I think one of the main mistakes I’ve made in the past is discounting the role of people in how much I will enjoy an experience. Whether I was trying a new activity, thinking about work I wanted to do, or pondering which topic I should study, I would focus on the thing itself, and less on the conditions surrounding it. In particular, I would make my choices purely by if I was going to get anything out of the activity.

During my Master’s degree at Perimeter Institute, I changed my thinking for the better. Instead of focusing only on if an activity interested me, I started asking a new question: Who will I meet and interact with?

This question changed how I viewed life. It helped highlight how much potential enjoyment I was missing out on by not factoring in the interactions I would have with others.

For example, because I pushed myself to spend time with the others in my Master’s program, I developed friendships that I will have for the rest of my life. In the moment, I may have thought that going out with friends was pulling me away from the “real” reason I was in this program (to learn theoretical physics). However, I see now that the friendships I formed during the program were the point. They are more valuable than the physics I learned. This might not be true for every student, but it was for me.

I notice this now in my life quite a bit. As an introvert, I often discount or neglect the value of interacting with other people. I may instinctively only question if the activity is enjoyable. But once I remember the value of friendships and human interaction, I find myself saying yes to a lot more activities.

The friends you make and the people you meet, they are worth so much that it’s probably worth having a bias towards doing activities (particularly new ones) just to kickstart friend formation.

After spending a long time on my PhD projects during the past year, I wanted to break away from them and work on something new. That’s why I applied to the Los Alamos Quantum Computer Summer School (I’ll call it QCSS now). The summer school was in its fourth edition, and was virtual like the one last year.

To be a scientist means to explore. You need to start from what is known and jump out into the void, investigating new ideas. In this regard, the scientist is an explorer, a person searching for new truths in a world without a map. To be more precise, a scientist uncovers the new map as they learn.

If you want to learn a topic today, the resources are much more plentiful than even a few decades ago. The internet has given us wonderful resources to learn from, including some which leverage internet technologies to provide animations and teach topics in a much more interactive way. This is particularly true for mathematics and physics, which have been entrenched in dry textbooks that are a chore to read¹ for much too long.

When I hear the word “quantum”, I think of all the misconceptions and crazy ideas people associate with it in a lot of popular media. Physicists are great (and terrible) at coming up with names, and the word “quantum” is such an example of a word with a lot of baggage attached. Pair it with the word “computer”, however, and the misconceptions skyrocket, sometimes turning into full-blown hype. The reality (at the time of this writing) is much more modest: quantum computing presents an opportunity for thinking of computation differently, and the subsequent years will see how this plays out when theory meets experiment and engineering.

There’s a ton to talk about when it comes to quantum computing, but in this essay, I want to share with you something called a quantum error correcting code. It does what it says on the tin, and corrects errors that can accumulate during a computation. There are many such proposals, but one of the most popular is called the surface code, whose name will make sense as we dive into the details. The surface code is a proposal for how we can build a quantum computer that is robust to errors, but is only one step in the process. This essay is devoted to the surface code, how it works, and the challenges it faces when it comes to implementation.