Brought to you by DARPA: spookytechnology

Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium             

4:15PM, Wednesday, May 21, 2008                 

HP Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building B01       

 http://ee380.stanford.edu                  

                                                                 

Topic:    Spookytechnology and Society                  

          The progress and implications of quantum information 

          science and technology

 

Speaker:  Charles Tahan

          Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc.

 

About the talk:

 

As a physicist, I will give a somewhat un-physics perspective on quantum information science and technology, both via some of my own scientific work, but mostly from the vantage of science and technology studies. My own pet name for the field, spookytechnology, provides a good starting point for the discussion. We will touch on why the new quantum revolution is for real (including some cool examples), what “new quantum revolution” actually means, why it’s more interesting than nanotechnology, and how we should prepare for it, both personally and societally.

 

 

About the speaker:

Dr Charles Tahan is currently the lead technical consultant to DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office on quantum-related programs. With a background in condensed matter physics andquantum information, previously he was a National Science Foundation Distinguished International Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge (with research also conducted at the University of Melbourne in Australia and the University of Tokyo, Japan). While in England he was an invited member of the United Kingdom’s Nanotechnology Taskforce and still remains an advisory board member of the Nanoethics Group (Santa Barbara, CA) as well as a founding memberof the Nanoethics Network of Aarhus University, Denmark.

All truth is nude, but painted – Willy deVille

 

“Wealth and speed are what the world admires, what each pursues. Railways, express mails, steamships and every possible facility for communications are the achievement in which the civilized world view and revels, only to languish in mediocrity by that very fact. Indeed, the effect of this diffusion is to spread the culture of the mediocre. “- Goethe

Don’t act. Don’t make anything but to make room to things to happen. What is done by no one in particular, none can stop, nor control, nor capture. -Çtalker

If you do not like fairytales and think the world is run like a project, you’d better move. All my life I’ve been trying to fuse these ways of writing into one mode of weaving the words that would satisfy both minds.

I failed again.

and it ain’t wondrous?

“Some time before the war the Austro-Hungarian government received a sharp note from St Petersburg, demanding that a stop be put to the activities of the Russian political emigrants in Vienna. The Minister of the Interior received the note and shook with laughter: ‘Who do they think is going to start a revolution in Russia – perhaps that Herr Trotsky from the Café Central?’” (from Wit as a Weapon by Egon Larsen, 1980, http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/trotsky.htm)

ain’t it right?

ah to play that bass on walk on water, neil diamond singing

ain’t it right

ain’t it right

ain’t it right,

sure it is!

but me I’m at Tofani’s

do you know the way to Café Central, my friend?