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CRC Press eBooks

Physics and Computation: Learning from Feynman, Hopfield, and Sussman

Michael R. Douglas

Published Mar 15, 2023• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Richard Feynman's course on computing at Caltech, and the course on neural networks taught at the same time by John Hopfield, had a profound impact on career, indeed on the author life. A feature of Feynman's course that greatly influenced the author was his grading policy – instead of a final, most of the grade was based on individual term projects on topics the people chose and which he approved. In 2006, Frederik Denef and the author showed that, much like the problem of protein folding, the traveling salesman problem, and even the problem of finding the ground state of a Hopfield model, the problem of finding vacuum configurations of string theory that agree with observation is NP hard. Patrick Hayden and John Preskill related quantum computation and the black hole information paradox, and Lenny Susskind and collaborators argued that a black hole saturates a physical bound on computation and thus is the most powerful physically realizable computer.

DOI
10.1201/9781003358817-13

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Richard Feynman's course on computing at Caltech, and the course on neural networks taught at the same time by John Hopfield, had a profound impact on career, indeed on the author life. A feature of Feynman's course that greatly influenced the author was his grading policy – instead of a final, most of the grade was based on individual term projects on topics the people chose and which he approved. In 2006, Frederik Denef and the author showed that, much like the problem of protein folding, the traveling salesman problem, and even the problem of finding the ground state of a Hopfield model, the problem of finding vacuum configurations of string theory that agree with observation is NP hard. Patrick Hayden and John Preskill related quantum computation and the black hole information paradox, and Lenny Susskind and collaborators argued that a black hole saturates a physical bound on computation and thus is the most powerful physically realizable computer.
When, in 1984–86, Richard P. Feynman gave his famous course on computation at the California Institute of Technology, he asked Tony Hey to adapt his lecture notes into a book. Although led by Feynman, the course also featured, as occasional guest speakers, some of the most brilliant men in science at that time, including Marvin Minsky, Charles Bennett, and John Hopfield. Although the lectures are now thirteen years old, most of the material is timeless and presents a “Feynmanesque” overview of many standard and some not-so-standard topics in computer science such as reversible logic gates and quantum computers.
When, in 1984?86, Richard P. Feynman gave his famous course on computation at the California Institute of Technology, he asked Tony Hey to adapt his lecture notes into a book. Although led by Feynman, the course also featured, as occasional guest speakers, some of the most brilliant men in science at that time, including Marvin Minsky, Charles Bennett, and John Hopfield. Although the lectures are now thirteen years old, most of the material is timeless and presents a ?Feynmanesque? overview of many standard and some not-so-standard topics in computer science such as reversible logic gates and quantum computers.
The last lecture course that Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman gave to students at Caltech was not on physics but on computer science. The course in 1983 was an overview of standard and not-so-standard topics in computer science, all given in Feynman’s inimitable style. This talk will begin by giving an overview of Feynman’s long-time interest in computing - starting with his time at Los Alamos during the war through to his suggestion of simulating physics on a quantum computer at a ‘Physics of Computation Conference at MIT in 1981 and his acting as a consultant for the parallel computer company, Thinking Machines. The talk will conclude with a summary of Feynman’s long-term interest in the physical limits to computation and the exemplary way he could communicate complex ideas to all types of audience.
The history of Quantum Computing and Quantum Cryptography starts with a friendship between Charles Bennett and Stephen Wiesner, two undergraduates at Brandeis University who toyed with ideas for sending information using quantum entanglement, and John Conway's Game of Life, which stimulated interest in cellular automata at MIT in the 1970s and started a generation of computer scientists wondering if the universe might be some massive computer running a simulation of reality. In 1974 MIT professor Ed Fredkin spent his yearlong sabbatical at Caltech, where he learned quantum physics from Richard Feynman while he taught Feynman about computer science. Returning to MIT, Fredkin's ideas developed into the philosophy of digital physics, which blossomed into the 1981 Conference on Physics and Computation at MIT. Feynman's keynote at the conference described how a computer based on quantum mechanics principles could compute physics simulations much faster than today's classical compu
These are lecture notes from a weeklong course in quantum complexity theory taught at the Bellairs Research Institute in Barbados, February 21-25, 2016. The focus is quantum circuit complexity---i.e., the minimum number of gates needed to prepare a given quantum state or apply a given unitary transformation---as a unifying theme tying together several topics of recent interest in the field. Those topics include the power of quantum proofs and advice states; how to construct quantum money schemes secure against counterfeiting; and the role of complexity in the black-hole information paradox and the AdS/CFT correspondence (through connections made by Harlow-Hayden, Susskind, and others). The course was taught to a mixed audience of theoretical computer scientists and quantum gravity / string theorists, and starts out with a crash course on quantum information and computation in general.
There were few basic aspects of computers and computation which intrigued Richard P. Feynman, and made the subject sufficiently interesting that he would spend time teaching it. Feynman himself did the lecture on quantum computation. Charles Bennett has already prepared the way by talking about reversible computation, and Norman Margolus on the billiard ball computer, so Feynman developed quantum computation in ways which made its connection to classical reversible computers obvious. His lecture was chiefly developing the idea that an entirely reversible quantum system, without damping processes, could perform universal computation. The insight that quantum computers were really different came only later, and to others, not to Feynman. Feynman only emphasized that the physical scale and speed of computers were not limited by the classical world, since conceptually they could be built of reversible components at the atomic level.