Unmaking Sense

The scale of the challenge of factoring huge composite numbers, Shor’s algorithm, and why we are not going to crack RSA encryption any time soon using quantum computing.

How we encode numbers, process the results, and decode the answers using inverse quantum Fourier transforms to obtain a usable answer.

Some details about how quantum Fourier transforms work.

Starting to understand quantum Fourier transforms - the basic idea.

Some of the practical challenges that make it so difficult to run code on real quantum computers even when the same code runs perfectly well on a simulator.

How does a Grover oracle test whether a solution is a solution without measuring the state vector it is assessing and so destroying it? Invisible operators and hidden manipulation. Uncomputing as a road from the depths of the enigma back to somewhere closer to where we can obtain the answer.

In what respects the quantum world and our access to it is a fitting metaphor for the human brain and consciousness as what we can directly know about it.

Quantum multiplication as a challenge. Why it can work and why it is difficult.

Quantum computing teaches and forces us to think differently because it is impossible to understand it in terms of classical physics. Superposition, entanglement, oracles, diffusers, invisible answers and impenetrable state vectors all combine to present us with an entirely new conceptual world that unmakes sense of the older one.

How do we extract a usable answer from a Grover oracle that marks solutions but doesn’t and can’t tell us what they are? The answer lies in the diffuser, which amplifies marked states and suppresses others.

What is the Grover oracle? Why is it called an oracle? How it works. And how it doesn’t.

We are made by the universe and can only experience what our evolved states allow. The persistents that are the building-blocks of our existence also define what we can know, how we must learn it, and the limits of what we can know. All our experiments embody interaction Hamiltonians so by measuring one thing we can learn of the things they are entangled with. And nothing else. That defines the li...

When a photo interacts with an object and then entangles with the pointer states that are the persistent characteristics of that object, how does it then convey that information either to ourselves as observers or more importantly to the environment itself? How do we leverage this mechanism to learn about objects in the world? This is an inconclusive exploration; a much better answer will be given...

When we observe the world by interacting with photons and other particles that act as witnesses, do we interpret the world only in the way in which our brains invent things like colour, secondary qualities as John Locke described them, or do we see the world as it in some sense ‘really is’?

This is the first of three episodes that explores the question of how information about the objects in the world is transferred into us as human observers, and more particularly and importantly how it is transferred into the environment as it monitors the persistence of the objective classical world that emerges from the quantum world.

Once we see that entropy is a measure of deficit, we can immediately extend the notion to concepts themselves and see that when we have things still to learn things still to understand our conceptual entropy is high but when we learn them our conceptual entropy falls. Of course overall entropy must increase but at a conceptual level we can still learn things and we do. 

Entropy can decrease locally but not globally; the total entropy of a closed system cannot decrease but the entropy of a part of it can. Otherwise there would be no order, no life.

Integrating the concept of entropy in thermodynamics, classical and quantum information theory and then extending it to a new class: conceptual entropy as a measure of deficit in concepts or understanding.

Working towards a reconceptualisation of entropy that brings thermodynamics, classical and quantum information under one conceptual umbrella. Boiling kettles, playing snooker and measuring quantum states all come together.

Why analogy often confuses when used to explain quantum processes. Fools rush in …

Why the world can monitor itself and govern its own evolutionary trajectory without any help from human consciousness.

Quantum collapse is not what we think.

If the whole universe is quantum, why is our experience of it classical? The answer lies in the aspects of the world that are persistent under decoherence.

Confirming Bell’s inequality violation using IBM’s quantum hardware and Qiskit. The quantum world is stranger than most people think.

If the markets are always right, as we are often assured, what does that tell us about incommunicable knowledge? Knowledge embedded in collectives that no individual can access alone? Feeling our way towards quantum theory.