25 December 1996, “Reality Steaks”

Holiday cheers! I'm sitting in Geneva, connected to my machine at Caltech, thinking about an old fart in Massachusetts. I was just reading an article (in the New Yorker) about Woody Allen and came across the most wonderful quote: “I hate reality, but, you know, where else can you get a good steak dinner?” Like it? Quantum mechanics everywhere you turn.

17 February 1997, “Prophetic Herberts”

This is the second time you've intrigued me with a phrase or two: I'm not letting you off the hook this time. Please explain in more detail what you mean by the following. The first quote comes from 25 December 1996:

Herbal Treatment 1:Actually that Austrian reaction to enhancing classical communication was probably part of a reality-loving or at least a quantum-preferring inclination which is some-thing beneficial to the reality-seekers amongst us – if everyone were so crazed about measurement and what-all, Charlie would never have figured out that it wasn't the knowing of an answer which introduced the irreversibility; it was the erasure of the “garbage” produced in the calculation. And without all the fuss over reversible classical computation, we wouldn't have had so much fun with quantum comp.

The second quote comes from 12 February 1997:

Herbal Treatment 2:I was impressed similarly by Charlie's hint that thinking beyond the “big deal” everyone since Szilard seemed to make of measurements was crucial to his realization that the entropy generated by Maxwell's demon for a 1-molecule gas came from forgetting which side of the door it was on.