Wine, Physics, and Song

Herbsaint is an excellent restaurant on St. Charles street in the central business district of New Orleans.  I have good memories of eating there a few years ago, and I had dinner there twice this week.  It has a bit more casual and hipper vibe than some of the top foodie meccas here, with white mosaic tile floor with black accents in the bar that looks like it might be original from the 20’s, cracks and all, large storefront plate-glass windows, a thick semigloss paint job on the walls and woodwork, off-white with the faintest avocado tinge, some dropped down lighting boxes hung from the ceiling, white tablecloths and comfortable oak chairs with a 20’s/30’s feel as well.  The place was packed on a Monday night—good sign.  I went with three friends.  We ate in the back room, not quite as nice an atmosphere as the main room, but fine.  My duck gumbo was intensely flavorful and hearty.  Olive oil seared Louisiana shrimp with tomato confit and breaded fried eggplant were delectable.  These were the best shrimp I’ve had on this trip to New Orleans—flavorful, extremely fresh, touched but not overwhelmed with some spices reminiscent of the New Orleans “barbecue” shrimp (but basically a grilled or sauted preparation, not swimming in the mildly spicy “barbecue” sauce).  The tomato confit was too sharply vinegary for my taste; the eggplant was quite good, though.  We drank a bottle of wine from Chateau de la Liquiere, at Faugeres in the Languedoc, recommended by the waiter over my initial choice of the Chave “Mon Coeur” Cotes du Rhone.  It was a good solid wine, reasonably tannic but not overbearing or rough, and fairly smooth—well flavored, with some golden leafy notes (reminded me of a California oak forest for some reason), but not complex.  My dinner companions raved over it more than I did—perhaps a bit of a sniffle was preventing me from fully appreciating it, or it maybe it was the $55 price tag.  It complemented the food well.  For dessert, I took one of the waiter’s top recomendations—the warm banana tart.  It was advice well taken—high-end and homey at the same time, with a delicious, well browned, thick crumbly tart crust, firmish, delicious filling somewhere between pecan pie filling and banana-flavored marzipan, and delectable seared glazed banana slices and mint leaves on top.  This and the shrimp were seriously delicious culinary achivements, the sort of stuff Michelin stars and such are made of.

Too tired to walk far from my hotel, the next night I went back thinking I’d have a small dinner.  I ended up getting the special Italian tasting menu (one each week, for the month of October), for $45.  This one started with a small antipasto of thinly sliced, excellent hard (but not tough!) salame, and some marinated diced eggplant (nice but not as good as the salame).  The Crab Gnudi were superb, gnocchi-like balls of crabmeat held together with ricotta and grilled or seared, served on swirls of delicious, intensely flavored olive oil (and some other delicious sauce that was a pale orange (something citrusy, perhaps?)).    The dish was less delicately flavored than I expected, but superb.  Herbsaint seems to have a style of “high-end heartiness”—perhaps it’s a Cajun-food influence: they tend toward big flavors, smokiness, searing along with a little innovation and fusion.  The main course certainly followed that model: baked striped bass with tomatoes, fennel, and basil was served in the paella pan it was baked in, and featured a chunk of firm, flavorful, skin-on bass in a smoky, thick tomato sauce in which big slices of fennel had braised to tenderness.  It was a lot for one person to eat, and if it had a flaw it might have been a bit of excessive smokiness, but was an extremely tasty take on what might be a pan-Mediterranean tradition of cooking fish over wood fires at sea’s edge—it called up stories of pine-smoke-scented bouillabaisses on the Riviera, and images of the Ligurian coast.  The server mentioned “a white cake” when I ordered the menu—the menu said Cassata Siciliana, usually a cake of ricotta and candied fruit flavored with liqueur—but it was indeed a square of white cake—high end Sara Lee, basically, with a bit of a caramel syrup and some tasty toasted hazelnuts on the cake.  The cake was velvety and fresh but not too special.  The chocolate salame, however, was excellent.

A Baumard “Cuvee Ancien” (a botrytized sweet wine, presumably a Chenin Blanc from the Loire, as Baumard also produce a Cote du Layon) was a good accompaniment to (and more interesting than) the cake, mellow and sweet but not cloying, and with nice flavor notes of dried orange peel, hints of brown sugar, and botrytis, though not a complex standout.  The main course went perfectly with a very good Commanderie de Peyrassol Rose 2007  from the mountains of Provence, though I suspect my other potential choice, a Barbera from an excellent producer, would also have gone well with it.  The Chateau d’Epire 2006 Savennieres, a firm, slightly steely and minerally Chenin Blanc based wine from the Loire, with a hint of honey and a balanced, smoothness, went perfectly with the crab (though it should have been served a touch colder).

