Benjamin Schumacher | |
---|---|
Nationality | American |
Other names | Ben |
Citizenship | United States |
Occupation | Theoretical physicist |
Employer | Kenyon College |
Known for | Schumacher compression Quantum cellular automaton Coherent information Entanglement distillation No-broadcasting theorem |
Spouse | Carol Schumacher [1] |
Children | 2 daughters [2] |
Awards | 2002 Quantum Communication Award, International Organization for Quantum Communication, Measurement and Computing [3] Rosenbaum Fellowship, Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (1999). Robert M. Tomsich Science Award, Kenyon College (1996). University Fellowship, the University of Texas at Austin (1982–1984 and 1985–1986). National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship (1982–1985). President's Medal for the outstanding graduating senior, Hendrix College (1982). [4] |
Website | Benjamin Schumacher website |
Benjamin "Ben" Schumacher is an American theoretical physicist, working mostly in the field of quantum information theory. [2]
He discovered a way of interpreting quantum states as information. He came up with a way of compressing the information in a state, and storing the information in a smaller number of states. This is now known as Schumacher compression. This was the quantum analog of Shannon's noiseless coding theorem, and it helped to start the field known as quantum information theory.
Schumacher is also credited with inventing the term qubit along with William Wootters of Williams College, which is to quantum computation as a bit is to traditional computation.
He is the author of Physics in Spacetime, [1] a textbook on Special Relativity, and Quantum Processes, Systems, and Information (with Michael Westmoreland), a textbook on Quantum Mechanics. Schumacher is a professor of physics at Kenyon College, a liberal arts college in rural Ohio. He is the lecturer in four courses produced by the Teaching Company: Black Holes, Tides, and Curved Spacetime: Understanding Gravity; Quantum Mechanics: The Physics of the Microscopic World; Impossible: Physics Beyond the Edge; and The Science of Information: From Language to Black Holes. [5]
Schumacher earned his bachelor's degree at Hendrix College, where he met his wife, mathematician Carol Schumacher. [6] His Ph.D. is from the University of Texas at Austin, where his advisers were Richard Matzner and John Archibald Wheeler.
General relativity, also known as the general theory of relativity and Einstein's theory of gravity, is the geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1915 and is the current description of gravitation in modern physics. General relativity generalizes special relativity and refines Newton's law of universal gravitation, providing a unified description of gravity as a geometric property of space and time or four-dimensional spacetime. In particular, the curvature of spacetime is directly related to the energy and momentum of whatever matter and radiation are present. The relation is specified by the Einstein field equations, a system of second order partial differential equations.
Quantum chemistry, also called molecular quantum mechanics, is a branch of physical chemistry focused on the application of quantum mechanics to chemical systems, particularly towards the quantum-mechanical calculation of electronic contributions to physical and chemical properties of molecules, materials, and solutions at the atomic level. These calculations include systematically applied approximations intended to make calculations computationally feasible while still capturing as much information about important contributions to the computed wave functions as well as to observable properties such as structures, spectra, and thermodynamic properties. Quantum chemistry is also concerned with the computation of quantum effects on molecular dynamics and chemical kinetics.
Quantum information is the information of the state of a quantum system. It is the basic entity of study in quantum information theory, and can be manipulated using quantum information processing techniques. Quantum information refers to both the technical definition in terms of Von Neumann entropy and the general computational term.
In physics, statistical mechanics is a mathematical framework that applies statistical methods and probability theory to large assemblies of microscopic entities. Sometimes called statistical physics or statistical thermodynamics, its applications include many problems in the fields of physics, biology, chemistry, neuroscience, computer science, information theory and sociology. Its main purpose is to clarify the properties of matter in aggregate, in terms of physical laws governing atomic motion.
A theory of everything (TOE), final theory, ultimate theory, unified field theory or master theory is a hypothetical, singular, all-encompassing, coherent theoretical framework of physics that fully explains and links together all aspects of the universe. Finding a theory of everything is one of the major unsolved problems in physics.
A wormhole is a hypothetical structure connecting disparate points in spacetime, and is based on a special solution of the Einstein field equations.
