{"id":6830,"date":"2022-11-22T22:12:34","date_gmt":"2022-11-23T04:12:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=6830"},"modified":"2022-11-22T22:12:34","modified_gmt":"2022-11-23T04:12:34","slug":"dismantling-quantum-hype-with-tim-nguyen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=6830","title":{"rendered":"Dismantling Quantum Hype with Tim Nguyen"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers! While I enjoy a family holiday-week vacation in exotic Dallas—and yes, I will<\/em> follow up on my old JFK post<\/a> by visiting Dealey Plaza—please enjoy the following Thanksgiving victuals:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I recently recorded a 3-hour (!) YouTube video with Timothy Nguyen<\/a>, host of the Cartesian Cafe<\/a>. Our episode is entitled Quantum Computing: Dismantling the Hype<\/a>. In it, I teach a sort of extremely<\/em> compressed version of my undergraduate Intro to Quantum Information Science course<\/a>, unburdening myself about whatever Tim prompts me to explain: the basic rules of quantum information, quantum circuits<\/a>, the quantum black-box model<\/a>, the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm<\/a>, BQP<\/a> and its relationship to classical complexity classes, and sampling-based quantum supremacy experiments. This is a lot more technical than an average podcast, a lot less<\/em> technical than an actual course, and hopefully just right for some nonempty subset of readers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Outside of his podcasting career, some of you might recognize Nguyen as the coauthor, with Theo Polya, of a rebuttal of “Geometric Unity.”<\/a> This latter is the proposal by the financier, podcaster, and leading “Intellectual Dark Web” figure Eric Weinstein<\/a> for a unified theory of particle physics. Now, I slightly know Weinstein, and have even found him fascinating, eloquent, and correct about various issues. So, in an addendum to the main video<\/a>, Nguyen chats with me about his experience critiquing Weinstein’s theory, and also about something where my knowledge is far greater: namely, my 2002 rebuttal<\/a> of some of the central claims in Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science<\/a><\/em>, and whether there are any updates to that story twenty years later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Enjoy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers! While I enjoy a family holiday-week vacation in exotic Dallas—and yes, I will follow up on my old JFK post by visiting Dealey Plaza—please enjoy the following Thanksgiving victuals: I recently recorded a 3-hour (!) YouTube video with Timothy Nguyen, host of the Cartesian Cafe. Our episode is entitled […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","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":true,"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":[31,5,4,24,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements","category-complexity","category-quantum","category-quantum-computing-primers","category-speaking-truth-to-parallelism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6830","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=6830"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6830\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6831,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6830\/revisions\/6831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}