For someone dining alone, the tables in the front window by the bar are a bonus—good seats from which to watch everyone having fun at the bar and in the restaurant, as well as a pleasant view of the outside seating and St. Charles street.

Overall, a very reliable, enjoyable place, well-appreciated by lots of locals, and with a very long and well chosen wine list, much more interesting wines by the glass than many places have, and a menu that is likely to deliver, if not guaranteed constant perfection, hearty, interesting, imaginative food and at least several dishes on each visit that will put you “in the zone.”

To enjoy it

You have to let it fade.

Ukiyo-e

Courtesy of Mike Lazaridis (CEO and co-founder of Research in Motion, the company that makes the Blackberry, and founder of Perimeter Institute, where I work), and/or his company (THANKS!!) the staff at Perimeter Institute was bused to Toronto and treated to the first of two U2 shows in the Rogers Centre, downtown next to the CN tower.  The roof was open on the arena, and those on the west side could see changing, glowing colors lighting up the elevator strip all the way up the CN tower, and encircling the observation deck. In my account of the concert below, I’ll link to mostly YouTube videos to that give a play-by-play record of most of the concert—be warned that some of these are pretty low quality, though a few are surprisingly good.

Overall, the concert rocked.  Although I haven’t followed U2 closely, I have a couple of their CDs from quite a while back—the excellent Achtung Baby, and a double live one, plus a few LPs kicking around that I haven’t listened to recently.  They haven’t lost their touch.  I particularly enjoyed some of the songs from their new album: the opening sequence “Breathe”,  “Magnificent”, and “Get on Your Boots”.  My notes call the latter “surrealistic hard rock, with fuzz bass and Nirvana-y guitar riffs”.  Its title and tacky-but-tasty riffs (think snarfing a box of Snyder’s of Hanover Honey Mustard & Onion Pretzels) remind me of Sonic Youth’s “Dirty Boots“.   I liked the live “Boots” a bit better than the studio video version you can hear here— a little grittier and harder-rocking.

Their traveling stage set (apparently one of three—the setup takes long enough that they need to start in one venue before the shows are finished in the next) is a giant pale-green thing, adorned with orange buttons and a tower sticking out the top, that looks like a cross between a giant four-legged beetle and the a lunar lander, and forms a tall canopy over the circular stage.  Under the belly of this thing, there’s a huge circular video screen made of elongate hexagonal chunks, which can be interpreted as the thrust nozzle of a rocket engine.  Half-way through the show, the thing elongates vertically to more than twice its size, revealing that the screens are mounted on diagonally criss-crossing metal rods hinged to each other as in a folding set of coat-pegs, or wash-hanging rack.  It’s used to show closeups of the performers, and various other graphics integral to the show.

