The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 35 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Preskill: Validated topological qubit may appear as soon as 2019
“And it's very ambitious, because at this point, it's not even clear they have a single qubit, but if that approach is successful, and we're, it's making progress, so I think we will see a validated Qubit of this type soon, maybe next year.”
Preskill: Superconducting circuits and trapped ions will lead for 5-10 years
“The most advanced are superconducting circuits and trapped ions, which is why I mentioned those first, and I think that will remain true, you know, over the next five to 10 years.”
Preskill: Quantum entanglement is what holds space-time geometry together
“So it's really the entanglement which holds space together, which keeps it from falling apart into little pieces.”
Preskill: Quantum computers will impact chemistry, carbon capture, and materials
“The Ones which will affect everyday life, I think, are better methods for understanding and inventing new materials, new chemical compounds. Things like that can be really important. You know, if you find a better way of capturing carbon by designing a better …”
Preskill: 50-to-100 qubit quantum computers will arrive in a couple years
“We think in a couple of years we'll have devices with about 50 qubits to a hundred, and we'll be able to control them pretty well, and that's an interesting range, because even though it's only 50 to a hundred qubits, doesn't sound like that big a deal, but th…”
Preskill: Quantum computers breaking public key crypto unlikely in 10 years, likely in 50
“I don't think, though I could be wrong, that we're likely to have quantum computers that can break those public key cryptosystems in 10 years. But in 50 years? Seems not unlikely.”
Preskill: Quantum computers will enable tabletop toy spacetime in decades
“And in particular, what we're going to be doing with quantum computers and, you know, the other quantum technologies that are Becoming increasingly sophisticated in the next couple of decades is we'll be able to control very well, highly entangled, complex qua…”
Preskill: Richard Feynman's refusal to read 1980s literature hurt his research
“The big difference between Feynman and me in the mid-nineteen-eighties is, I was reading literature, and he wasn't. And probably if he had been, it would have, he would have been well-served.”
Preskill: Most Important Quantum Applications Have Not Yet Been Conceived
“Probably the most important ones are things we haven't thought of when it comes to applications of quantum computing.”
Preskill: Efficient classical algorithms for quantum chemistry are unlikely
“Maybe some brilliant graduate student is going to drop a paper on the archive tomorrow which will say, here I solve quantum chemistry and I can do it on a digital computer. But we don't think that's very likely because we've been working pretty hard on these p…”
Preskill: Quantum hardware is far from converging on a single winning approach
“There are a number of different approaches to Building hardware, and nobody really knows which is going to be the best. We haven't, I think we're far from collapsing to one approach, which everybody agrees has the best long-term prospects for scalability.”
Preskill: Near-term quantum computing has best hopes in hybrid classical-quantum methods
“Well, I think in the near term, we're going to be trying out, and probably we have the best hopes for kind of hybrid classical quantum methods with some kind of classical feedback.”
Preskill: Silicon electron spin qubits could surpass other modalities long-term
“In the long term those electron spins could catapult ahead of these other things. That's something that you can naturally do in silicon, and you know, it's potentially easy to integrate, integrate with silicon technology.”
Preskill: Nuclear-spin quantum sensors can exceed existing spatial resolution limits
“And again, using this technology of Nuclear spins, which I mentioned you can do it at room temperature, potentially. You can make a pretty good sensor, and it can potentially achieve higher sensitivity and spatial resolution. You look, look at things on shorte…”
Preskill: Quantum speedup requires engineering interference to cancel incorrect answers
“The art of a quantum algorithm is to make sure that the wrong answers interfere and cancel one another out, so the right answer is enhanced. And that's not automatic. It requires that the quantum algorithm be designed in just the right way.”
Preskill: Feynman Insisted on First Principles Over Expert Literature
“Feynman he always wants to think things through for himself. From first principles rather than rely on the guidance from experts who have thought about these things before.”
Preskill: 10-year-old kids will play quantum games in a few decades
“What I wouldn't be surprised by is that if you go out a few decades, kids who are 10 years old are gonna be playing quantum games.”
Preskill: STEM education should prioritize critical reasoning over workforce training
“That STEM education, we shouldn't think of it as, we're going to need this technical workforce, and so we better train them. I think the key thing is, we want the general population to be able to reason effectively. You know, and to recognize when an argument …”
Preskill: Silicon Valley is likely to become Quantum Valley
“That's the place with the Silicon Valley is likely to be Quantum Valley the way things are right now.”
Preskill: Quantum startups should prioritize cross-disciplinary hires
“Being able to communicate across those boundaries is very valuable, and you can see it in quantum computing now, that if the man or woman who's involved in the software has that background, but there's not a big communication barrier talking to the people who …”
Preskill: Leonard Susskind is the active physicist most similar to Richard Feynman
“In terms of style and personality of physicists who are currently active I think Lenny Susskind is the most similar to Feynman of anyone I can think of.”
Preskill: Quantum error correction is now achievable in the laboratory
“But at first that was just kind of a theorist fantasy. It was a little too far ahead of The technology, but, you know, 20 years later, the technology is catching up, so now this idea of quantum error correction has become something you can do in the lab.”
Preskill: Entanglement is the primary distinction between quantum and classical physics
“It's really the characteristic way, maybe the most important way that we know, in which quantum is different from ordinary stuff. Ok. From classical.”
Preskill: Quantum error correction hides data from noise via entanglement
“So we have to encode the information so the environment, so to speak, can't find out anything about what the information is. And that's the idea of quantum error correction. If we encoded an entanglement, The environment is looking at the parts one at a time, …”
Preskill: Grover's algorithm only doubles tractable cities in traveling salesman problems
“And in practice, it's not that big a deal. What it means is that, you know, if you have the same processing speed, you can handle about you know, twice as many cities before the problem becomes too hard to solve as you could if you were using a classical proce…”
Preskill: Current quantum computers are too small for proposed algorithms
“We have algorithms that have been proposed, but, which we can't really run currently, because our quantum computers aren't big enough, on the scale that's needed to solve problems really, people really care about.”
Preskill: Current quantum tech achieves gate error rates around a few parts per thousand
“More or less with the technology we have now, you can have a gate error rate of a few parts in a thousand, you know.”
Preskill: Superconducting qubit coherence times grew 10x every three years
“And for the superconducting circuits, those coherence times have increased about a factor of 10 every three years, going back 15 years or so.”
Preskill: Superconducting circuits execute gates faster than trapped-ion qubits
“They have the advantage of being faster than the time to take the cycle time, the time to do a gate is faster than with the trapped ions.”
Preskill: Quantum computers can break both RSA and elliptic curve cryptography
“RSA, which is one of the ones that's widely used, as typically practiced today, the, to break it, you'd have to do something like factor a number, which is Over 2000 bits long to 20 48. And that's, you know, that's too hard to do now. But that's what quantum c…”
Preskill: Quantum information can travel tens of kilometers in fiber with low error
“But nowadays, you know, you can send quantum information through an optical fiber over tens of kilometers with you know, a low enough error rate, so it's useful for communication.”
Preskill: Quantum repeaters require much smaller processors than computing hard problems
“And so it will require some quantum processing to get that quantum error correction in the quantum repeater to work. But it's a much more modest scale quantum processor than we would need to solve hard problems.”
Preskill: Quantum entanglement does not enable faster-than-light communication
“What sometimes Gets said, or the impression people get, is that that means that when I do something to my qubit, it instantaneously affects your qubit, even if we're on different sides of the galaxy. But that's not what entanglement does. It just means they're…”