As a consequence of being a graduate student in quantum computing, I met several people whose papers I had read in high school and whose writings had influenced my interests. It was very cool, for example, to sit next to Dr. Charles Bennett during a lecture at the Perimeter Institute and to watch him grill the speaker. My supervisor, Dr. Cleve, also introduced me personally to Dr. John Preskill, a meeting which I will describe in another post.
Another person I met through Dr. Cleve was Dr. Michael Nielsen, the co-author with Dr. Isaac Chuang of the standard textbook on quantum computing. Dr. Nielsen is writing a book on the future of science and is interested in the effects of modern communications technologies on scientific research and collaboration, a topic which I had been thinking and writing about since high school. But when I met him, I couldn’t bring myself to discuss it with him.
I have already written about this kind of self-sabotage, of holding myself back, previously. Dr. Nielsen is one of the pioneers of quantum computing, and I shared not one but two academic interests with him, and I should have spoken to him about them. But I had been punished in high school for both of these interests, which my father had dismissed as “worthless”, and this fact and the associated pain were always on my mind. This is a prime example of how, even when my parents were not actively attacking me, they still nevertheless managed to disrupt my studies and deprive me of numerous career opportunities. I was always apprehensive about discussing my academic interests with others because it might lead to a situation where I had no control over the public exposure my work might receive, and also because I did not want to put myself into any situations where I would have to disappoint other people when my parents put a stop to my collaborations with them, as had often happened before. It is easy to see how devastating the restrictions imposed on me by my parents’ behaviour are to a career in science, where researchers typically broadcast their interests and their work as publicly and as widely as possible.
Someone else who shares an interest in both quantum computing and open access scientific publication is Dr. Scott Aaronson, who was previously at IQC and is now at MIT, and who is an editor for the open access journal Theory of Computing. When I started writing my autobiography, one of the main reasons behind my decision to make it public was that there was nobody to whom I could point when I was in high school and say to my parents that this person proves that everything they think they know about how to succeed in academia is wrong. But Dr. Aaronson is exactly such a person.
If my father’s beliefs are correct, Scott Aaronson should not exist. His research explores the connections between computational complexity theory (my father had claimed that theoretical computer science is not computer science) and physics (which my father had insisted had “nothing to do with” computer science). And yet Dr. Aaronson is a computer scientist, and a rather accomplished one. Furthermore, he works at MIT, which my father had assured me I would never get into if I continued to “waste [my] time” studying the physics of computation.
Consider the following sentence from Dr. Aaronson’s Research Statement:
To me, Shor’s algorithm represented a promise: that from now on, the study of the feasibly computable was going to be inextricably linked to the central conceptual problems in physics.
My argument with my father about the intimate relationship between physics and computation had started before the publication of Shor’s factoring algorithm, but I had defended the necessity of my studying theoretical physics in preparation for computer science research using almost exactly the same language. The above quote is the sort of sentence that would send my father into a screaming rage.
Or, consider the following story from Dr. Aaronson’s Teaching Statement. While a second-year graduate student, he had designed a course called “Physics, Philosophy, Pizza”, in which the students would discuss “Gödel’s theorem, P versus NP, quantum computing, special relativity, the Turing test, or other topics depending on student interest”. My father had refused to believe me when I told him in high school that Gödel’s theorem and the P vs. NP problem were among some of the most important ideas in computer science, because he had never heard of them. When I participated in the University of Toronto Mentorship Program to study astrophysics, including the theory of relativity, he kept dismissing it as a “waste of time”. Every single one of the topics listed by Dr. Aaronson was something I had studied in high school outside of the classroom while my parents attacked me for doing so. And I have already written about how, when I used to organise study sessions very much like Dr. Aaronson’s description of his course, my mother would continually nag me to stop.
I had visited Dr. Aaronson’s apartment a few times while he was in Waterloo, and his shelves were full of the kinds of books that my parents kept pressuring me not to read. Like me, he had books on Middle Eastern history, religion, and several fields of science outside of his research. In fact, he owned several books by authors whose writings I had specifically been punished for reading in high school.
