I asked Dave Bacon, the Quantum Pontiff and UW Quantum Computer Scientist, to give a little commentary on a recent Nature paper stating that negative Quantum Information exists. He obligingly endorsed the authors' explanations (and if you're interested in such things, I recommend reading them), and offered this fun anecdote instead:
When I was a freshman at Caltech, I was wandering around campus a few weeks after I showed up on campus, and I saw these two guys having a really animated conversation outside on a bench. One of the guys was really really tall, and the other guy was fairly short and looked EXACTLY like Rick Moranis. I mean exactly. This being Los Angeles, and me being a hick from the sticks, I was only a few feet away from asking the shorter guy for an autograph, when I chickened out. Which is a good thing, because it turns out that this guy was none other than [Professor] Steve Koonin!This follow-up comment by Bacon also amused me: Did you also notice the resemblence of another professor, who will go unnamed, who had a stricking resemblence to Nintendo’s Mario? But in general I love the idea of movie-stars---even movie stars as nerdy as Rick Moranis--hanging out at the Caltech campus. It's not that far-fetched, I know that producers and their ilk, at least, often make their homes in nearby snootily gorgeous San Marino. If I was a movie star and lived in LA, I would totally go to quantum computing seminars at Caltech.
When I was a sophomore at Berkeley, Robin Williams' Patch Adams was partially filmed in the physics building over spring break. (Chairman Falcone rather endearingly took every possible opportunity to mention this to alumni, often mere breaths away from heady discoveries like about dark matter and super nova.) The story goes that as Williams was wrapping up an interview with the local news channel, a grad student friend of mine walked past and shouted out, "Hey Robin, want to see some really cold atoms?" and Williams responded, "Yes!" conveniently supplying the newscrew with some wacky B-reel of him bouncing off to the basement of Birge with my friend, which then caused me to choke on my dinner as I watched the evening news. Apparently Williams had quite a blast examining what was one of the densest, largest optical table laser sets ups on the continent.
