December | 2014 | Quantum Frontiers

I heard it in a college lecture about Haskell.

Haskell is a programming language akin to Latin: Learning either language expands your vocabulary and technical skills. But programmers use Haskell as often as slam poets compose dactylic hexameter.^*

My professor could have understudied for the archetypal wise man: He had snowy hair, a beard, and glasses that begged to be called “spectacles.” Pointing at the code he’d projected onto a screen, he was lecturing about input/output, or I/O. The user inputs a request, and the program outputs a response.

That autumn was consuming me. Computer-science and physics courses had filled my plate. Atop the plate, I had thunked the soup tureen known as “XKCD Comes to Dartmouth”: I was coordinating a visit by Randall Munroe, creator of the science webcomic xkcd, to my college. The visit was to include a cake shaped like the Internet, a robotic velociraptor, and playpen balls. The output I’d promised felt offputting.

My professor knew. We sat in his office for hours each week, dispatching my questions about recursion and monads and complexity. His input shaped the functional-programming skills I apply today, and my input shaped his lecture notes. He promised to attend my event.

Most objects coded in Haskell, my professor reminded us in that lecture, remain static. The Haskell world never changes. Even the objects called “variables” behave like constants. Exceptions, my professor said, crop up in I/O. Users can affect a program through objects called “actions.”

“Actions,” he said, “do change the world.”

I caught my breath. What a zinger, I thought. What a moral. What a lesson for the ages—and from the mouths of computer scientists.

My professor had no idea. He swanned on about I/O without changing tone.

That December, I gave my professor a plaque that read, “Actions do change the world.” Around his slogan, I’d littered illustrations of fractals, Pascal’s triangle, and other subjects we’d studied. My professor’s actions had changed my world for the better.

You can change the world by writing code that revolutionizes physics or finance. You can change the world by writing code that limps through tasks but improves your understanding. You can change the world by helping someone understand code. You can change the world by understanding someone.

A new year is beginning. Which actions will you take?

^*Not that I recommend studying Haskell to boost your verbal SAT score.

by Jorge Cham.

Ok, this is where things get weird. If quantum computers, femtometer motions or laser alligators weren’t enough, let’s throw in fractionalized electrons, topological surfaces and strings that go to the end of time.

To be honest, the idea that an electron can’t be split hadn’t even occurred to me before my conversation with Gil and Jason. And yet, this goes back to the very essence of the word Quantum: there’s a minimum size to everything. For electrical charge, that minimum is the electron.

Or so we thought! According to my friend, Wikipedia, the discovery of the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect in the 1980’s showed that you can form quasi-particles (or “bubbles” as Gil and Jason explain in the video) that carry 1/3 of an electron charge under certain 2D conditions. The 1998 Nobel Prize was awarded for this discovery, although, ironically, they had to split it in three (two for the experimentalists who found it and one for the theorist that explained it).

Typically, I leave a lot out of the final video. The conversation I recorded with Jason and Gil lasted several hours and yet the final product is only five minutes long. One aspect that we talked a lot about but that I did not include in the video above (you watched it already, right?), is the idea of “More is Different”. Here is audio of Jason explaining what it is using birds as an example:

source: we-are-star-stuff.tumblr.com. Click below to hear the audio.

This is the idea of “emergent properties”: that when you combine lots of something together, you don’t just get what’s inside, you get something new. Something different. I think this is a good analogy for IQIM itself, or any such grouping of researchers under one banner. Sure, technically, each person can do great research on their own, but mix them together in one soup and more interesting things can happen that you didn’t expect.

The IQIM Family:

Well, I hope you’ve been enjoying these videos and blog entries. I was going to title this blog post, “The Mysteries Are Just Piling Up” or “Quantum Knots”, but then I looked at the pageviews for all the other blog posts I made: