QSciTech Blog

A selection of user blogs

Back from Canada

09 Sep, 2009

We're back from America! After more then 3 weeks abroad I'm finally back home. It was great. Here is what I did.

After a long flight which included going past 2 very unfriendly American airports (LAX and Minneapolis), I finally arrived in Waterloo. Very soon i discovered something very nice about the university there, things are actually open till late, in fact the student center is open 24hrs - wow! and it's possible to get dinner at night. Promising? yes, but it turns out Waterloo is pretty boring after all. The next day i went to the Niagara falls which turned out to be a great way to get rid of jet lag. The falls are pretty impressive, but even more impressive is the amount of tourists there. And all taking photos of themselves.

On Sunday the conference on "Reconstructing quantum theory" started with some really cool lectures. I met some of the key people attempting to reconstruct quantum mechanics from some simple principles. And of course I had a chance to hear all these new ideas, most of which are very convincing in their own way. It's really neat stuff this reconstruction business and it is really interesting to see how no one really agrees on what the axioms of quantum mechanics are. It did get to be a bit hard to take in at times with 3-4 different lectures each day, each on a different approach to a similar end. And I use the word similar since there is no complete agreement on what we want to achieve with the reconstruction. Now with all these new ideas I'm very excited about my own work in this area, hopefully I'll present something on the next reconstruction conference.

The rest of the MQ guys arrived on Sunday night to attend a different conference at IQC, and during the week we did all kinds of fun things , one of the best being a great Canadian beef steak.

The conference ended on Sunday with a day of discussion about the future of quantum foundations. It's really great to be a part of this project.

After taking some papers from people and some advice on how to continue with my research (and life in general) I took the bus to Toronto.

Toronto... what a great city, people in the streets, bars, restaurants , homeless bums.... Our first dinner was at a microbrewery :). Monday morning we went to the first day of school at the fields institute,

most of the students were Canadian , but with the 4 of us and one of the lecturers (Vidal) from UQ , Australia was well represented.The students were from all different fields (physics, mathematics, and computer science) and the school was at the level where we could (read should) all understand the different lectures. While not too much was new to me , it was really great to have everything connected in a nice way and to get a good overview of the subject. Oh yeah... there was a huge blackboard with chalk and everything there.

On one of the evenings Lauri and I went to a baseball game, it was quite a cultural experience and a very boring game.

Finally we attended the student conference on Saturday and Sunday. The lectures were all very good and again helped me get a good overview of what people are doing (in Canada). I gave my presentation on Saturday and even won a prize, wooohoo. On Saturday we also got to see one of Johann's favorite bands in concert , great stuff. Sunday continued with even better talks then Saturday, and it was a good thing it was the end of the academic part of the trip because i was a little past my saturation point.

On Sunday night Lauri and I left for New York, after some really rude people at the U.S border crossing we finally got there. Our three days of walking around the city by day and Jazz by night were absolutely fantastic and would have been an amazing ending to our trip had the plane from NY to LA left on time. Unfortunately it got delayed by about 3 hours because the sink in the toilet was not working, for us that meant a whole day in LA. We got to see Santa Monica beach and eat some real Mexican food .

All in all , a great trip, both for the mind and the soul.