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| bio | website | scottaaronson.com |
|---|---|---|
| location | Cambridge, MA | |
| age | 31 | |
| visits | member for | 1 year |
| seen | Apr 24 at 1:38 | |
| stats | profile views | 537 |
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Apr 29 |
awarded | Yearling |
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Apr 13 |
awarded | Nice Question |
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Mar 29 |
answered | Does quantum computing rely on particular interpretations of quantum mechanics? |
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Mar 19 |
awarded | Necromancer |
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Jan 3 |
comment |
If the ground states of interacting QFTs are so complicated, how did Nature find them? dmckee: You seem to be answering a much easier question than the one I asked! I know there's an algorithm to efficiently simulate at least special QFTs on a quantum computer, since JLP showed it (check out their paper if you haven't yet). And yes, certainly you can describe such an algorithm in path-integral language. My question was about the step in their algorithm where you need to adiabatically prepare the interacting vacuum state. Can you avoid that step? If so how? If not, how does Nature do that step? (John Preskill has now partly answered this question; see below.) |
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Jan 3 |
comment |
If the ground states of interacting QFTs are so complicated, how did Nature find them? @Hugh: This is off-topic, but I think that's completely wrong. If it were correct, then why shouldn't MWI believers simply shoot themselves with (very fast and effective) guns hooked up to quantum random number generators? Since they can never observe the gun being fired, obviously it will seem never to do so! ;-D Yet I don't see them lining up to try it (nor can I blame them, since I don't see anything in MWI that says we get to condition on remaining alive). |
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Jan 3 |
awarded | Nice Question |
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Jan 3 |
revised |
If the ground states of interacting QFTs are so complicated, how did Nature find them? added 29 characters in body |
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Jan 3 |
comment |
If the ground states of interacting QFTs are so complicated, how did Nature find them? BTW, I suppose we'd better HOPE that the early universe found the correct QCD ground state! I'd never quite put together that, if the known universe gets destroyed via tunneling to a lower-energy vacuum state, the Earth incinerated by a bubble expanding outward at the speed of light, then we ought to blame the failure of the quantum adiabatic algorithm to efficiently find global optima to NP- and QMA-hard optimization problems. :-) |
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Jan 3 |
comment |
If the ground states of interacting QFTs are so complicated, how did Nature find them? One quick thing: your answer focuses on QCD. Is the story substantially different if we want to prepare other interacting ground states, say for the electroweak or Higgs fields? |
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Jan 3 |
comment |
If the ground states of interacting QFTs are so complicated, how did Nature find them? Thanks, John -- that's extremely helpful! I'm delighted and awestruck that my option (2), which I considered rather fanciful (but not logically excluded), seems not so far from the truth. So, what you need to do in the "adiabatic" step of JLP could be explained, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, as recreating something like the conditions of the early universe! (Of course, this still doesn't explain why you need to adiabatically turn off the interactions before measuring, but maybe that's a separate issue.) |
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Jan 3 |
accepted | If the ground states of interacting QFTs are so complicated, how did Nature find them? |
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Jan 2 |
comment |
If the ground states of interacting QFTs are so complicated, how did Nature find them? dmckee: So, if that's correct, can you get rid of the "adiabatically turn on the interaction" step in computer simulations of QFT, or can't you? |
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Jan 2 |
comment |
If the ground states of interacting QFTs are so complicated, how did Nature find them? Thanks---yes, I suppose! So then I simply revise the question to, "how does Nature find A ground state?" |
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Jan 2 |
revised |
If the ground states of interacting QFTs are so complicated, how did Nature find them? deleted 5 characters in body |
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Jan 2 |
asked | If the ground states of interacting QFTs are so complicated, how did Nature find them? |
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Oct 15 |
awarded | Nice Question |
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Oct 9 |
accepted | Hawking radiation and reversibility |
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Oct 9 |
revised |
Hawking radiation and reversibility added 2 characters in body |
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Oct 9 |
asked | Hawking radiation and reversibility |
