JJohn Preskillohn Preskill is presenting the 2017 Oppenheimer Lecture at the University of California Berkeley. The Oppenheimer lecture is a public lecture with a distinguished tradition. Past lecturers have included: Murray Gell-Mann, Kip Thorne, Freeman Dyson, Chen-Ning Yang, Robert Laughlin, Bruno Zumino, Edward Witten, Martin Rees, Michael Fisher, Stephen Hawking, David Mermin, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji , Frank Wilczek, Lisa Randall, Gerard ‘t Hooft, Andrei Linde, and Charles Kane.

John Preskill’s talk is Quantum Computing and the Entanglement Frontier is February 27.  Abstract: The quantum laws governing atoms and other tiny objects seem to defy common sense, and information encoded in quantum systems has weird properties that baffle our feeble human minds. John Preskill will explain why he loves quantum entanglement, the elusive feature making quantum information fundamentally different from information in the macroscopic world. By exploiting quantum entanglement, quantum computers should be able to solve otherwise intractable problems, with far-reaching applications to cryptology, materials, and fundamental physical science. Preskill is less weird than a quantum computer, and easier to understand.