Skeletons In the Closet

Among the collections cabinets of the Renaissance, fish, in the forms of naturalia and artificialia, can be widely found. They were sought after for their beauty as well as their relation to the natural world. In the famous frontispiece to Ferrante Imperato’s Dell’historia naturale (1599), fish of varying kinds are hung against and atop the ceiling on either side of a large alligator. They are mixed between an assortment of crustaceans and shells, also sea creatures, including the prized nautilus shell found so abundantly in Renaissance culture. As seen in this frontispiece, fish could be found as decoration in collection cabinets, featured creatures of study in natural history books, and the subject of paintings. The cabinet here at Gettysburg features fish in those two forms of naturalia and artificilia to properly emulate the era. A skeleton of the Gar fish is displayed alongside the skeleton of a Perch. Each representing two sides of the commercial spectrum. Paired with the skeletons are prints of copper engravings done by Mark Catesby (1682-1749) from the second volume of his book The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands (1754).[excerpt

Models to Reduce the Complexity of Simulating a Quantum Computer

Recently Quantum Computation has generated a lot of interest due to the discovery of a quantum algorithm which can factor large numbers in polynomial time. The usefulness of a quantum com puter is limited by the effect of errors. Simulation is a useful tool for determining the feasibility of quantum computers in the presence of errors. The size of a quantum computer that can be simulat ed is small because faithfully modeling a quantum computer requires an exponential amount of storage and number of operations. In this paper we define simulation models to study the feasibility of quantum computers. The most detailed of these models is based directly on a proposed imple mentation. We also define less detailed models which are exponentially less complex but still pro duce accurate results. Finally we show that the two different types of errors, decoherence and inaccuracies, are uncorrelated. This decreases the number of simulations which must be per formed.Comment: 25 page