Links for 2012-04-16

  • Sparks Fly Over Shoestring Test Of 'Holographic Principle'

    " "The beauty of it is that we have the people who can come up with this low-risk, high-reward experiment," says Fermilab's Raymond Tomlin. "It's one shot, and if you discover something you go to Stockholm [to collect a Nobel Prize]. And if you don't see anything, you set a limit." Not everyone cheers the effort, however. In fact, Leonard Susskind, a theorist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and co-inventor of the holographic principle, says the experiment has nothing to do with his brainchild. "The idea that this tests anything of interest is silly," he says, before refusing to elaborate and abruptly hanging up the phone. Others say they worry that the experiment will give quantum-gravity research a bad name."

  • BBC News - Quantum computing: Is it possible, and should you care?

    Probably, and yes.

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