Michael Nielsen

@michael-nielsen · 26 positions · On ppll ↗

Physicist, writer and researcher, co-author of the standard textbook on quantum computation and quantum information.

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What Michael Nielsen says most about

physics 5

A theory of everything would not finish physics: Turing and Church laid down computation's theory of everything in the 1930s and we have spent ninety years exploring the consequences.
Anomalies cannot be sorted in advance: the same move that found Neptune failed completely for Mercury, so a field has to pursue both answers at once.

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ambition 2

Ask anyone whether they would have worked the same way with a million dollars at stake and the answer is invariably no: they tried, but they did not really try.
Creative work splits into routine work you should get fast at and high-variance work you must be willing to spend a long time on, and almost everyone is good at only one of the two.

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design 2

AI has moved the programmer's bottleneck from writing code to having good design ideas, and there is no verification loop for a design idea.
We are near the bottom of the tech tree, not the top; even the list of phases of matter keeps growing and we are starting to design new ones.

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