TEDxCaltech | Feynman's Vision: The Next 50 Years Caltech In recognition of the 50 year anniversaries of Richard Feynman's visionary talk "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" and the inauguration of his revolutionary "Feynman Lectures on Physics," the Institute will host TEDxCaltech on January 14, 2011. TEDxCaltech will be a dynamic celebration of Feynman's spirit, curiosity, and scientific vision, and will take ideas worth sharing from Caltech out into the world by celebrating Nobel Laureate, visionary, and “curious character” Richard Feynman, with the theme “Feynman’s Vision: The Next 50 Years.” Speakers include Scott Aaronson, Immanuel Bloch, Sean Carroll, John Preskill, Lenny Susskind, David Awschalom, Kip Thorne, Charlie Marcus, Don Eigler, Michael Roukes, Craig Venter, and many more.

Future holds key to quantum physics — Obama awards National Medal of Science to Aharonov 

The National Medal of Science  

As reported in USAToday, Yakir Aharanov of Chapman University was in Washington D.C. to collect a National Medal of Science this past week:

“The future is affecting the past—all the time, on the quantum level—allowing physicists to effectively select the future they want their particles to have, within limits, and amplifying the results for a desired outcome.”

“I really believe we are close to a second revolution in physics as big as the one a century ago," Yakir Aharonov says. "I feel we are only beginning to free existing quantum theory and to do so, we must think of time in another way.”

Austrian Fellowship on Quantum Physics and the Nature of Reality

I'm recently back from two resident Templeton fellowships on Quantum Mechanics in Higher Dimensional Hilbert Spaces and Quantum Physics and the Nature of Reality at Austrian International Akademie Traunkirchen with Nobel laureate Anton Zeilinger.

Fruitful collaborations were borne from engaging discussions with inspiring pioneers in the field including Rupert Ursin, Marcus Aspelmeyer, Časlav Brukner, William Wootters, Christopher Fuchs, Daniel Greenberger and Michael Horne. 

Christopher Altman (front, center), Traunkirchen, Austria

Creative discussions were enhanced by the tranquil setting of the former monastery, surrounded by mountainous scenery and clear blue skies reflected off the mirrored waters of Lake Traunsée. Overlooking the lake are Mount Traunstein, Salzkammergut, and the alpine mountain ranges spanning Upper Austria.

Photos of the picturesque setting and the idyllic, crystalline lake in the Austrian Alps are available online here. 

Zeilinger's achievements are most succinctly described in his citation for the Nobel Prize in Physics (2022) and the Isaac Newton Medal of the Institute of Physics: 

“For his pioneering conceptual and experimental contributions to the foundations of quantum physics, which have become the cornerstone for the rapidly-evolving field of quantum information. He is a pioneer in the field of quantum information and the foundations of quantum mechanics.”

Zeilinger and his colleagues have demonstrated many world's-first achievements in the field, including quantum teleportation, entanglement swapping, dense coding, entanglement-based quantum cryptography, one-way quantum computation, multipartite quantum entanglement, and blind quantum computation. In addition, he has made many important contributions to the conceptual and experimental foundations of quantum mechanics, particularly in the areas of quantum entanglement and macroscopic quantum mechanics. 

IQOQI Deputy Director Rupert Ursin later joined up for a tour of Mauna Kea and the Big Island of Hawaii in close proximity to the IEEE Summer Topicals Meeting on Quantum Photonics and Communications in Waikoloa, where he spoke on The Next Frontier of Quantum Communications, sharing engaging discussions alongside long, meandering morning walks on the beach that gave birth to new collaborations with Richard Hughes, Chair of the USG Quantum Roadmap at LANL, Tim Ralph, Wolfgang Tittel, Jaewan Kim, and Masahide Sasaki. 

Soon thereafter I was fortunate to attend the inaugural NASA Quantum Future Technologoies Conference under the visionary leadership of USAF Gen. Pete Worden, PhD astrophysicist. Stimulating debates with longtime mentor Jon Dowling led to further research collaborations with Ursin, Williams, Sharma, Villoresi under the DARPA QUINESS Macroscopic Quantum Communications program through our team proposal, Astronaut Development and Deployment of a Secure Quantum Space Channel Prototype at the Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems. 

— In tribute to pioneer of quantum reality Michael Horne. 

Quantum computers may be much easier to build than previously thought Physical Review Letters physorg, arXiv "Quantum computers should be much easier to build than previously thought, because they can still work with a large number of faulty or even missing components, according to a study published today in Physical Review Letters. This surprising discovery brings scientists one step closer to designing and building real-life quantum computing system—devices that could have enormous potential across a wide range of fields, from drug design, electronics, and even code-breaking."

Moving Towards Quantum Computing New York Times "Three major technologies have the potential to move from demonstration computers to practical, highly powerful machines. 'We’re at the stage of trying to develop these qubits in a way that would be like the integrated circuit that would allow you to make many of them at once,' said Rob Schoelkopf, a physicist who is leader of the Yale group. In the next few years you’ll see operations on more qubits, but only a handful. The good news is that while the number of qubits is increasing only slowly, the precision with which the researchers are able to control quantum interactions has increased a thousandfold."

Seth Lloyd—Quantum effects in Biological Systems MIT cbc.ca "Lloyd's biological research, funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, looks at how living things use quantum computation [...] Bird navigation, plant photosynthesis and the sense of smell all represent ways living things appear to exploit the oddities of quantum physics."