Avner Magen Memorial Lecture Day

Quantum computation has seen many interesting developments over the past few years, which connect it to seemingly completely unrelated scientific areas, including a variety of areas in mathematics, physics, computational complexity and even to the foundations of the philosophy of science. I will try to give the basic idea behind just two or three of these connections, concentrating on an interesting question on the borderline of philosophy of science. The talk will be geared to a wide scientific audience, and no prior knowledge about quantum computation will be assumed.