Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Stephany's Wacky Rant for Tuesday

Alternative Title: "Stephany Coffman-Wolph + Quantum Anything = Complete Confussion on a Huge Scale"

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the universe." - Albert Einstein

Monday was another quantum computing related lecture. Although I find the whole topic extremely hard to grasp, I find it amazingly interesting. Honest. It just, when I leave lecture, I feel as though the world is not continuing in the same method it was before class started. Everything that one thought they knew and understood about the world - may not entirely be true. I am sure this is sounding a lot more than a rant than anything (sorry about that). It's really not. It is more of a "Stephany trying to come to grips with a world that contains quantum aspects".

I am totally understanding why Einstein had a difficult time believing in quantum computing. He felt there must be something controlling the particles, making them act the way they do (instead of it being random). Of course, it has been demonstated that Einstein was wrong. Some how this makes me feel better. Really, really smart people (those considered to be "brilliant") have a hard time with the concept of quantum computing.

My personal struggles are nothing new, everyone has them when learning quantum physics/computing. Therefore, I have decided to post a few links that anyone interested in reading more about quantum computing might be interested in taking a look at:

From this page from Slashdot you can get a great pdf (250 pages) on the topic of Quantum computing. It appears to be written as a good starting place. Of course, I haven't read all of it - yet.

This is an interesting recent article on the subject. A piece of silicon (1/10 of a human hair) oscillated in a lab at Boston University. It was done at extremely cold temperature (110 millikelvin). Yikes, 1/10 degree above absolute zero.

As I said in an earlier blog Quantum computing throws encryption rules out the window. This article discusses this issue further. Did you know when the first quantum computer was demonstrated? 1998. Quantum cryptography, a spin off field is also dicussed in this article and I highly recommend anyone studying sercurity/cryptography to take a look at the article if only for that part.

Well, I hope you enjoy a few of my links. So I will end the blog on a significantly lighter note.

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