FaceMash Updated 2025-07-16
Goldstone's theorem Updated 2025-07-16
gwern.net Updated 2025-07-16
One thing that annoys Ciro Santilli about that website are the footnote overload. Ciro likes linear things.
List of High-temperature superconductors Updated 2025-07-16
Matrix representation of a Hermitian form Updated 2025-07-16
Meson Updated 2025-07-16
composite particle made up of an even number of elementary particles, most commonly one particle and one anti-particle.
This can be contrasted with mesons, which have an odd number of elementary particles, as mentioned at baryon vs meson vs lepton.
Software license that starts closed and becomes open once a certain amount of money is raised Updated 2025-07-16
This is an interesting licensing model that might just scale.
Stockfish (chess) Updated 2025-07-16
CLI program implementing Universal Chess Interface: www.reddit.com/r/ComputerChess/comments/b6rdez/commandline_options_for_stockfish/
How to actually play against it: chess.stackexchange.com/questions/4353/how-to-install-stockfish-on-ubuntu So hard!
Money creation Updated 2025-07-16
Quantum dot quantum computer Updated 2025-07-16
Turing machine decider Updated 2025-07-16
Of course, because what we know about the halting problem, there cannot exist a single decider that decides all Turing machines.
E.g. The Busy Beaver Challenge has a set of deciders clearly published, which decide a large part of BB(5). Their proposed deciders are listed at: discuss.bbchallenge.org/c/deciders/5 and actually applied ones at: bbchallenge.org.
But there are deciders that can decide large classes of turing machines.
Many (all/most?) deciders are based on simulation of machines with arbitrary cutoff hyperparameters, e.g. the cutoff space/time of a Turing machine cycler decider.
The simplest and most obvious example is the Turing machine cycler decider
Ciro's Edict #4 Not work Updated 2025-07-16
Some further comments at: Section "Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead".
Ciro's Edict #5 Improve header summary display Updated 2025-07-16
Before
. After
. Added font awesome icons. github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook/issues/151
Didn't manage to subset, but so be it for now: stackoverflow.com/questions/62395038/how-can-i-export-only-one-character-from-ttf-woff-file-to-avoid-load-unnecessa/71197892#71197892
Trapped ion quantum computer Updated 2025-07-16
TODO understand.
Trapping Ions for Quantum Computing by Diana Craik (2019)
Source. A basic introduction, but very concrete, with only a bit of math it might be amazing:Sounds complicated, several technologies need to work together for that to work! Videos of ions moving are from www.physics.ox.ac.uk/research/group/ion-trap-quantum-computing.
- youtu.be/j1SKprQIkyE?t=217 you need ultra-high vacuum
- youtu.be/j1SKprQIkyE?t=257 you put the Calcium on a "calcium oven", heat it up, and make it evaporates a little bit
- youtu.be/j1SKprQIkyE?t=289 you need lasers. You shine the laser on the calcium atom to eject one of the two valence electrons from it. Though e.g. Universal Quantum is trying to do away with them, because alignment for thousands or millions of particles would be difficult.
- youtu.be/j1SKprQIkyE?t=518 keeping all surrounding electrodes positive would be unstable. So they instead alternate electrode quickly between plus and minus
- youtu.be/j1SKprQIkyE?t=643 talks about the alternative, of doing it just with electrodes on a chip, which is easier to manufacture. They fly at about 100 microns above the trap. And you can have multiple ions per chip.
- youtu.be/j1SKprQIkyE?t=1165 using microwaves you can flip the spin of the electron, or put it into a superposition. From more reading, we understand that she is talking about a hyperfine transition, which often happen in the microwave area.
- youtu.be/j1SKprQIkyE?t=1210 talks about making quantum gates. You have to put the ions into a magnetic field at one of the two resonance frequencies of the system. Presumably what is meant is an inhomogenous magnetic field as in the Stern-Gerlach experiment.This is the hard and interesting part. It is not clear why the atoms become coupled in any way. Is it due to electric repulsion?She is presumably describing the Cirac–Zoller CNOT gate.
How To Trap Particles in a Particle Accelerator by the Royal Institution (2016)
Source. Demonstrates trapping pollen particles in an alternating field.- youtu.be/lJOuPmI--5c?t=1601 Cirac–Zoller CNOT gate was the first 2 qubit gate. Explains it more or less.
Introduction to quantum optics by Peter Zoller (2018)
Source. THE Zoller from Cirac–Zoller CNOT gate talks about his gate.- www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3l0QPEnaq0&t=427s shows that the state is split between two options: center of mass mode (ions move in same direction), and strechmode (atoms move in opposite directions)
- youtu.be/W3l0QPEnaq0?t=658 shows a schematic of the experiment
Ciro's Edict #5 OurBigBook Library tested on PostgreSQL Updated 2025-07-16
After something broke on the website due to SQLite vs PostgreSQL inconsistencies and took me a day to figure it out, I finally decided to update the test system so that
OURBIGBOOK_POSTGRES=true npm test
will run the tests on PostgreSQL.Originally, these were being run only on SQLite, which is the major use case for OurBigBook CLI, which came before the website.
Superconductivity is a a form of superfluidity Updated 2025-07-16
We know that superfluidity happens more easily in bosons, and so electrons joins in Cooper pairs to form bosons, making a superfluid of Cooper pairs!
Isn't that awesome!
Tiananmen Square Protests Updated 2025-07-16
Transmission electron microscopy Updated 2025-07-16
Transmission Electron Microscope by LD SEF (2019)
Source. Images some gold nanopraticles 5-10 nm. You can also get crystallographic information directly on the same machine. There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.