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… » [Expand post] [Permalink]