We unfortuately missed the opening act, Snow Patrol, as the bus ride from Waterloo to Toronto is a lengthy proposition when you leave at 4 PM on a weekday.  The show started out with the bug thing towering over the empty stage as Bowie’s “Space Oddity” was played on the sound system.  Then some moody, pretty music as the lights went out, the band came on, and the spots came up on them one by one, segueing into the band playing “Breathe” off their new album  (Here’s longer, but better, video of the whole initial sequence from the last part of Space Oddity, through the band entrance and “Breathe”).   Initially the sound balance left something to be desired—the low bass and kickdrum frequencies that resonate in your chest, and below, were overemphasized for my taste, while the actual low and low-midrange frequencies where the bass melody lives were underemphasized.  And the non-kickdrum parts of the drumset, especially at lower frequencies, were a bit undermixed too (partially remedied by Bono’s call for “more drums” early in the set).  But basically the sound was pretty good, especially for an open arena which is probably pretty hard to fill sonically.  Vocals and guitar lines were pretty clear.  The band was able to carry things through Breathe and “No Line on the Horizon” as the sound settled down, or I stopped noticing it, and by Get On Your Boots things were rocking just fine.  (Here’s some good video footage, with crummy no-bass sound, of the CN tower … not sure this is actually “No Line” as claimed by the tuber who posted it, though.)  Here’s the beginning of Magnificent (another song I liked from the new album, here’s another snippet of it, and here’s probably a better video of the whole song, from near the stage.)  This was followed by Get on Your Boots—no acceptable video from Toronto, so here it is from the opening show of the tour, in Barcelona’s Olympic Stadium.  “Beautiful Day” from 2000’s “All That You Can’t Leave Behind” ended with a little snippet from Elvis Costello’s “Alison”, though with an somewhat altered, and I thought less interesting, melody.  “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” from Achtung Baby, here beginning with the audience doing a good bit of the singing, was the first of the oldies but goodies for me, followed by a nice version of Elevation (also from “All…”), with the band really getting into a disjointed but rocking groove appropriate to the somewhat “surrealistic” lyrics (”why can’t the sun // shoot me from a gun..”).  “Your Blue Room” was a classic, lazing-across-inner-space “orbit” song, at a meandering tempo with looping “satellite” motifs and footage shot from the International Space Station, and a little sprechstimme from Commander Frank.  Nice touch (as was the LEM-like stage-set)  in the anniversary year of the moon landing.  (Here it is from Chicago a few days earlier, from farther out so you can see the video display.) [Unknown Caller]  Until the End of the World resumes the sequence from Achtung Baby (begun with “Still Haven’t Found…”)  An even better video of End. Stay.  Unforgettable Fire (nice sound and video, but cut off after 2:50.  ).  This is when the rocket nozzle video screen got vertically elongated.  More good video of Unforgettable Fire; relatively decent sound for this kind of thing, but bass-challenged.  City of Blinding Lights.  Vertigo / Pump It Up.  Bono announced that Elvis was in the house; this, and the bit of Alison and Oliver’s Army, were presumably in his honor.  (Some parts of this sound like Dirty Boots as well.)  I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight (sound issues), a lightweight but hard-rocking pogo-ey, poppy bit of infectious fluff off the new album.  Another version of Crazy with different sound issues and funny audience vocal.  Sunday Bloody Sunday (OK sound, long view; late beginning).  Ends with a snippet of Elvis Costello’s “Oliver’s Army”.  MLK, for Aung San Suu Kyi.  Walk On, and One, for Aung San Suu Kyi (seriously bad audience vocals from near whoever recorded this, but with some redeeming value (humor)).  Amazing Grace.  Where the Streets Have no Name.

Ultraviolet (Light My Way), another oldie but goodie from Achtung Baby.  Bono doesn’t slack off when covering old songs…the phrasing is different in different performances, his heart and mind is in it.  With or Without You.  Moment of Surrender.

OK, another must-link, to Paul Krugman’s extended New York Times version of something he’s blogged on before: the divide between “freshwater” and “saltwater” economists, and how the profession largely failed to anticipate the present economic crisis, and to some extent—especially in the “freshwater” camp—lacks the intellectual tools to deal with it.

Anybody who is interested in understanding the current economic situation, and in getting some background for their attempt to understand it, should read Krugman’s article.  (And even more importantly, read Keynes’ “General Theory”.

As a graduate student in economics round about 1985-87, for a semester at Yale and then for two and a half years at Berkeley (I moved to the Bay Area for love), I got (or rather continued, since I’d taken a bit of econ as an undergrad, and done quite a bit of reading on my own) a squarely “saltwater” (this refers to the coastal US—say, Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Yale—as opposed to the heartland—say, Minnesota and Chicago, and I’m not sure how far the generalization holds beyond these schools…) economics education, taking first-semester macro, for example, from Jim Tobin.  Yet even then, and there, we were subjected to readings from the “rational expectations” and “real business cycles” school of macro:  Barro, Sargent, Lucas.  I must admit I found this stuff as obviously out of touch with reality then, as Krugman is now telling us it is.  Often  fitted out with impressively technical talk of autocorrelations and regressions, it made claims such as:  systematic use of monetary policy to smooth out business cycles can’t have any effect, because rational economic agents will anticipate it; business cycles are due to such “real” factors as shifts—due to underlying changes in “technological possibilities”, not due to failure of aggregate demand—in the relative rewards to leisure versus labor, resulting in more people choosing leisure (the “Great Depresssion as Great Vacation” theory, as Krugman skewers it).   The apparently supportive econometric analyses apparently worked—I don’t actually recall the econometric critiques of the time, having been more concerned at the time to acquire tools that would help me understand how the economy actually did function, than to score intellectual points against the wrong-headed—by mistaking correlation for causation, and leaving out of the analysis variables of critical importance.  Sometime somebody should—heck, somebody probably has, and I’d love to be pointed towards the analysis—take their macroeconometric work apart.  (Here’s a contribution in that direction from one L. H. Summers—pretty devastating, I’d say.)

Krugman’s article adduces two, or perhaps three reasons—the “beauty” of rational-agent equilibrium theories, the lure of “sabbaticals at the Hoover Institution and job opportunities on Wall Street” why “freshwater” macro gained as much influence as it did.  Of these, he thinks the “beauty” aspect was the more important.  I think a lengthy exploration of the culture and politics of the economics profession would reveal a lot about how the intertwining of politics, business, and academic culture enabled the rise of the freshwater school.  I’d love to see such a work, by an economically literate social scientist (perhaps even an economist).  Because to my mind, the fact that the bundle of misguided ideas Krugman is referring to as “freshwater economics” gained as much influence as it did, is a serious counterexample to the idea that economics, as practiced in the academy and the more academically-linked think-tanks and policymaking institutions, is a science that makes a serious effort to test its theories against reality, and judges the work of its practitioners accordingly.

Having said that, I’ll admit to being very irritated by people who claim that economic theory and academic economics in general have been shown up as useless by the present crisis.  For me, Keynesian theory was always at the heart of macroeconomics, certainly the macro that was taught me when I was in grad school (and that I sought out to teach myself even before then) and its value as a tool to help understand and deal with reality is only accentuated by this slump—as is the value of intelligent, reasoned, reality-based economic analysis more generally.

Anyway, I’d like to think that “freshwater” versus “saltwater” may be a bit of a calumny on the heartland.  Maybe instead of the fresh versus the salt we should (reversing the order) call them, whether or not it fits with Levi-Strauss, the Raw and the Cooked, according to whether they are willing to accept the raw facts of economic slumps, unemployed resources, burst asset bubbles, or can’t believe these are what they appear to be and (unintentionally in most cases, perhaps) are moved to cook the data via sophisticated regressions to fit their “markets can’t fail” theories. For them, or those seduced by them, maybe the words of Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers (if you want to listen, the track was switched with “Modern World [alternate take]” ) are apropos, put into the mouth of a hypothetical bubble-acknowledging, behavioral-economics-friendly, neo-parti-Keynesian, reality-based “raw” economist:

Now I’ve watched you walk around here.
I’ve watched you meet these
boyfriends, I know, and you tell me how they’re deep.
Look but, if these guys, if they’re really so great,
tell me, why can’t they at least take this place
and take it straight? Why always stoned,
like hippie Johnny is?
I’m straight and I want to take his place.

I get annoyed by blogs that are mostly just links to other people’s stuff… but I had to link this great post from Brad DeLong on his inside view of the 1994 debacle in health care…

I”ve been wondering for the last few weeks or months… why can’t Obama be more like LBJ?  Still, everyone has to operate from their own strengths… he may yet pull off health care reform in his own style, and for those who care about the horse-race aspect of this (and I certainly do inasmuch as it affects the Democrats’ chances in the next two elections): by now, anything decent (or even apparently decent) by way of a health care bill will be viewed as a victory for Obama.

I’m worried, though, that although there are apparently European models for well-functioning healthcare that don’t involve a public option, they involve nongovernmental nonprofit entities, or high levels of regulation.   Such models may be very difficult to replicate in this country where they may be easily co-opted or weakened by the money and influence big insurance can put behind things, and by the continual possibility of politically motivated medldling/sabotage.  Ironically, I fear our politics and culture may make a public option more workable than a semiprivate one.

Okay, now I’ve done wine, I’ve done physics, I’ve done economics and policy griping, but still no song yet.  I think I’d better remedy that—this will have to do, for now.  (If you’re easily amused I’d avoid food or drink while viewing this one.)

From youtube…

Cheers…

To take up where I left off, I was discussing the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics with Alan Guth at dinner the first night of the FQXi conference in the Azores.  If I understood correctly, he seemed to think that the Many Worlds (in the sense of One Hilbert Space—Many Mutually Orthogonal Subspaces in which macroscopically distinct things appear to be happening) interpretation was useful, perhaps needed, to deal with quantum effects in cosmology.  I asked him whether he though the question of justifying the Born probability rule in the MWI was an important issue, and whether he had any opinions on it.  (The Born rule,  introduced by Max Born early in the history of quantum theory, in a famous footnote in a paper of his, it says, rougly speaking,  that the probability of finding a given outcome of a quantum measurement is given by the square of the modulus (”absolute value” of a complex number) of the complex component of the state vector in the subspace corresponding to that outcome.)  He advocated the Farhi-Gutmann version of an argument going back to James Hartle in 1965, and perhaps earlier to Finkelstein.  In his telling, the idea is that as long as one is willing to “neglect components of the wavefunction with vanishingly small modulus”, the fact that when one makes repetitions of the same measurement on the same state of Hilbert space (prepared again for each measurement) the state is represented by a tensor products implies that the state is (except for a negligible component) in a subspace in which frequencies are close to those given by the Born rule—approaching the Born frequencies ever more closely as gets larger.

Hopefully I’ve rendered what Guth had in mind reasonably well—we didn’t formalize things on a napkin or anything.  In some versions of this argument, one actually goes to an infinite tensor product Hilbert space, and the claim is made that the vector corresponding to an infinite number of independent preparations of —call it if you like—just is an eigenstate of a “relative frequency operator” on this infinite tensor product Hilbert space, with eigenvalue equal to the Born probabilities.  I believe that’s the claim of the Farhi and Gutmann paper — but Caves and Schack claim it’s incorrect.  Then—by the “eigenvalue-eigenstate link”, which is a “minimalist” interpretation of the state vector’s relation to actual observational outcomes, saying that if a state actually has a definite eigenvalue for some observable, than the outcome corresponding to that eigenvalue is actual (perhaps this can be thought of as assigning probabilities and to outcome subspaces in which the state has zero component, or in which the state is contained, respectively)—one concludes that the Born rule probabilities are the only ones that give the correct relative frequencies, in the infinite limit.

Whether or not the claim about the infinite state being an eigenstate of relative frequency is correct, I’m suspicious of arguments that require an actualized infinity—I try to understand them by understanding the actual limit as summarizing—albeit with some quantitative details of rates of convergence suppressed—how things “can be made to look in large finite cases”—i.e., the ’s and ’s rule my understanding.  So—without having looked at the Farhi and Gutmann paper recently, however—let’s think about this; it’s something I’ve thought about before.  Basically, it seems to me incorrect to claim that the state approaches an eigenstate of a sharp relative frequency operator—although the expectation value of its relative frequency list approaches the Born rule probabilities, as grows it remains in a superposition of eigenstates of the -th relative frequency operator.  Indeed, as grows, if one projects out the relative frequencies nearest the Born ones containing a fixed large fraction—say 0.95—of the modulus squared of the state, there are more different frequency eigenvectors superposed as .  Of course, the numerical range of the frequencies also converges around the Born rule ones, roughly as .  It’s a weak law of large numbers kind of thing—convergence in mean to the Born probabilities.  But it’s not convergence to an eigenstate of the frequency operator.  This point, if I remember correctly, was first driven home to me by Ruediger Schack, at a time when I thought the convergence of most of the statevector modulus to a narrower and narrower range around the Born probabilities, was a pretty good argument that if you have to assign probabilities to outcomes in the Many Worlds interpretation, and you are willing to say that the probability assignment to a subspace should be uniformly continuous in the squared modulus of the state vector component in that subspace, then you should assign probabilities according to the Born rule.

I no longer care so much about this argument.  I now think the major issue for the Everett (Many Worlds) interpretation is whether one can reasonably use probabilistic notions at all, something that on my view this argument already presupposes one can do, as to neglect of a small-squared-modulus component of the wavefunction is effectively to declare that they have negligible probability, for the purposes at hand.  At dinner, Alan argued that even classically, one has to neglect the large number of outcome sequences —exponentially larger than the number of sequences having frequencies near the probabilities—to argue that frequencies will “typically” be near the probabilities, even classically.  Neglecting a small-modulus portion of the state vector is thus no worse than what we do classically.  From a Bayesian—or more particularly, subjectivist/decision-theoretic point of view on how probability enters into these matters—the point is that this is justified for many purposes by the low probability, of these sequences, whereas someone who truly believes that the value of probability as a guide to describing and deciding about the world comes from properties of frequencies, doesn’t really have anything to say to justify this neglect.  And there are things we can do to show that we cannot literally just treat all small probabilities as zero—for instance, we would not want to claim that, because the probability of each particular sequence of coin-toss outcomes is , we can ignore the possibility of getting a sequence with at least one tail, since each such sequence has negligible probability.  But Alan wasn’t buying a Bayesian point of view here—he said he was interested in predicting the frequencies with which things occur, not in betting.  This is just a fundamental disagreement between us, and I tend to think that ultimately the frequentist point of view does not hang together sensibly, but this is not the point to go too far into it beyond what I said above about needing to presuppose probabilistic notions in order even to predict frequency.

