SN 879: The Rolling Pwn

Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…

What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!

I recently learned about [hopefully] post-quantum secure encryption, so I looked up the episode where Steve and Leo had discussed it. I hadn’t ever used TWiT as a searchable archive. Great ep! Several comments:

I was disappointed that Elaine didn’t annotate @Leo’s Scottish accent on his “you can’t crack these Dilithium CRYSTALS” riff. Her transcript of this episode – simply attributing the line to Leo – just doesn’t capture the spirit of that moment. That has got to be one of the top TWiT podcast moments of the year!

Interesting commentary about quantum entanglement. “Entangling single atoms over 33 km telecom fibre” is the (science paper discussed in this episode.). The two buildings were 700m apart; the 33km comes from having a bunch’o’loops in the cabling. This allowed the researchers to try a bunch of distances and find the longest where they were able to maintain an entangled relationship between 2 particles.

I was bothered a bit by the use of “instantly” in the discussion. Information being sent 33km with no delay would be interesting, but the paper is not claiming that that is happening. This is not a 33km Orson Scott Card ansible. Ever-lengthening entanglements is a “dog bites man” story. FTL transfer of information would be a “man bites dog” story! :smiley:

Boy that’s an interesting point. As I understand it (poorly) true quantum entanglement would be instant and wouldn’t require any connection between points. Nevertheless it is interesting that they did it with photons.

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I’m pretty sure that’s right. I paid a lot of attention to the quantum entanglement articles a few years back; I haven’t paid attention for a while. I’ll send a message to Dr. Kiki; perhaps she already discussed this on her podcast. Hope she’s still on the Twitter.

As long as you can’t crack the Dilithium CRYSTALS…

Maybe it’s time for TWiQE.