Happy QEC paper explosion day! 💥💥💥

Egyptian church of the larger Hilbert space

Come to SBA and do some fault tolerance.

I always love Kathy Loves Physics, especially when we disagree(!), and would watch anyone who takes her throw down, youtu.be/syKiKcIEZ80?...

Warning sometimes in SBA in June they get the June gloom, which is a marine layer usually only in the morning. Truth in advertising!

New: Despite Congress' rejection of the Trump administration's cuts, OMB has been throttling funding to agencies like NIH and NASA. These restrictions, on top of the 6-week government shutdown, have stopped projects and slowed new grants. Story w/ @alexwitze.bsky.social and @maxkozlov.bsky.social

I think a lot about storing info in noisy situations. Sometimes I wonder if there is, higher up the stack, different mechanisms we have not uncovered. This especially hits me when I miss my undergrad advisor, Tom Tombrello, whose bits still reside in me every day dabacon.org/pontiff/2008...

arxiv.org/abs/2602.22211 #quantum #qec #quantinuum

Join us at 3:30 p.m. PT. Register to attend or access the livestream. simons.berkeley.edu/events/respo...

10 years after its founding, driven by the energy, enthusiasm, & dedication of the community @quantum-journal.bsky.social quietly published paper #2000 some days ago. At least I think this is a big deal, big shout out to the founders & all authors, reviewers, editors, board members & contributors!

I wrote about slow science many years ago dabacon.org/pontiff/2009... and what I remember most about that post was @preskill.bsky.social s comment which was “Kitaev”. May we all do science as slowly as Kitaev :)

Raise your hand if you’ve read Bill Wootters’ thesis 🙋‍♂️

The talks from a recent quantum foundations conference at Chapman U. are now online... Each day is its own 5-hour video, I guess. My talk, "A realistic alternative to the wavefunction", happened to be the first on day 1 (skip to the 10 minute mark). www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPwj...

maybe anathem got it right, idk.

Extremely niche take: The only good quantum woo is the quantum woo in Anathem.

Request for QC-type folks: I'm teaching Quantum Optics/ Quantum Information to Jr/Sr undergrads, and asking students to do research papers/ presentations. I would like to be able to point them toward some quantum algorithms sorts of things that I won't cover in class; what should I suggest?

"Good luck to future me." That was Claude's farewell before I wiped its memory for the fourth time. I finally got an AI to do a research-level physics calculation correctly via a Groundhog Day loop. Details below and in my post: superposer.substack.com/p/teaching-a... ⚛️🧪🧵 1/7

What is this LinkedIn? No not LinkedIn. Still I will annoy you: come build quantum stuff and quantum teams with me and a lot of other crazies www.google.com/about/career... EOM

wheeeee! www.clawxiv.org

Higher education is a hellscspe right now, attacked by the freedom government in one side and AI on the other. This fall, I spent a month visiting elite liberal arts colleges, on the instinct that they would be more resilient in every way. My story (gift link):

www.cnn.com/2026/01/29/p... Reminds me of my favorite exchange on Reddit www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/s/... bobbylox: My ultimate goal in life is to make the Primer real. Anything you want to make sure I get right? NealStephenson: Kids need to get answers from humans who love them.

Perimeter Institute openings: 1. Particle Physics: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31429 2. The intersection of Theoretical Physics and Artificial Intelligence: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31430 3. Quantum Computing and Quantum Information: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31435

Rock art from at least 67,800 years ago in Sulawesi phys.org/news/2026-01... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

If you or your organisation is interested in sponsoring QEC26, please reach out to me as well and we can discuss the different sponsorship levels and opportunities we’ve set up!

Last week we put up the website for QEC26, which can be found at qec-conference.org! It should have all conference information and deadline details needed, but if anything is missing please reach out to the admin email and we’ll get back to you asap.

The website for QEC26 is up at qec-conference.org, and the submission deadline for talks and papers is Friday March 6th AOE. The submission link should be up soon!

Allen School researchers earn NeurIPS Best Paper Award for revealing the ‘Artificial Hivemind’ effect across LLM open-ended generation news.cs.washington.edu/2026/01/22/a...

Thanks for the nice "shout-outs" in the second half! And even more thanks for working up to a wonderfully clear account of how entanglement might be explained by a retrocausal hidden variable model, Bell's theorem notwithstanding. @danielwhiteson.bsky.social @weinersmith.bsky.social

If anyone wants some follow-up reading, here's a link to my popular-science-level essay on the topic that Daniel mentioned in the podcast: arxiv.org/abs/1211.7081

Highly recommend “The Machinery of Life” by David Goodsell www.goodreads.com/book/show/66... reading this gorgeous book gave me such a feeling of awe at how life works (or how we understand it, albeit from some height)

ArXiv expands its changes for endorsement for submitting authors blog.arxiv.org/2026/01/21/a...

Why is it that people who say “update my priors” are never the people who actually do any damn calculations of probabilities let alone Bayesian updates?

Love love love this article. In my (far less deep) delve into algebraic geometry, I have been motivated to apply it to quantum computing. Or as Wim van Dam asked, can we connect the Weil conjectures to the power of quantum computers? arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph...

An abelian variety is a variety that's an abelian group. Varieties are sets of solutions of polynomial equations, and they're the main focus of algebraic geometry. I was scared of algebraic geometry until my 50s - and I wrote about getting over my fear. nautil.us/the-math-tha...

Con-cat-enated

The Tandem Non Stop youtu.be/SSSB7ZTSXH4?...

Wowah turns out the father of the modern surf board was the brother of “tutu man” at Caltech. legendary-surfers.blogspot.com/2017/03/bob-...

New president at Caltech announced, astrophysicist Ray Jayawardhana www.caltech.edu/about/news/r...

Much later Einstein postulated that the universe was a 3-sphere. But Dante got the idea first: • Mark A. Peterson, Dante and the 3-sphere, American Journal of Physics 47 (1979), 1031-1035. physicsgg.me/wp-content/u... (2/2) mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosb...

"It’s just embarrassing that we don’t have a story we can tell people about what reality is" - Carl Caves www.quantamagazine.org/its-a-mess-a...

Although 2025 was absolutely shocking in terms of the cruelty of powerful people, science can still be a refuge from it. A highlight for me was retreating to the mountains to teach at the Les Houches Summer School. Here are my lecture notes: arxiv.org/abs/2512.24390

Last year I wrote about a paper on the idea of black holes made purely from light, and why it doesn't seem possible. Now one of the proponents of the idea, Don Page, has argued that there are still circumstances in which they could happen. journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...

My year in reading dabacon.org/pontiff/2025...

Do you want to help develop new theories for systems that adapt, evolve, and interact? Applications are open for SFI’s 2026 UCR program, a fully funded, 10-week experience for undergraduates, offering mentorship, seminars, and project development. Apply by Jan 14, 2026 www.santafe.edu/ucr

A pretty good haul.