Alan D. Salewski via plug on 22 May 2026 11:58:44 -0700


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Re: [PLUG] Quantum computing talk Thursday night at Princeton ACM

I was on the Zoom session as a wallflower. A fair amount of the physics went over my head, and I was not familiar with all the players in the story, but it was fascinating hearing Terry Bollinger's retracing the history of the ideas behind quantum computing -- with an emphasis on a split in perspectives between Richard Feynman and Hugh Everett -- and how that affected how we think about it today. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the video recording so I can study it better and maybe track down some of the referenced writings.
There were quite a few ideas presented that were mind-bending to me. A particular idea that was new to me was that "Maxwell's equations cannot explain all electromagnetic phenomena if they are interpreted /only/ in the future direction". (Emphasis in original) I took a screenshot of the (CC BY 4.0)[0] slide, and am sharing a plain text approximation of it here as a taste: 

<quote>
                   The Strange Issue of Recoil


  => Contrary to what you likely have heard...
-> Maxwell's equations cannot explain all electromagnetic phenomena _if they are interpreted /only/ in the future direction_ 

     -> The missing behavior: _Recoil after charge acceleration_
-> The only fully conserving momentum-energy source of local recoil is the _particle that absorbs the photon in the future_ 

     -> _That particle could be billions of years in the future

  => An experiment: Shine a laser into the darkest part of space

     -> With sufficiently good instruments, you can _detect a recoil effect_

     -> _That recoil is a testable example of the future affecting you now_
</quote>
If that sounds interesting to you, then you'll love the video section where that leads into a discussion of quantum computing in two-dimensional time.
As he notes elsewhere on this thread, Michael Lazin was also there and asked Bollinger a couple of interesting questions, one which led to an interesting high-level discussion of chemical computers (another topic I need to read up on; thanks, Michael, for bringing them up).
Thanks, Walt, for bringing that meeting to our attention. I'm very happy that I was able to make it. 

-Al


[0] CC BY 4.0
    https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

--
a l a n   d.   s a l e w s k i
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On 2026-05-22 10:34:27, Walt Mankowski via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org> spake thus:

I needed to run some errands after work and totally forgot all about
this until this morning. Did anyone attend?

Walt

On Wed, May 20, 2026 at 05:20:06PM -0400, Michael Lazin via plug wrote:

I will try to attend this because I am interested in the idea of quantum
cryptography.  I am more interested in the creation and protection of
quantum cryptographic keys because the qubit provides a physics level
approach to protecting an encryption key because if you view or copy the
key the state of the qubit changes and you cannot know what state the qubit
was in before it was modified.  Please excuse me if this explanation is too
simple.


Michael Lazin

.. τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι.

On Wed, May 20, 2026 at 5:01 PM Walt Mankowski via plug <
plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Tomorrow night Terry Bollinger will be giving a talk on quantum
> computing at the Princeton ACM. Here's a brief synopsis:
>
> ===
>
> A Deep-Physical Look at Quantum Computing
>
> The talk begins with a description of how David-Deutsch-style quantum
> computing was supposed to undermine all prime-number cryptography
> methods by using only 15 qubits. Not 15 thousand or 15 million: 15
> qubits. What happened after that, and why usable quantum computing
> continues to stump the world decades later, is the topic of this talk.
>
> ===
>
> The meeting is online and starts at 8 PM EDT tomorrow night, May
> 21. For more information go to
>
> https://princetonacm.acm.org/meetings/mtg2605.pdf
>
> Walt
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___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
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___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug

___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug