Thursday, July 30, 2009

Public Lecture

Last night I gave a public lecture in Aspen CO which went over pretty well. It will be streamed tonight at 9pm mountain time, and you can download the whole thing here anytime thereafter (maybe even before). I encourage even the most science-phobic to try watching it (you know who you are).

After the lecture (off camera) I got a lot of good questions from random audience members who were too shy to ask in front of the entire room. There was one question that really stumped me: Does anyone know of a good book about quantum computation for the lay-person? Eddie Farhi (who introduced the lecture) is a mainstay of the field of quantum computation, and he couldn't think of one either. There is a book by Seth Lloyd, but I don't know what it contains (or if I approve of it).

Added: Two minor techincal problems with the video (1) you could not see the laser pointer at all, so when I pointed and said "this thing", you have no idea what I am pointing out. (2) in a few places the resolution of the video is not as good as one would like. Despite these problems, I am reasonably happy with the outcome.

3 comments:

Don Monroe said...

Assuming that price correlates with accessibility, this book seems promising, but I haven't seen it myself.

There have been some good stories in Scientific American, too, I think.

Don Monroe said...

There's a largish list of popular books posted at USC. Most of the popular level ones, including one by Michael Brooks (consultant for New Scientist) and Tom Siegfried (now editor-in-chief at Science News) seem to data from almost a decade ago.

Steve said...

Thanks Don. If I get a chance, I will take some of these out of the library and give them a perusal.