Did Einstein Kill Schrödinger's Cat? A Quantum State of Mind

Featuring

Scott Aaronson, PhD

Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Scott Aaronson is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. Beginning this fall, he'll be David J. Bruton Centennial Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. He studied at Cornell and UC Berkeley, and did postdocs at the Institute for Advanced Study as well as the University of Waterloo. His research focuses on the capabilities and limits of quantum computers, and more generally on computational complexity and its relationship to physics. His first book, Quantum Computing Since Democritus, was published in 2013 by Cambridge University Press.

Aaronson has written about quantum computing for Scientific American and The New York Times, and writes a popular blog. He's received the National Science Foundation's Alan T. Waterman Award, the United States PECASE Award, and MIT's Junior Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Daniel Harlow, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University Center for the Fundamental Laws of Nature

Daniel Harlow is a theoretical physicist specializing in black holes, cosmology, and quantum gravity. He is one of the leaders of a new field that applies ideas from the theory of quantum computation to black hole physics, and is perhaps best known for his work for his work reformulating a key relationship of quantum gravity (the AdS/CFT correspondence) as a quantum error correcting code, demonstrating a novel link between quantum gravity and information theory.

Dr. Harlow has a PhD in physics from Stanford University, and prior to coming to Harvard was a postdoctoral fellow in the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science. Starting in 2017 he will be an assistant professor in the Center for Theoretical Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Brian Swingle, PhD

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics

Brian received his BS in Physics from Georgia Tech in 2005 and his PhD in Theoretical Physics from MIT in 2011. He was a Simons Fellow at Harvard from 2011 to 2014 and then joined the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics in the fall of 2014. In the summer of 2015 he became an It From Qubit Fellow as part of the new "It From Qubit" Simons Collaboration. His interests span a variety of topics at the intersection of many-body physics, quantum information, and quantum gravity. He introduced the use of tensor networks in quantum gravity and is one of the originators of the idea that quantum entanglement holds spacetime together.

Moderator

George Musser, PhD

Contributing Editor at Scientific American

George Musser is a contributing editor at Scientific American magazine, a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT for 2014–2015, and the author of Spooky Action at a Distance (2015) and The Complete Idiot's Guide to String Theory (2008). Although he focuses on space science and fundamental physics, his writings range widely over the sciences. He has won numerous awards for his work, including the 2011 Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics and 2010 Jonathan Eberhart Planetary Sciences Journalism Award from the American Astronomical Society. As a Scientific American senior editor for 14 years, he was co-awarded the National Magazine Award in 2003 and 2011.