yeah, I don't know the details but he's not a chemist by any means. I think his job title is literally "scientist"
He does research on mice by injecting them with viruses so their immune system detects cancer cells. He was trying to be a doctor but hasn't applied yet despite doing ok on the mcats.
I feel bad though, he spent so many hours on a project only for it to be axed by his boss.. but the corporate world moves so slowly they want him to continue working on it even though it's a dead end.
There had been a lot of hype over the quantum supremacy. But the state of the art is still very far away from actually achieving useful number of qubits. Other than my own self being burnt by a bit of that, basically everybody I had talked to that had exited the field, have stories to tell about how barebones it still is. I mean, if you just want the first few qubits, simply by smart choices, you can easily get them. We are kinda somewhat lucky that, despite all the environmental noise,
there are some systems that simply naturally are not so noisy. The difficulty, however, is in scaling up to more qubits to the point of becoming useful.
@Obliv I thought Schroeder should have given you a decent understanding that physical chemistry is very mathematically well-established and very physics?
can you explain in layman's terms what QC is? Like classical computing operates with circuits with off and on states but quantum qubits have quantum states or something..? How is that useful
Don’t u think people only really are researching the heck out of it because of quantum computing though (or like that it is such an active area of research)? I guess there is the quantum gravity stuff too
@Obliv It has to do with the logic being employed. Classical computing assumes classical logic rules. Our world, however, is quantum, and obeys quantum logic rules. Quantum computing is about trying to use qubits to actualise quantum logic computing.
@SillyGoose No, if quantum computing works out, it will have immediate uses in cryptography (and so every big state is investing a lot into them, just in case) and in biochemical research.
@Obliv That's a neat idea. I have no idea if it would work, but I think someone else might have already come up with it. I think it would be difficult to shield a quantum computer in space too, since solar winds are a thing.
@naturallyInconsistent isn’t this what i was saying though? That they are only developing all this stuff for the purpose of realizing QC
@Obliv my understanding is you would use algorithms on a quantum computer that take too long to run on a classical computer to create more secure “passwords” and then distribute these “passwords” to the people you want to have them to then be used to access data on classical computers
Maybe a better word is more secure “codes” where more secure means that they are harder to break
@SillyGoose oh, your statements didnt connect properly so miao miao couldnt know that you were meaning to say that people were studying QC for the sake of actualising QC itself.
@SillyGoose noooo
@Obliv no
@Obliv It is this. Prior to us designing new cryptographical standards that are safe from quantum computing attacking them (and testing these cryptographical standards, before we can roll out widespread adoption of these standards), basically everything is protected by large prime numbers. Quantum computing allows every piece of information that was protected this way to be broken.
The official USA government policy is literally to store all data preemptively, so that when quantum computers are finally here, they can run the quantum computers on these data, and thereby know all your passwords, all your bank account details, all your secrets.
For those of us unfortunate enough to not be american citizens (and not smart enough to be a prominent researcher in cryptography that they would headhunt from overseas), our perusal of such information would be swiftly accompanied by some unfortunate accidents.
@SillyGoose oh, snowden wannabe? I can donate to that cause
I've already survived that mars rover
uugh, the weather is really crappy. Maybe it really is the weather that is causing meow meow to feel bad. Bad combination with protein shake. Imma go sneepppuuuu
@naturallyInconsistent That doesn't make much sense to me. The more data we store online, the more they will eventually have.. to do what with? Are we going to make a lame version of cortana from halo where it had information from all of human civillization within the galaxy, except just from humans on earth from 2010 to whenever they make it
seems like weaksauce
It's kinda ridiculous how impressed people are with "AI" right now when it's a mediocre LLM trained on such little data.
I'll be impressed when we have hundreds of years of data + multi planetary so billions/trillions of people etc
@naturallyInconsistent "Quantum computing allows every piece of information that was protected this way to be broken." Not really. Quantum cracking algorithms typically require you to double the key length to have the same level of security. That's inconvenient, but it doesn't destroy any of the current crypto schemes.
And RSA isn't the only asymmetric encryption scheme in use. Eg, there's stuff based on the discrete logarithm problem. And although that is similar to RSA, merely having a more efficient way of factorizing natural numbers doesn't instantly give you a way to do analogous stuff over other fields.
Chloroform isn't that dangerous. Ok, it can increase your risk of liver cancer. But it used to be a common pharmaceutical ingredient, eg in cough syrup. When I was a kid, you could even buy throat lozenges that contained chloroform. Of course, they stopped than when they learned about the liver cancer. ;)
I didn't watch the video but apparently he wrongly assumed that the surface charges of the wire are what induce the current, not that the charge actually moves throughout the wire.
@PM2Ring I messed that up, I meant to say it fell on his wrists (scarred from the burns)
@PM2Ring see what I said after that - as this is someone working with viruses this was probably someone extracting RNA via phenol chloroform - it's the phenol part, not the chloroform part, that burns your skin
Dry ice is around -70°C, liquid nitrogen is -170°C, but IME dry ice is far more dangerous. And yes, I've dipped my fingertips into liquid nitrogen numerous times.
@ACuriousMind Yep. I noticed that. Phenol is definitely not fun on the skin. But I figured it was worth mentioning that chloroform isn't that bad, if you don't get exposed to it frequently over a long time span.
Conversely, if you pour liquid nitrogen into the palm of your hand, that's certainly uncomfortable. ;)
I always wondered at what point is an ice bath actually dangerous? Or are ice baths in general dangerous regardless of the temperature/condition you are in?
I used to take ice cold showers in the winter when I was younger because it felt good. I can't even go under mildly cold water now without being uncomfortable :s
@Obliv not really dangerous at all as long as you can get out when you start experiencing discomfort
hypothermia sets in quicker than many expect, which is what tends to kill people in larger bodies of water where they can't get out quickly, but it's not subtle
If you lose too much body heat, it's generally not good. However, if you're lucky the cold can actually trigger a kind of cryo-preservation state. Some people have been rescued from ice-cold water, etc, who were expected to be dead from the cold. But it's not clear exactly how this works.
> Even if the data were of the highest quality, its provenance should surely put it out of bounds to the ethical scientist. In making use of these results we are offering a veneer of respectability – however thin – to doctors who have violated in the most extreme way imaginable the essence of their calling. And medicine itself is demeaned.
are master equations invoked when taking the genuine partial trace of a time evolved composite system becomes unwieldy?
to my understanding master equations are a sort of approximation to the exact dynamics given by partial tracing out of the time evolved composite system; is that incorrect?
(other than the master equation being a differential equation)
I mean in the context of open quantum systems. Exact time evolution of a composite system is given by the Schrödinger equation. Then, we can define the dynamics of a subsystem to be the partial trace of the time evolved composite state. Then, we can try to write down a differential equation for the time evolution of the subsystem. This resulting differential equation is what i mean by master equation. I do not understand, however, in what circumstances it is beneficial...
...to use the master equation over exact time evolution. My guess is it just becomes intractable to compute the exact time evolution, and instead we make some approximations and write down a nicer differential equation (master equation) that we say approximately governs the time evolution of the subsytem
