Matt Leifer » blogs

Baez on Quantum Foundations

mleifer — Fri, 11 May 2007 17:26:04 +0000

I just wrote another post on the fqxi site, but to cut a long story short it gives a link to the latest “This Week’s Finds..” on quantum foundations.

Tao on Many-Worlds and Tomb Raider

mleifer — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 17:21:05 +0000

Terence Tao has an interesting post on why many-worlds quantum theory is like Tomb Raider. I think it’s de Broglie-Bohm theory that is more like Tomb Raider though, as you can see from the comments.

Geek blog is on the move

mleifer — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 20:50:49 +0000

This is just a gentle prod to remind you that I have an even geekier blog than this one called Academic Tech. I’ve actually started writing things for it now, and there will be lots of interesting links, such as this one. This is the last time I’ll mention it here, unless there is something to do with quantum theory because I want to keep this a quantum foundations only zone.

Reorganizing my web empire

mleifer — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 03:37:03 +0000

I have been busy reorganizing my mini-web empire, as you can see if you look at my swanky new website. Part of this has to do with the fact that I occasionally want to write about things other than the foundations of quantum mechanics, but I don’t want to burden the loyal readers of Quantum Quandaries with such trivia. Therefore, I have started two new blogs.

The first is my announcements blog. This mainly exists to serve the news feed on my website, and it will contain announcements every time I submit a paper to the arXiv, update a paper, get published, visit somewhere for a long time, unify quantum theory with general relativity etc. I won’t announce the details of every paper I write on this blog as well, unless I think the paper is interesting for people into quantum foundations (actually, on that topic you might like this recent paper and also this one). I hope you will appreciate my goal of always keeping this blog strictly on topic, bucking the trend to use blogs mainly for shameless self promotion. Of course, you are welcome to become a regular reader of my announcements blog as well, but I am under no illusions that it will appeal to anyone except maybe my mother.

Secondly, I have started another blog called Academic Tech. This should satisfy my inner geek, as it is about the uses of computers, technology and the net in academia. If you want to know about software and web tools that you can do amazing things with then you might want to read it. However, quantum theory still holds the vast majority of my attention, so articles for this blog will probably be posted much more frequently.

fqxi award announcements

mleifer — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 21:37:21 +0000

There has been quite a bit of discussion on physics blogs recently about the announcement of the Foundational Questions Institute grants a couple of days ago. The stated aim of the institute is:

To catalyze, support, and disseminate research on questions at the foundations of physics and cosmology, particularly new frontiers and innovative ideas integral to a deep understanding of reality but unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources.

In the blogs and comments, some have praised the choice of grantees, whilst others have criticized it for being too conservative, a waste of time, or for not including grants for some particular foundational topics that they think are important. The connection of fqxi to the Templeton foundation has also been extensively debated. Being a recipient of a grant myself, I obviously think they made at least some good choices, and am looking forward to being able to do some foundational work without having to pretend it has any practical applications in quantum information.

For those who complained about the choice of topics, I would just say that they can only work with the proposals they actually receive, so if people want to change the range of topics that are supported then I think the best way to do so is to submit a strong proposal to the next call. To other critics, I would say that the worth of fqxi should ultimately be judged by the quality of research that is produced, rather than any predjudices one might have about what makes good foundational research, and this will become clear over the next couple of years.