What’s It All About, Alfie?

The 1966 classic film Alfie is about a promiscuous young man, played by Michael Caine, who is clueless about what to do with his life and why. The first few lines of the movie’s theme song are:

What’s it all about, Alfie?
Is it just for the moment we live?
What’s it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?
Are we meant to take more than we give
Or are we meant to be kind?

The movie ends with Alfie asking the audience: “What’s it all about? You know what I mean.”

In this post, I don’t plan to tell Alfie what life is all about, since I’m still not sure myself. In lieu of that, I will explain to him (and you) what I think quantum computing is all about. In language hammed up enough to be worthy of being uttered by the great Michael Caine himself, this is my answer:

A Physics-Computer Science Collider
I see the field of quantum computing as a Large Ideas Collider. Instead of colliding two proton beams like the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) does, quantum computing collides two titanic fields: Physics and Computer Science. It asks the successors of Feynman and Turing to work together to build bridges between these two imposing fields, and perchance (if one can dream) to create a grand synthesis of the two.

An all too common human folly is to think that the field we are working in is the hub of the universe, that everything else turns around it, and around us. I’m not claiming that quantum computing is that. I can see that there are many other very important areas of human endeavor. What I am claiming is that quantum computing is a highly fundamental and nontrivial field, one that is well worth exploring because it is of infinite scientific, theoretical and technological interest.

I like the fact that the QC field has a clearly defined technological goal: to build a quantum computer. Other scientific fields don’t have as much specificity and clarity in their goals, or their goals are not of a technological nature. Planning strategy and allocating resources for the future can be done more easily and efficiently when one has clearly defined goals.

P.S. I’m very fond of making lists. In particular, I like to make them when I’m brain-storming ideas about a topic and organizing those ideas in a tree structure. In ancient times, I made my lists on paper, but this being the computer age, now I make them on a computer. I find it very useful to have a simple software tool that allows me to make hierarchical lists, lists with the little twisties so that I can hide all the items in a folder if I want to. I like software that allows me to easily add, delete and reorder the items in my lists. To make such lists on my Mac, I use a FREE (i.e., costs nothing) application that I found at the Apple website called Deep Notes. The lists in the above picture were made using Deep Notes.