Last Day at QSQW

 It's day 4 at Quantum Simulation and Quantum Walks.  We've had the conference dinner:  Foodwise so-so for vegetarians, but it was a social event more than anything, and I had a nice chat with the people I was sitting near.  Smalltalk is not one of my primary skills, but we managed to keep the conversation going.  The guy opposite me (Bryce Gadway from Penn State) bonded over some of the weird things our kids find on YouTubeKids. 

We've also had the excursion, which was a guided tour of a tunnel dug into the side of a hill in Naples.  It was started in the 1500s as part of an aquaduct system, then expanded under the auspices of the Bourbon King Ferdinand II of the two Sicilies (of which Naples was a part at the time).  This was mainly to provide him with an escape route to the sea, ordered in the period leading up to the 1848 revolution.  Ferdinand left Naples before the tunnels were finished and they were abandoned, until their utility was rediscovered in World War 2 when they provided useful bomb shelters.  After the war, the tunnels were filled up with rubble from the destroyed city, and later used to store impounded cars (many of which are still there).  Only in the last 20 years or so have people started to clear them out and turn them into a tourist destination, operated by the multistory garage which is carved into the opening sections of the tunnels (winner of "Worlds Coolest Car Park 2018" award).  Here is a picture of some of the tour party in what was the old aquaduct

 

I gave my talk yesterday, and had some interesting discussion afterwards with people who seemed to find it interesting.  I've learnt a lot about quantum walk and quantum cellular automata, which seems like less of a niche thing with limited application, as I had assumed, but an alternative and complete way to think about quantum problems.  Indeed, there is book by 't Hooft describing Cellular Automata as an "interpretation" of quantum mechancs.  Let's see if I keep up any of the momentum of the interest I have picked up from being here in my future research.  At the very least, I've made some connections to people who are working on things that are closer to what I am doing than I had suspected.

They took a conference photo.  I am right at the back and not terribly easy to spot.   After they had taken several pictures, a couple of latecomers arrived and one stood half in front of me, and that's the photo they shared.

 

QSQW in Naples

It's my first time in Naples and I'm here for the Quantum Simulation and Quantum Walks conference.  I was sent an email about the conference a while ago, and while I do not work directly in Quantum Walks, I'm interested enough in them, and I do work in quantum simulation.  I think, after having sat through the first day, that I am slightly here under false pretences and the quantum simulation talks generally have some kind of link to the idea of quantum walks or quantum cellular automata.  Well,  I submitted an honest abstract, and they selected it for a talk, so ... hopefully they will like it when I give it on Thursday morning. 

I don't really know anyone here – at least I didn't when I arrived, but at least have managed to talk to some people, including someone who turns out to be married to one of my colleagues at Surrey.  Small world, eh?  Well, perhaps not surprising that two academics working in a similar are should be married, I suppose. 

I arrived in the mid-evening yesterday, after sunset.  There was a prominent moon, with Jupiter visible just below, so I made use of the fact that if you can set your phone somewhere quite still, then it does a pretty good job of capturing nightime scenes with a long exposure.  It helped that the silhouette of Mount Vesuvius was in the shot:

 

Surrey dropping Elsevier deal

I came aross the following story about my institution dropping its current Elsevier journal subscription deal which is arranged as part of the UK-wide JISC organisation:

 

The full story is here.  It seems like the general financial difficulties in UK Higher Education, as well as particular choices at Surrey have led to this.  At a time when Universities, including Surrey, have been cutting costs by getting rid of staff, I am not at all sad to see them cutting costs by avoiding handing so much money to the academic publishers, who take our publicly-funded research without payment, then sell it back to us, all the while getting us to perform the peer-review for free. 

I much prefer the model from the likes of SciPost, where I perform my sole editorial work these days.  An online journal with low costs met through sponsorship, where neither scientists nor readers pay in the sharing of research