Loyal readers may remember that a few years ago I wrote an April Fool’s Day spoof news article that claimed that physicists had built a quantum computer that played Jenga – a game that involves removing wooden blocks from a tower so that it does not collapse.
Maybe that was not so crazy after all, because a physicist at Caltech has come up with a quantum version of tic-tac-toe (or noughts and crosses to readers in the UK). Dubbed Quantum TiqTaqToe, the game was devised by Evert Van Nieuwenburg and is described in the Quantum Frontiers blog.
“Why do so many Americans believe the Moon landing was fake?” is a fascinating article in Slate by Mark Jacobson. One of the more bizarre conspiracy theories that he mentions is that the film director Stanley Kubrick was involved in creating fake video images from the Moon – the evidence being that a character in Kubrick’s film The Shining wears an Apollo 11 T-shirt.
With a paucity of recent experimental results and the spectre of this drought persisting into a “nightmare scenario”, why choose a career in theoretical particle physics when quantum computing is beckoning? “Get to know 10 early-career theorists” by Emily Ayshford profiles mostly particle physicists in junior university faculty positions. Discovering the nature of dark matter emerges as a key driver for many of them.
