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Category Archives: Physics
November’s Lectures, 2025
Happy Chanukah, everybody! There is a lot of academic activity around, and the ceasefire in Gaza has brought some relief and hope. Let me tell you about the (unusually high number of) lectures I attended in November 2025, in reverse … Continue reading
Posted in AI, Combinatorics, Computer Science and Optimization, Geometry, Physics, Quantum, Updates
11 Comments
Computational Complexity and Explanations in Physics
The title of this post is taken from a recent interesting lecture (judging from the slides) by Scott Aaronson at Columbia University. The lecture explored a wide range of topics at the intersection of physics, computation, and philosophy. In this … Continue reading
Some Questions from Recent Quantum Events
Over the past few years, I have given several lectures about quantum computation, presenting my argument for why quantum computing—and even significant early milestones toward it—are fundamentally impossible. Recently, I participated in a debate with Matthias Christandl on the possibility … Continue reading
Majorana Zero Modes and Topological Qubits
This post contains the first item, devoted to Majorana zero modes, from an ambitious planned post on some quantum physics mysteries, related to quantum information and computation. (Some items are also related to noise sensitivity and associated Fourier analysis.) Majorana … Continue reading
Robert Alicki, Michel Dyakonov, Leonid Levin, Oded Goldreich, and Others – A Summary of Some Skeptical Views On Quantum Computing.
In this post, I provide links, references, and a brief discussion of the skeptical views regarding quantum computing held by Robert Alicki, Michel Dyakonov, Leonid Levin, Oded Goldreich, and a few others. In the next post I will briefly describe … Continue reading
Seven Assertions about Quantum Computing.
The purpose of this post is to present seven assertions about quantum computing that arose in my research. I welcome questions and remarks and will gladly clarify or elaborate on them. Continue reading
Posted in Physics, Quantum, Statistics
Tagged Quantum error-correction, quantum supremacy, quantum-computing, Too good to be true
26 Comments
The Case Against Google’s Claims of “Quantum Supremacy”: A Very Short Introduction.
The 2019 paper “Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor” asserted that Google’s Sycamore quantum computer, with 53 qubits and a depth of 20, performed a specific computation in about 200 seconds. According to Google’s estimate, a state-of-the-art classical supercomputer … Continue reading
Posted in Computer Science and Optimization, Physics, Quantum
Tagged Quantum computation, quantum supremacy
45 Comments
Bill Fefferman, Soumik Ghosh, Michael Gullans, Kohdai Kuroiwa, and Kunal Sharma’s paper on the Effect of Non-unital Noise on Random Circuit Sampling
I would like to discuss the following remarkable paper posted on the arXiv in June 2023. Effect of Non-unital Noise on Random Circuit Sampling, by Bill Fefferman, Soumik Ghosh, Michael Gullans, Kohdai Kuroiwa, and Kunal Sharma’s Abstract: In this work, … Continue reading
My Notices AMS Paper on Quantum Computers – Eight Years Later, a Lecture by Dorit Aharonov, and a Toast to Michael Ben-Or
The first part of the post is devoted to eight-year anniversary of my 2016 paper. I will go on to describe a recent lecture by Dorit Aharonov and conclude with my toast to Michael Ben-Or. The Quantum Computer Puzzle, Notices … Continue reading
Combinatorics and more 