The Quantum Pontiff

Interview with Jeff Kimble

Posted by Dave Bacon on February 15, 2008
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Jeff Kimble, who taught me all about waves as a second year undergraduate at Caltech, is interviewed by Scientific American.

My favorite part:

Switching gears–this new movie, Jumper, is about a kid, and some other people, who teleport from place to place.
I didn’t know that.

If you saw X-Men, with Nightcrawler…
I haven’t seen X-Men either.

Do you watch Heroes on NBC?
No. I watch some of the football playoffs.

But you know Captain Kirk…
I have some advice. Just don’t talk about teleporting people in your story. The technical base of our society is information commerce, and in the next 20 years it will radically change. Read the semiconductor industry’s roadmap. We’re just going to gleefully think it’s going to happen on the movie screen, and we will ignore investments in science and technology.

There’s a really incredibly exciting frontier in science that didn’t exist 15 or 20 years ago, and it’s this quantum information science, which brings together traditional computer science and quantum mechanics. There’s stuff going on that is just titillating.

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Comments

  1. #1 John Preskill
    February 17, 2008

    Jeff insists he never used the word “titillating” (at least not in this interview).

  2. #2 Jonathan Vos Post
    February 17, 2008

    Dear Dave and John: “Jeff insists he never used the word ‘titillating’…”

    Thank you for keeping me abreast of the matter.

    “Jumper” leaps to top of North American box office

    Sun Feb 17, 2008 5:45pm EST

    LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The sci-fi thriller “Jumper” leaped to the No. 1 spot at the North American box office on Sunday as moviegoers ignored critics’ dire warnings for a second weekend.

    The movie, in which Hayden Christensen plays a man who is able to “teleport” around the world, earned an estimated $27.2 million for the Friday-to-Sunday period, distributor 20th Century Fox said….

    [JVP: could it really be e x $10^7 = $27.18281828459045...?]

  3. #3 Anandi
    February 19, 2008

    H. Jeff was also in this month’s Wired magazine. I was kind of surprised to see him since he was the frosh adviser for my old roommate Kristin, and that’s the only context I ever really “knew” him.