Dr. Aaronson had also written an article for Scientific American. I mention this because of my father’s odd attitude towards popular science magazines, and Scientific American in particular. He had always attacked me for “wasting money” on such magazines (primarily Scientific American and Wired) while I was in high school. Shortly after I came to Waterloo, however, he said to me, out of the blue, “You should write an article for Scientific American.” And he suggested this a few times before he dropped it. I didn’t quite know what to make of it — maybe one of his colleague’s children had an article published there, or he believed that this was the sort of thing one “should” do as a graduate student. But a typical person can’t just suddenly decide that he wants to write an article for Scientific American and have it published, and the kind of people the editors ask to contribute articles are very likely not to have parents who refer to their magazine as a “waste of money”.
In the fall of 2006, Dr. Aaronson taught a course called “Quantum Computing Since Democritus” at IQC. (Note the course code: PHYS771.) I sat in on the first lecture, but I became so depressed that I couldn’t continue. The contents of the course were exactly the topics that my father had dismissed as “worthless” and threatened and beat me for studying in high school. I did, however, read the course notes afterwards, when they became available.
The “textbook” for the course was Dr. Roger Penrose’s “The Emperor’s New Mind”, a book my father had prevented me from completing in high school. (After my father forbid me from reading books on science at home, this drastically cut down on the amount of time I had to read the books that I wanted to read.) Dr. Aaronson actually disagreed with the book’s central premise, but chose it anyway it because it covered many of the ideas he wanted to discuss in the course. Leaving aside for the moment the fact that my father would have derided the contents of the entire book as “nonsense” (but for a completely different reason than Dr. Aaronson’s disagreement with it), this was something that my father would most certainly have criticised. To a traditional Chinese mentality, the thought of an instructor choosing a textbook that he disagreed with, and especially if he made a big deal in class out of what he believed to be its errors, is unthinkable.
Even the title of the course was something that my father would have ridiculed. I had studied a number of ancient philosophers, and my father had always insisted that this was something I should hold off doing until “after [my] retirement”, because their ideas had “nothing to do with” my studies. But this isn’t true. I had studied the Indian Buddhist logicians, and my familiarity with their ideas was a part of the reason that I had done so well when I took a graduate course in mathematical logic. For the second lecture of Dr. Aaronson’s course, he had asked Dr. Rahul Jain, a postdoc from India, to give a brief presentation on atomist ideas from Jainism. If I had been in the course and had access to my books on Indian logic, which had been stored away in my parents’ house, I would certainly have contributed to the discussion.
I have discussed previously how my parents would continually pressure me to remove books that they believed I did not need from my residence to their house. When I was in Toronto, I had a reputation as a library — friends and acquaintances would borrow books from me. The fact is that you can never predict when a book will come in handy, and having books around on “irrelevant” subjects is often very advantageous. My parents claimed that books on subjects unrelated to my research distracted me, but I was more often distracted by not having ready access to a book that I owned when I wanted to refer to it. As another example, when Dr. Seth Lloyd visited the Perimeter Institute, I wanted to ask him about Dr. Elaine Pagels, the wife of his late academic advisor Dr. Heinz Pagels and the author of several books on the early Christian church. Dr. Lloyd had written about being influenced by her writings on Gnosticism, and I had wanted to discuss these with him (if for no reason other than that every other student asked him about quantum computing). But I didn’t have her books with me, and so I never spoke with him about her ideas.
In Dr. Lloyd’s “Programming the Universe”, he described his education as follows:
My undergraduate curriculum at Harvard went by the name “General Education.” In practice, this seemed to mean that if I could talk my way into a course, then it was part of my curriculum. Accordingly, with the blessing — or, at any rate, the signature — of my advisor, the Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow, I designed my undergraduate physics curriculum around Robert Fitzgerald’s courses on prosody and on Homer, Virgil, and Dante, supported by Leon Kirchner’s course on chamber music performance and I. Bernard Cohen’s graduate seminar on the Influences of the Physical Sciences on the Social. Glashow also insisted that I take some physics.
The more people I met, the more data points I accumulated to support the theory that no one who behaved in the way my parents wanted me to behave could ever be successful as a quantum computing researcher, or more generally, a computer scientist or any other kind of scientist. But my behaviour since my arrival in Waterloo had, in fact, been largely dictated by the restrictions imposed on me by my parents, and this made me very depressed.
– davinci
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