Quantum is getting hot in 2019, and even Ciro Santilli got a bit excited: quantum computing could be the next big thing.

No useful algorithm has been economically accelerated by quantum yet as of 2019, only useless ones, but the bets are on, big time.

To get a feeling of this, just have a look at the insane number of startups that are already developing quantum algorithms for hardware that doesn't/barely exists! quantumcomputingreport.com/players/privatestartup (archive). Some feared we might be in a bubble: Are we in a quantum computing bubble?

To get a basic idea of what programming a quantum computer looks like start by reading: Section "Quantum computing is just matrix multiplication".

Some people have their doubts, and that is not unreasonable, it might truly not work out. We could be on the verge of an AI winter of quantum computing. But Ciro Santilli feels that it is genuinely impossible to tell as of 2020 if something will work out or not. We really just have to try it out and see. There must have been skeptics before every single next big thing.

cyclotrons produce the better images, but they are expensive/you have to move to them and order a timeslot.

Lab-based just use some X-ray source from the lab, so it is much move convenient e.g. for a pharmaceutical company doing a bunch of images. The Wikipedia image shows such a self-contained lab system: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Freezed_XRD.jpg

A cool thought about cancer expressed at Power, Sex, Suicide by Nick Lane (2006) is that cancer it is the direct product of natural selection gone wrong!

Cancer cells are obviously selected against anti-cancer mechanism, which when they manage to evade, they reproduce uncontrollably, gaining more and more momentum.

What makes lasers so special: Lasers vs other light sources.

Bibliography:

Ciro Santilli dislikes the fact that they take themselves too seriously. Ciro prefers the jokes and tech approach.

Google's quantum hardware/software effort.

The "AI" part is just prerequisite buzzword of the AI boom era for any project and completely bullshit.

According to job postings such as: archive.ph/wip/Fdgsv their center is in Goleta, California, near Santa Barbara. Though Google tends to promote it more as Santa Barbara, see e.g. Daniel's t-shirt at Video "Building a quantum computer with superconducting qubits by Daniel Sank (2019)".

Sometimes it feels like this could be how we finally make experiments to see what the theory of everything looks like, a bit like the first high energy experiments were from less exotic cosmic rays.

There is a slight variation in temperature of CMB across the sky of the order of 200 microKelvin. It is small to the ~2.7 K average temperature, but it can be measured.

If the initial conditions of the Big Bang and the laws of physics were perfectly symmetric, then we could expect the universe to just be one perfectly uniform boring soup.

But instead some asymetry made all the fun weird things we see today happen eventually, like galaxies and life.

And the cosmic microwave background serves as a way for us to look back in time to the early conditions of the universe, as it was set in stone as soon as the universe became transparent to this light during recombination.

Or if you want to get poetic, it is the closest we can ever get to listening to the original word of God when he setup the initial conditions of the universe.

The ansiotropies of CMB is the ultimate astronomical compass we will ever have, as it is the thing with the least proper motion.

Uranium-based, dropped on Hiroshima. The uranium was enriched at the Clinton Engineer Works.

When we have a symmetric matrix, a change of basis keeps symmetry iff it is done by an orthogonal matrix, in which case:

There are explicit examples of this. We can have ever thinner disturbances to convergence that keep getting less and less area, but never cease to move around.

If it does converge pointwise to something, then it must match of course.