Speaker
Description
My main job is to make quantum computers (QCs) happen, and I will tell about that. QCs are very low energy machines, based on the premise that there are extremely accurate effective Lagrangians describing their domain. Trapped atom devices have been pretty successful for building QCs, and the atomic Lagrangian is indeed highly descriptive -- even considered ``fundamental" by some workers, despite requiring many more than 92 arbitrary parameters (atomic masses). The Lagrangian for superconducting devices is, as in nuclear physics, not so descriptive, and troubles constantly occur due to this fact. I will reflect more generally on effective Lagrangians, and pose the question, in the epistemic spirit of "turtles all the way down", whether we can feel we can do fundamental physics without quarks, and without most of the Standard Model.