These quotes come from John Preskill of Caltech's physics department
(and director of their Center for the Physics of Information, which
was generous enough to hire me as a postdoc for a couple years).

The course in which they occurred was Physics/Computer Science 219
(Quantum Computation) taught in Fall 2005 (a) and then Winter 2006 (b)
at Catech.


10/28/05:

"Bell had to discover that von Neumann was full of crap."

"[laughs] I get so confused by this subject."  (this was the lecture
on classical vs quantum regions for states)

"The norm follows immediately from the definition that I just erased."



11/02/05:

"This polytope has a quite complicated geometry in general.  [Preskill
tries to draw a generic polytope.]  See, I can't even draw it, it's so
complicated."

"I'm not even talking about quantum mechanics yet.  That's ok---what I
said was right."

"The ions are only 10 microns apart.  [Preskill draws a figure
representing them.]  They're actually closer than I just drew them."



11/04/05:

"I don't know.  Maybe this didn't help you understand teleportation,
but it works for me."



02/03/06:

"This won't go on too much longer."  (on a brief number theory interlude)



02/17/06:

"Say you have only four friends --- or only four girlfriends, which is
better." (the TA, Panos Aliferis, substituting for Preskill)



02/22/06:

"The answer, as usual in complexity theory, is that it doesn't imply
anything."



02/24/06:

"... which is what I told you last time when I was on the phone with
Rachel." (there's a funny story behind this)

"It kind of smells like it could be a bit of a miracle that NP
problems could be solved by quantum computation...  Sometimes you just
smelling something."

"Yeah, well gravity is a tricky one."



03/03/06:

Student: "So today is the last lecture?" (after Preskill just wrote
	 that on the board)
Preskill: "Yes, and you're lucky to be here."

"But we want to talk about this version of the problem because that's
what this case is all about, isn't it?"