John Preskill’s Intro to Quantum Information Lectures

I’ll take this opportunity to offer one of my occasional plugs for Caltech’s Quantum Frontiers blog. They publish posts by various members of the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter. Remarkably, the posts manage to exhibit considerable personality, rather than being perfunctory mentions of recent papers or talks. Much credit should go to Spiros Michalakis for getting the thing off the ground.

A lot of credit should also go to John Preskill, who is very well-known for his work in particle physics and quantum field theory as well as his second career as a quantum information. Who knew there was an entertaining blogger lurking inside the facade of a respectable scientist? (Third career?) John’s posts invariably manage to be enjoyable as well as informative. Now he’s put up a couple of hour-long videos, lectures that he gave at the 12th Canadian Summer School on Quantum Information. Two hours is a good length: enough time to actually convey useful information, without demanding the commitment of a full-semester course.

That’s the first video; click over for the second. And for an entertaining story about noisy hotel rooms and the exciting, thrill-a-minute life of the academic lecturer.

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