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The countdown had begun. In ten days, I’d move from Florida, where I’d spent the summer with family, to Caltech. Unfolded boxes leaned against my dresser, and suitcases yawned on the floor. I was working on a paper. Even if I’d turned around from my desk, I wouldn’t have seen the stacked books and folded [...]
Physicists are not known for finesse. “Even if it cost us our funding,” I’ve heard a physicist declare, “we’d tell you what we think.” Little wonder I irked the porter who directed me toward central Cambridge. The University of Cambridge consists of colleges as the US consists of states. Each college has a porter’s lodge, [...]
The night before defending my Masters thesis, I ran out of shampoo. I ran out late enough that I wouldn’t defend from beneath a mop like Jack Sparrow’s; but, belonging to the Luxuriant Flowing-Hair Club for Scientists (technically, if not officially), I’d have to visit Shopper’s Drug Mart. The author’s unofficially Luxuriant [...]
Faculty Lunch and Discussion Date Speaker Location June 3 Xie Chen 114 East Bridge May 13 Dave Hsieh 114 East Bridge April 29 Jason Alicea 114 East Bridge April 15 Daniel Silevitch B157 West Bridge February 26 Alexei Kitaev 114 East Bridge February 12 Rana Adhikari 114 East Bridge January 29 Linda Ye 114 [...]
This year marks the 50th anniversary of my first publication. In 1964, when we were eleven-year-old fifth graders, my best friend Mace Rosenstein and I launched The Pres-stein Gazette, a not-for-profit monthly. Though the first issue sold well, the second issue never appeared. Front page of the inaugural issue of the Pres-stein Gazette. Faded [...]
I am a theoretical physicist at University of California, Berkeley. Last month, I attended a very interesting conference organized by Foundamental Questions Institute (FQXi) in Puerto Rico, and presented a talk about making predictions in cosmology, especially in the eternally inflating multiverse. I very much enjoyed discussions with people at the conference, where I was invited [...]
In anticipation of The Theory of Everything which comes out today, and in the spirit of continuing with Quantum Frontiers’ current movie theme, I wanted to provide an overview of Stephen Hawking’s pathbreaking research. Or at least to the best of my ability—not every blogger on this site has won bets against Hawking! In particular, I [...]
Transforming the STEM Pipeline into a River The traditional metaphor of the “leaky pipeline” tracks the number of students entering the educational system and emphasizes points at which women and minority students leave the system. IQIM is working to increase diversity on our campus and more broadly in STEM by encouraging a [...]
First slide, viewed on my laptop. I'm lazy. The only reason I ever do anything is that sometimes in a weak moment I agree to do something, and after that I don't have the nerve to back out. And that's how I happened to give the introductory lectures leading off the 12th Canadian [...]
The lessons we learned from the Ryu-Takayanagi formula, the firewall paradox and the ER=EPR conjecture have convinced us that quantum information theory can become a powerful tool to sharpen our understanding of various problems in high-energy physics. But, many of the concepts utilized so far rely on entanglement entropy and its generalizations, quantities developed by [...]