a daylong event called <a href=\"http:\/\/tedxcaltech.com\/\">\u201cTEDxCaltech \/ Feynman\u2019s Vision: the Next 50 Years\u201d<\/a>, which was attended by about a thousand people.  Celebrity participants included Stephen Hawking, Carl and Michelle Feynman (Carl told me he\u2019s a fan of the blog\u2014hi Carl!), and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ondar.com\/\">Ondar<\/a>, a Tuvan throat-singer who pretty much stole the show.<\/p>\n<p>Videos are finally being posted on YouTube; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=SczraSQE3MY\">my talk is here<\/a>.  My goal was to cover the P versus NP question, quantum computing, conceptual issues in quantum mechanics, and Feynman\u2019s relation to all three, while also cracking crude masturbation jokes (in a talk like this, one has to bring out the heavy humor cannons), and to finish in 15 minutes.  I don\u2019t know how well I succeeded\u2014but if I die tomorrow, then at least Stephen Hawking was in the audience when I made my case for P and NP being as big a deal as anything in physics.<\/p>\n<p>Two explanatory comments:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>By far my most successful joke was a reference to \u201cprime numbers, such as 3, 5, 1\u2026\u201d  Before the lunch break, the emcee had told everyone to be back by 1:35, \u201cwhich I\u2019m sure you nerds will remember since it\u2019s the first three prime numbers.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Yeah, I know the current upper bound on the matrix multiplication exponent is 2.376, not 2.736!  It was correct on the slides I submitted, but got transposed when the slides were converted into \u201cTED format.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If you think my talk stinks, my only defense is that showing up to give it was already an accomplishment: my flight (from Tel Aviv to LA through Newark) was canceled because of a snowstorm, so I arrived at Caltech exhausted and barely conscious, via a 36-hour alternate route through Frankfurt and London.<\/p>\n<p>I have to confess that I was skeptical of this event\u2019s entire premise.  Richard Feynman was famous for his contempt of pomp and authority; would he really have enjoyed a heavily-scripted day extolling him as a secular saint?  In the end, though, the quality of many of the talks made the event more than worthwhile for me, even <em>without<\/em> counting Ondar\u2019s throat-singing as a \u201ctalk.\u201d  I particularly enjoyed the cosmology talk of fellow-blogger Sean Carroll (yo, Sean), the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/caltech#p\/c\/B6401753BB13E367\/6\/hpjwotips7E\">Feynman stories of Lenny Susskind<\/a>, a demonstration of the mind-blowing <a href=\"http:\/\/www.worldwidetelescope.org\/Home.aspx\">WorldWide Telescope<\/a> by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/caltech#p\/c\/B6401753BB13E367\/8\/HkldGXyL-Ag\">Curtis Wong of Microsoft<\/a>, and a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=UzMQpZe-j4M\">\u201cWho Wants to be a Millionaire?\u201d parody skit<\/a> put on by the three \u201cblack hole bettors\u201d (John Preskill, Kip Thorne, and Hawking, the last of whom wheeled into the auditorium to thunderous applause and the opening fanfare of <em>Thus Spake Zarathustra<\/em>).  I understand that all the talks will eventually be on YouTube <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/caltech#p\/c\/B6401753BB13E367\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks to Michael Roukes, Mary Sikora, John Preskill, Ann Harvey, and the other organizers for putting this thing together and for inviting me.<\/p>\n<p><input id=\"gwProxy\" type=\"hidden\" \/><input id=\"jsProxy\" onclick=\"jsCall();\" type=\"hidden\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A month ago, Caltech hosted a daylong event called \u201cTEDxCaltech \/ Feynman\u2019s Vision: the Next 50 Years\u201d, which was attended by about a thousand people. Celebrity participants included Stephen Hawking, Carl and Michelle Feynman (Carl told me he\u2019s a fan of the blog\u2014hi Carl!), and Ondar, a Tuvan throat-singer who pretty much stole the show. [&hellip;]<\/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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543","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=543"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3141,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543\/revisions\/3141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}