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> But I agree with Scott Aaronson that learning about quantum information before learning about quantum physics is easier than the opposite direction. I'm unco

> But I agree with Scott Aaronson that learning about quantum information before learning about quantum physics is easier than the opposite direction. I'm unconvinced that this is anything but Scott's personal opinion. Basically all teaching methodology advocates for concrete examples over abstract concepts. You can't get much more abstract than generalization of probability theory to allow minus signs. It might work well for some people, and I'm happy it worked for you.

nhaliday 10y ago
I don't really think the physical approach is any more concrete than Scott Aaronson's approach (at least in the way most people talk about concreteness wrt pedagogy). The point of having examples is to illustrate how general principles work in practice by specializing. You can do this just fine in quantum information/computation by discussing particular algorithms, problems, etc. Frankly having taken both QC courses and QM courses, I found the physics-oriented exposition used a bunch of verbiage to phrase things in an experimental/physical way without really specializing the mathematical objects in any sense (eg, Stern-Gerlach experiments). That particular sort of concreteness can be helpful in other parts of physics, but physical intuition is weak to nonexistent in QM. Anyway, I'm nowhere near a physicist so take my review with a grain of salt.
Strilanc 10y ago
In the case of QM, I think the concrete physical cases are all counter-intuitive. They trigger the wrong ideas and confuse people instead of helping them, e.g. by having them focus on malformed questions like "is it a particle or is it a wave?". Which is not to say that I think you should do two years of linear algebra before understanding how the heck it applies to reality. That would also be insane. I guess I just think that the first concrete case should be a qubit simulator. Something grounded that you can come back to and say "Well, what if I did this?" and get the right answer.

nhaliday 10y ago

I don't really think the physical approach is any more concrete than Scott Aaronson's approach (at least in the way most people talk about concreteness wrt pedagogy). The point of having examples is to illustrate how general principles work in practice by specializing. You can do this just fine in quantum information/computation by discussing particular algorithms, problems, etc. Frankly having taken both QC courses and QM courses, I found the physics-oriented exposition used a bunch of verbiage to phrase things in an experimental/physical way without really specializing the mathematical objects in any sense (eg, Stern-Gerlach experiments). That particular sort of concreteness can be helpful in other parts of physics, but physical intuition is weak to nonexistent in QM. Anyway, I'm nowhere near a physicist so take my review with a grain of salt.

Strilanc 10y ago

In the case of QM, I think the concrete physical cases are all counter-intuitive. They trigger the wrong ideas and confuse people instead of helping them, e.g. by having them focus on malformed questions like "is it a particle or is it a wave?". Which is not to say that I think you should do two years of linear algebra before understanding how the heck it applies to reality. That would also be insane. I guess I just think that the first concrete case should be a qubit simulator. Something grounded that you can come back to and say "Well, what if I did this?" and get the right answer.