It looks great. But it's missing one critical feature of "fast-food" apps like TikTok: the content is not easily digestible. Which is understandable, because scientific papers are dense.
Maybe a good idea would be to parse the abstract through an LLM to make it more understandable (maybe caching the results so it's not expensive)? Maybe also using some standard style, like starting with a couple of "dumbed-down" sentences of the article for the non-expert, and progressively explaining better.
Good read. It is also refreshing to read how Schrödinger came up with his equation even if it was not clear how to interpret it.
He was attempting to formalize de Broglie's "particles as waves" concept, which, according to the article, "could obtain the quantization rules of Niels Bohr and Sommerfeld by demanding that an integer number of waves should be fitted along a stationary orbit."
Schrödinger's equation put that claim on firm mathematical grounds. It gave correct predictions. But just what this new "wave function" was remained up to interpretation.
I don't know about this book, but I highly recommend "Linear Algebra Done Right" by the same author. It is a very clear presentation of Linear Algebra. Although I would recommend it for someone who already took a first course on it.
This is a visualization of what the states of a qubit can look like in two different physical systems (particle spin / photon polarization). Despite their differences, they can be described using the same mathematical object: a unit vector, here represented on the famous Bloch sphere.
I have worked on this aspect on quantum computation [1]. The main problem is that reversibility is a feature of isolated quantum systems. In practice, they are not isolated.
Why? It's not just because of small interactions with the environment that we cannot control. It's that even the apparatuses that we use to control/drive the logical instructions (lasers, electrical transmission lines) should be taken into account if the computer is to be considered isolated. But usually they aren't, and this leads to inevitable losses of reversiblity in the data register.
In other words, unitary (reversible) operations do not come for free.
I think that in quantum computers it is more likely that energy-efficiency will come from some sort of algorithmic advantage.
When systems (think "automated" systems like computer programs, mathematical axioms, formal systems, etc, where conclusions can be drawn/calculated "mechanically" from a few starting points) get large enough, they gain the ability to become self-referential. That is, they become expressive enough to encode statements about themselves. A hallmark of this are "incompleteness theorems" like those of Godel or the Turing halting problem.
The book argues that these "strange loops" (of a system onto itself) are behind the emergence of intelligence and consciousness, because physical matter itself gives rise to human intelligence, albeit being a mechanical system.
I am becoming convinced that sugar, although not exactly a drug to which we could apply the concepts of addiction and withdrawal (like tobacco, alcohol, or opioids), nevertheless creates habits that are really hard to break.
Notice how we train animals with treats: sniffing drugs, attacking robbers, etc. It's a powerful behaviour modulator.
Our brains are no different. In a pavlovian way, we reinforce behaviours that give us a sugary reward. But in our case, the feedback loops are really short. Instead of doing a difficult task, our behaviour to get the reward is simply going to the kitchen and opening a snack.
Do you ever get the feeling, after a meal, that you feel like having "a little something", like a sweet? To me, that's like a learned pavlovian behaviour. And every time we cave, we reinforce that automatic response. It can be anxiety-inducing not to do the behaviour.
The question in my mind is: how do we break this pattern? Because it's easy to do it once, but it's statistically hard to keep it up many times. You will slip up and reinforce the behaviour again.
I am becoming increasingly convinced that we need to change the environment around us, that is, regulate the amount of added sugar in foods.
Good point. I tried asking ChatGPT to write the numbers from 1 to 10 in 1 sec intervals and it couldn't.
Edit: Oops, I read the question the other way around. Humans can easily emulate ChatGPT's behaviour in this scenario -- just say that, as an LLM, you cannot do the task.
Inspired by this, in my PhD we actually used a quantum computer to do classical logic to investigate if that can lead to energy savings [1]. Quantum machines are (in principle) reversible, so they may avoid Landauer's principle.
However, there are subtle energy costs that you can hit before getting to Landauer's. The most interesting to me is that the qubits can become entangled with the wires that control them! This reduces the quality of information, and one way around it is to use a lot of energy [2].