But let’s return to a frame of mind in which one does care about such arguments, and see what the consequences area of adopting the continuity assumption I made above, i.e. roughly “vanishingly low modulus of amplitude implies vanishingly low probability”.  Does it really kill the argument to say that is not an eigenstate of any frequency operator?  What about  coarse-grained frequency operators, whose eigenspaces include subspaces spanned by the definite-frequency states with frequencies near the Born ones ?  We can gloss the continuity assumption I described above by calling it the “almost-an-eigenstate rule”: states with large enough amplitude in an eigenspace count as having the associated eigenvalue.  This codifies Alan’s “neglecting”, and we may cash it out more delicately, for the subjectivist-inclined probabilist—in terms of a probabilistic assumption:  that the probability of having an eigenstate is uniformly continuous in the modulus of the state’s component in the associated eigenspace.   This assumption is, at least, significantly weaker, at first glance, than assuming the Born rule straight away.  And then it would seem to allow one to conclude, that the probability of observing relative frequencies close to the Born ones, grows with large .  More to the point, perhaps, the probability of observing any other relative frequencies, within the same tolerance, becomes negligible.  At any , of course, there will always be frequencies that we can’t rule out.  But it does look like only the Born rule is self-consistent in the sense that only for that rule will the amplitude of the states having frequencies within a shrinking interval of width proportional to around the proposed probabilities, approach with increasing .

I should probably think a bit more about things before posting this since there may be some elementary objection to the considerations I’ve just given, but as it’s a blog, what the heck—I’ll leave this hanging in the void of cyberspace for now, and risk being shown up by some comment, though this would appear unlikely if the past is any guide…

One parting point is that there are more comments on this issue in Matt Leifer’s blog, under the neutral title “Anyone for Frequentist Fudge?“,  which I came across while working on this post, and recomend  highly.  Matt objects to assiging “worlds with small amplitudes a small probability (which we do not do because that is what we’re trying to derive”.  I tend to agree, but strictly speaking it’s only part of what we’re trying to derive, so it’s at least interesting that—if you buy the apparatus of for representing independent trials, which I guess is pretty standard (although Peter Byrne (see previous post) seemed to be claiming Everett may have introduced it)—you appear to be able to get from it, to a demonstration that only the Born probabilities satisfy the self-consistency property I described above.

So far, there hasn’t been much physics in Wine, Physics, and Song—nor much song, for that matter, though there’s been plenty of wine, and some economics and politics.  I guess wine is easier and more relaxing to write about.  But it’s time to redress that balance.

I arrived in Ponta Delgada, the main town of the island of São Miguel in the Portuguese archipelago of the Azores, courtesy of the Foundational Questions Institute, to attend and speak at their second annual conference.  We were treated to dinner and an after-dinner talk.  (The wines, especially a white called  something like Tierra de Lavas that was served before dinner, were tasty.)  The talk was by Peter Byrne, who is writing a biography of Hugh Everett III, the originator (unless you want to ascribe it to Schrödinger in his cat paper) of what he called the “relative state” interpretation of quantum mechanics, often called the “many worlds interpretation” (MWI).  I was particularly interested in this talk because a fascination with the problem of how to interpret quantum theory is a large part of what got me into physics.  In 1989–1990 I wrote a paper (unpublished), “The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: Psychological versus Physical Bases for the Multiplicity of “Worlds“, arguing that Everett’s interpretation had often been misunderstood as involving a “physical” splitting of the universe into different branches, whereas Everett was actually fairly clear that the “branching” into parts of the universe involving different outcomes of a quantum experiment was associated with different subspaces of a single Hilbert space of the world, subspaces defined by which of the different macroscopic outcomes of the experiment an observer had experienced.  So I was very interested to hear from Peter Byrne that among the boxes of Everett’s paper that he has been sorting and studying, were drafts of Everett’s thesis in which there is much more extensive discussion of splitting minds than was available even in the long version of his thesis published by Princeton.  If I’m reporting Byrne correctly, one of these drafts compares the splitting minds to splitting amoebas, noting there is no fact of the matter as to which of the amoebas is the original one.  The whole thing, he says, had much more extensive discussion of splitting, which his advisor John Wheeler made him take out (partly, if I understood correctly, because of negative comments by Bohr, relayed by Stern who was on Everett’s thesis committee).   It will be interesting to see the details of these drafts, and find out more about how Everett understood this “splitting”.

