[texaslonghorn5]

I am confused, how did you reach that conclusion? How does this announcement relate to the future of physics research? Sure, Scott's research is at the intersection of complexity and physics, but he is a CS professor at Texas working in the theoretical computer science department. His work leans far more towards TCS, with some work having connections to cosmology (he cares about physical limits of the universe and the information theory of things like black holes) and other interesting ideas from physics. But the main themes of his work have been quantum algorithms and complexity for a while. He's also nowhere near the experimental side of physics.

[texaslonghorn5]

Also copied from a couple blog posts ago he doesn't self-identify as a physicist either.

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6457

I also had the following exchange at my birthday dinner:

Physicist: So I don’t get this, Scott. Are you a physicist who studied computer science, or a computer scientist who studied physics?

Me: I’m a computer scientist who studied computer science.

Physicist: But then you…

Me: Yeah, at some point I learned what a boson was, in order to invent BosonSampling.

Physicist: And your courses in physics…

Me: They ended at thermodynamics. I couldn’t handle PDEs.

Physicist: What are the units of h-bar?

Me: Uhh, well, it’s a conversion factor between energy and time. (*)

Physicist: Good. What’s the radius of the hydrogen atom?

Me: Uhh … not sure … maybe something like 10-15 meters?

Physicist: OK fine, he’s not one of us.

[mdp2021]

> radius of the hydrogen atom [...] maybe something like 10-15 meters?

Please fix that into 10^-15 or equivalent expression for 10⁻¹⁵, before somebody gets the idea that "Scott" thought "between 10 and 15".

[jks]

The original doesn't say "10-15 meters" but ten to the power of negative fifteen meters, so his guess was off from the Bohr radius of 5.3E-11 in the other direction but by much fewer orders of magnitude than as rendered above.