Summer recapitulates life

Last week, I was back at the IAS in Princeton, to speak at a wonderful PITP summer school entitled “From Qubits to Spacetime,” co-organized by Juan Maldacena and Edward Witten. This week, I’ll be back in Waterloo, to visit old and new friends at the Perimeter Institute and Institute for Quantum Computing and give a couple talks.  Then, over the weekend, I’ll be back in Boston to see old friends, colleagues, and students.  After some other miscellaneous travel, I’ll then return to Austin in late August when the semester begins.  The particular sequence IAS → Waterloo → Boston → Austin is of course one that I’ve followed before, over a longer timescale.

Two quick announcements:

First, at the suggestion of reader Sanketh Menda, I’m thinking of holding a Shtetl-Optimized meetup in Waterloo this week.  Please send me an email if you’re interested, and we’ll figure out a time and place that work for everyone.

Second, many of the videos from the IAS summer school are now available, including mine: Part I and Part II.  I cover some basics of complexity theory, the complexity of quantum states and unitary transformations, the Harlow-Hayden argument about the complexity of turning a black hole event horizon into a firewall (with my refinement), and my and Lenny Susskind’s work on circuit complexity, wormholes, and AdS/CFT.  As a special bonus, check out the super-embarrassing goof at the beginning of my first lecture—claiming a mistaken symmetry of conditional entropy and even attributing it to Edward Witten’s lecture!  (But Witten, who I met for the first time on this visit, was kind enough to call my talk “lots of fun” anyway, and give me other positive comments, which I should put on my CV or something.)

Addendum: Many of the PITP videos are well worth watching!  As one example, I found Witten’s talks to be shockingly accessible.  I’d been to a previous talk of his involving Khovanov homology, but beyond the first few minutes, it went so far over my head that I couldn’t tell you how it was for its intended audience.  I’d also been to a popular talk of Witten’s on string theory, but that’s something he could do with only 3 awake brain cells.  In these talks, by contrast, Witten proves some basic inequalities of classical and quantum information theory, then proves the Reeh-Schlieder Theorem of quantum field theory and the Hawking and Penrose singularity theorems of GR, and finally uses quantum information theory to prove positive energy conditions from quantum field theory that are often needed to make statements about GR.