Preceding the Hofstadter Lecture, Professor Preskill will also speak at the Tuesday, May 28th Physics/AP Colloquium at 3:30pm followed by the Hofstadter Memorial Dinner at the Stanford Faculty Club at 6pm.

The Robert Hofstadter Memorial lectures were established in 1993 by the Stanford Physics Department. The lectures traditionally focus on one or more of the four main areas of physics that the late Prof. Hofstadter pursued in his career: high-energy particle physics, high-energy astrophysics, particle detectors and medical physics.

Abstract: The quantum laws governing atoms and other tiny objects seem to defy common sense, and information encoded in quantum systems has weird properties that baffle our feeble human minds. John Preskill will explain why he loves quantum entanglement, the elusive feature making quantum information fundamentally different from information in the macroscopic world. By exploiting quantum entanglement, quantum computers should be able to solve otherwise intractable problems, with far-reaching applications to cryptology, materials, and fundamental physical science. Preskill is less weird than a quantum computer, and easier to understand.

Bio: John Preskill is the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology, and Director of the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter at Caltech. Preskill received his Ph.D. in physics in 1980 from Harvard, and joined the Caltech faculty in 1983. Preskill began his career in particle physics and cosmology, but since the mid-1990s his main research area has been quantum information science; he is especially intrigued by the ways our deepening understanding of quantum information and quantum computing can be applied to other fundamental issues in physics, such as the quantum structure of space and time.