A passionate and personal account of the early days of quantum information and quantum computing, this unique book is a collection of more than 500 letters between the author and many of the founders of these intriguing fields. Christopher A. Fuchs is one of the most penetrating modern thinkers on the philosophical foundations of quantum mechanics. This remarkable book follows his journey as he comes to grips with the quantum world. It contains correspondence with Charles Bennett, Gilles Brassard, Rolf Landauer, N. David Mermin, Michael Nielsen, Asher Peres, John Preskill, Abner Shimony, William Wootters, Anton Zeilinger, and many others. Filled with diary entries, anecdotes, historical selections, and research ideas, this book will fascinate physicists, philosophers, and historians of science.
Abstract For the last chapter devoted to the interference of a particle, we go back a few years in time, to 1984. If until now everything has taken place in the familiar setting of old Europe (Fribourg, Vienna, Grenoble, Constance), this time the change of scene will be much greater – this year, the IEEE International Conference on Computers, Systems and Signal Processing, one of the most important gatherings of computer scientists and communication theoreticians, is taking place in the city of Bangalore, at the heart of the immense triangle that is India. However, all conference rooms look the same. Gilles Brassard, computer scientist from the University of Montreal, is not too dis- oriented when he is preparing himself to present a project done in collaboration with Charles Bennett, trained as a chemist, currently a theoretician at IBM in New York. The title of the lecture arouses the curiosity of those who glance absent-mindedly through the conference programme: Brassard is going to speak on ‘quantum cryptography’.