Pimping another physics book: "Three Roads to Quantum Gravity"
Three Roads to Quantum Gravity
Trying to understand the thought processes and devices that physicists create in order to define the universe is an awesome process that I recommend for anybody. The constantly create tools that have no natural relationship with the things they describe, while still allowing us to use our own terms to describe them. My favorite recently is the concept of a balloon or sphere upon which you create a series of dots. Now blow the balloon up and all of the dots spread or accelerate away from one another with none of the dots actually approaching one another. You might say, well duh, it's a balloon silly, but the experiment is more to visualize the process that every galaxy we see through a telescope is expanding away from us or rather accelerating away from us at increasingly larger speeds. How can that smack be possible?
Well, you'll need to read the book because while I grasp these concepts I'm not the best person to explain them (unless of course you want to meet me at my house or invite me to yours for dinner, in which case I'll gladly talk about these things incessantly).
The book covers three tools currently being used to try and explain or discover quantum gravity. The use of a Bekenstein bound for discovering the effects of a quantum black hole are actually really interesting and have direct computer parallels (the Bekenstein bound can be explained in a thought experiment that is equivalent to how we view pixels on a monitor). In fact I'll give a short explanation here.
The amount of information lost in a black hole is basically proportional to it's surface area. In other words the maximum number of questions that can be asked of it (and since it is a black hole it won't answer) is based on it's size, but not volume based size, instead area based size. To rationalize this in computer terms, take your monitor. It has some fixed number of pixels and each pixel represents one piece of information that we can get from the machine. That means with current monitors the maximum amount of information you can get from a machine at one time is equal to the width by the height in pixels on your screen, or directly proportional to the area. The truly horrid thing is that we can't even get that much information out of a computer because it takes such a large number of pixels to convey even a simple piece of meaning to us. Of course the black hole is a little different, because it actually hides all of it's information. While it embodies a single pixel (the horizon of the blackhole) for each piece of information it has stored inside of it, it doesn't actually allow you to view that information. It's basically lost, as if the hard-drive crashed or was placed in some intrinsic write only mode.
The remaining two tools don't really have computer equivalents, relative quantum theory and string theory (generalized to M-theory). Most of the book deals with the relationships between the two, since Lee Smolin, the author, believes that each describes a different portion of nature and that a possible unification is required in order to bring about a true theory.
I don't just recommend these books because of their potential in explaining universal truths, but rather because of the tools that are developed than can turn around and be applied to computer science. Obviously the creation of a quantum computer would be an amazing thing and everyone would relish the exponential power of such a construct, however, I'm not sure any of us would know how to program the darn thing. The requirements of this construct are entirely different from what we are used to, since the quantum computer is allowed to give us only one of a set of answers. You might think it'll just give you the answer you want, but that certainly isn't the case. Of course some people have realized this and have come up with way's to program the quantum computer. Shor has come up with a composite factoring algorithm that use a classical computer and a quantum computer in conjuction to produce results far faster than a classical computer could manage. Grover has managed to develop an algorithm for finding a number within an unsorted list much faster than the min(1), avg(N/2), max(N) that current classical algorithms are capable of. The resulting item is found in .758*sqrt(N). For a list of 100 elements the average search time for a classical computer would be 50, while the quantum search would take 7.58 (strange that we get a real number result for the number of operations, I'm assuming that the number actually gets clamped to the upper bound of 8 operations).
If you have the time, then staying ahead of the game by studying up on the next techonology is pretty cool, but if you REALLY want to be ahead of the game, maybe you should pick up the technology you'll be using say 20 years from now. Most of us don't think in decades though.