My early paper was to some extent a “devil’s advocate” exercise—I did not then, and do not now, believe in Everett’s interpretation in the sense that a macroscopically entangled wavefunction, describing me having all kinds of different conscious experiences, is a real entity.  But I did believe, and still do, that pushing Everett’s idea as far as possible is one good way of getting a better understanding of what is weird about quantum theory, and of the unexpected difficulties we’ve encountered in figuring out what quantum physics has to tell us about the world, and our place in it.

My reasons for not accepting many worlds are in part tied up with the fact that there don’t seem to be probabilities of measurement outcomes on this interpretation, as there are indeed not definite classical outcomes.  More on this later—it is something that I’ve been thinking about for years, and before Byrne’s talk, I had a long discussion about it with Alan Guth at dinner.   But one last thing:  it was therefore striking to hear from Byrne that one of a myriad of titles Everett considered for his dissertation was “Wave mechanics without probability”.

This inexpensive Chilean Chardonnay, which I drank at my parents’ in DC recently, seems like great value—I believe they paid around $6 for it, but I’m not sure.  Some nice aromas and flavors something like peach and vanilla,  a rounded, balanced, even somewhat elegant feel in the mouth—not high-acid, but not flabby (or lush).   No overbearing oakiness–an excellent food wine.  Very drinkable, and somewhat reminiscent of Sonoma County’s Chateau St. Jean Chardonnays—even their higher-end Robert Young Vineyard ones, which also have that low-acid, vanilla thing though more prominently, and (at least in the Robert Youngs) often with a velvetiness this lacks.   But velvetiness would not necessarily be an improvement.  This is crisper, a summer quaffer of a chardonnay but still quite flavorful and holding one’s interest through a a meal—maybe not seriously complex, but far from one-dimensional.  Yum!  This is “produced and bottled by Viñas Errazuriz Ovalle, SA San Ignacio 2170 Santiago, Chile”, and imported by Monsieur Touton, NYC; alas, I can’t find a price or distributor reference with a cursory Google.  I do find some entertaining snark at Le Cheap Lush concerning Monsieur Touton, though—to which this wine would seem to be a counterexample, unless I was just in a particularly good mood when I drank it.

Next week, I’ll be at a workshop in Vienna, VA that has been organized to help come up with a national strategy for public investment in quantum information science and technology.

To quote from the workshop website:

This Workshop on Quantum Information Science (QIS) has been organized in response to the NSTC report. It brings together leading theorists and experimenters drawn from physical science, computer science, mathematics, and engineering who will assess recent progress in QIS and identify major goals and challenges for future research.

The report in question, titled “A Federal Vision for Quantum Information Science came out this January, from the US National Science and Technology Council which is part of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.

All in all, a very interesting and promising development, which suggests serious potential for US government support for research in quantum information science, which is to say quantum computation, quantum computing, quantum cryptography, the use of quantum information science concepts to understand and engineer the behavior of complex physical systems, including quantum control and quantum metrology.  The report emphasizes computation and the understanding of new quantum states of matter and quantum phase transitions.  The organization appears to have been fairly rapid—probably carried out at Caltech, where John Preskill heads the Institute for Quantum Information, since that’s where the website is located and the administrative coordinator is the IQI’s.

The invited speaker lineup looks excellent, though some have complained that it’s not representative of some aspects of quantum information research (metrology, i.e. precision quantum measurement, is covered only lightly) and some top US groups (like the quantum cryptography effort led by Richard Hughes at Los Alamos) are missing (though I don’t know why).  Evenings will involve open discussions on strategy for QIS research, though I worry we may be burned out after full days of excellent technical presentations.

I’m looking forward to hearing Anne Broadbent talk about Universal Blind Quantum Computation with Joseph Fitzsimmons and Elham Kashefi, and not only because a crucial component of it is the use of quantum authentication codes, a concept developed my collaborators Claude Crepeau, Daniel Gottesman, Adam Smith, Alain Tapp, and me.  (Hey, this is my blog, so shameless self-promotion is de rigeur.)