The Novikov self-consistency principle, also known as the Novikov self-consistency conjecture and Larry Niven's law of conservation of history, is a principle developed by Russian physicist Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov in the mid-1980s. Novikov intended it to solve the problem of paradoxes in time travel, which is theoretically permitted in certain solutions of general relativity that contain what are known as closed timelike curves. The principle asserts that if an event exists that would cause a paradox or any "change" to the past whatsoever, then the probability of that event is zero. It would thus be impossible to create time paradoxes.
The many-body problem is a general name for a vast category of physical problems pertaining to the properties of microscopic systems made of many interacting particles. Microscopic here implies that quantum mechanics has to be used to provide an accurate description of the system. Many can be anywhere from three to infinity, although three- and four-body systems can be treated by specific means and are thus sometimes separately classified as few-body systems.
In theoretical physics, the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence is a conjectured relationship between two kinds of physical theories. On one side are anti-de Sitter spaces (AdS) that are used in theories of quantum gravity, formulated in terms of string theory or M-theory. On the other side of the correspondence are conformal field theories (CFT) that are quantum field theories, including theories similar to the Yang–Mills theories that describe elementary particles.
The black hole information paradox is a paradox that appears when the predictions of quantum mechanics and general relativity are combined. The theory of general relativity predicts the existence of black holes that are regions of spacetime from which nothing—not even light—can escape. In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking applied the semiclassical approach of quantum field theory in curved spacetime to such systems and found that an isolated black hole would emit a form of radiation. He also argued that the detailed form of the radiation would be independent of the initial state of the black hole, and depend only on its mass, electric charge and angular momentum.
In theoretical physics, quantum field theory in curved spacetime (QFTCS) is an extension of quantum field theory from Minkowski spacetime to a general curved spacetime. This theory uses a semi-classical approach; it treats spacetime as a fixed, classical background, while giving a quantum-mechanical description of the matter and energy propagating through that spacetime. A general prediction of this theory is that particles can be created by time-dependent gravitational fields (multigraviton pair production), or by time-independent gravitational fields that contain horizons. The most famous example of the latter is the phenomenon of Hawking radiation emitted by black holes.
Induced gravity is an idea in quantum gravity that spacetime curvature and its dynamics emerge as a mean field approximation of underlying microscopic degrees of freedom, similar to the fluid mechanics approximation of Bose–Einstein condensates. The concept was originally proposed by Andrei Sakharov in 1967.
Robert M. Wald is an American theoretical physicist and professor at the University of Chicago. He studies general relativity, black holes, and quantum gravity and has written textbooks on these subjects.
Physics is a scientific discipline that seeks to construct and experimentally test theories of the physical universe. These theories vary in their scope and can be organized into several distinct branches, which are outlined in this article.
Basil J. Hiley, is a British quantum physicist and professor emeritus of the University of London.
In theoretical physics, the problem of time is a conceptual conflict between general relativity and quantum mechanics in that quantum mechanics regards the flow of time as universal and absolute, whereas general relativity regards the flow of time as malleable and relative. This problem raises the question of what time really is in a physical sense and whether it is truly a real, distinct phenomenon. It also involves the related question of why time seems to flow in a single direction, despite the fact that no known physical laws at the microscopic level seem to require a single direction.
Constructor theory is a proposal for a new mode of explanation in fundamental physics in the language of ergodic theory, developed by physicists David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto, at the University of Oxford, since 2012. Constructor theory expresses physical laws exclusively in terms of which physical transformations, or tasks, are possible versus which are impossible, and why. By allowing such counterfactual statements into fundamental physics, it allows new physical laws to be expressed, such as the constructor theory of information.
Sandu Popescu is a Romanian-British physicist working in the foundations of quantum mechanics and quantum information.
Quantum Theory: Concepts and Methods is a 1993 quantum physics textbook by Israeli physicist Asher Peres. Well-regarded among the physics community, it is known for unconventional choices of topics to include.
Carol Smith Schumacher is a Bolivian-born American mathematician specializing in real analysis, a mathematics educator, and a textbook author. She is a professor of mathematics at Kenyon College, and vice president of the Mathematical Association of America.