Thoughts on cooking

I could talk for a long time about this but it’s late so I’ll focus on one thing.  Here it is:

A recipe isn’t yours until you have made it several times and have tweaked it.  My friend Denis told me that there is a Russian saying that, translated, is “the first pancake is always messed up.”   Amen.

And it seems only fair to expect that the first time you make a new recipe it won’t be perfect.  So what do you do?  You make several guesses at how it might be improved and then you try again soon enough that you can compare the results.  And you iterate again.

Feedback is more powerful than planning ever was.

It’s true in physics too.  People have been trying for years to make the perfect quantum states to allow Heisenberg-limited interferometry.  It’s possible to plan these states in advance and sometimes it is possible to create them but they turn out to be extremely fragile.  The newer approach is to rely on quantum feedback control.  This year two separate groups have achieved what was impossible through quantum state preparation by using quantum feedback control. By doing this each group replaced a fragile perfectly planned solution by a robust one relying on adapting to feedback.