Charles Bennett

Born in 1943 in New York, Charles H. Bennett received his PhD in chemical physics from Harvard in 1971 under David Turnbull and Berni Alder, continuing this research at Argonne Laboratory under Aneesur Rahman.  Since joining the research staff at IBM in 1973 he has worked on the physics of information processing, including Maxwell's demon and reversible computation; quantum information and computation theory; and the relation of thermodynamic disequilibrium to the emergence of phenomenological classicality and complexity from quantum laws. In 1984 he and Gilles Brassard of Montreal devised the first and most widely used protocol for quantum cryptography. In 1993, they and coworkers showed that intact quantum states can be transmitted via a combination of classical communication and prior entanglement, a phenomenon called quantum teleportation.  He is an IBM Fellow and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of the Royal Society of London. He is married with a large family on three continents. His main hobbies are photography and music.

Research summary

Most of Bennett’s research has been on the relation between physics and information, refuting or clarifying ideas like "measurement and computation require the dissipation of at least kT ln(2) of energy for each bit of information acquired or processed", and "dissipation begets self-organization."  He is one of the founders of quantum informatics, which extends the mathematical theories of Shannon and Turing to include superposition and entanglement, with a classical channel now viewed as a quantum channel with an eavesdropper, and a classical computer as a quantum computer handicapped by having eavesdroppers on all its wires.  His public lectures have sought to demystify quantum mechanics, introducing analogies like “the monogamy of entanglement” and “quantum information is like the information in a dream” to help both scientists and lay people overcome the field’s radical weirdness and replace it by a mature quantum intuition.

Talks and reports on quantum information and physics of information

• NSF Report on Quantum Information Science

Blog posts and links

• Schopenhauer and the Geometry of Evil 2016
• Britannica article by Eric Gregersen

Conferences

• 2014 IBM Research "Quantum Foundations of a Classical Universe"
• 2018 Niels Bohr Institute Simons Program "Quantum Information in Cosmology"

Talks

• "Forging a culture of information physics", Wroclaw, Poland 2017
• "Information is Quantum" talk at IBM Research 2017
• Quantum Information's revolutionary origins March 2021 (anniv of 1981 Endicott conf.)
• Simons Berkeley Ben-Or Fest talk June 2024: ”How Science and Scientists can stabilize liberal democracy" and "Computerizing Occam's Razor to evade the hard problem of consciousness"