rose.blog

There used to be a time when one person could know pretty much everything that was known. Those days are long gone. Nowadays in order to become an expert in anything you need to focus pretty much all of your faculties on that one thing.

This leads to a couple interesting effects. One is that this focus tends to color everything about how you view the world. People tend to approach problems and form opinions through the lens of their expertise. This happens all the time when disciplines are close-for example solid state physicists tend to have a way of thinking about chemistry problems that is predictable and different from the way chemists think of these things-but it also happens in wierder situations, where the area of expertise is entirely disjoint from the situation being analyzed-like when theoretical computer scientists have opinions about real computers for example.

I think this is inevitable. But understanding this phenomenon is very important in dealing with any highly multidisciplinary technology effort. One thing you can actively try to do is make sure that basic results known to one class of expert are understood by the others. It’s easy to assume that just because something is well-known in one sector of science that leading experts in something else will be aware of these results, but this is almost always not the case.

So why am I going on about this? Well it turns out that something I thought was foundational knowledge in quantum computation is not common knowledge for a lot of QC theorists (although I’ve yet to meet an experimental QC-er who didn’t know about these. You guys should talk more).

An entry point into these sets of experiments is here, which in my opinion is a QC classic and one of the most important experimental QC papers written to date. A good theoretical analysis of this type of system is here.

Now that I get that a lot of people aren’t aware of these I’m going to spread the good word.