Some things are possible and some are not. That line between the possible and the impossible can tell us a lot about the way Nature works. In this talk we will ponder a few impossibilities, from the notorious (time travel, escape from a black hole) to the obscure (quantum cloning), using them to discover some of the physical principles that govern information in our quantum universe. As one might expect upon a journey into wonderland, our constant companion will be Alice — thanks to her creator Lewis Carroll and her most famous illustrator Sir John Tenniel. Many surprises await beyond the looking-glass of the impossible.

Bio: Dr. Benjamin Schumacher is Professor of Physics at Kenyon College, where he has taught for 20 years. He received his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from The University of Texas at Austin in 1990. Professor Schumacher is the author of numerous scientific papers and two books, including Physics in Spacetime: An Introduction to Special Relativity. As one of the founders of quantum information theory, he introduced the term qubit, invented quantum data compression (also known as Schumacher compression), and established several fundamental results about the information capacity of quantum systems. For his contributions, he won the 2002 Quantum Communication Award, the premier international prize in the field, and was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Besides working on quantum information theory, he has done physics research on black holes, thermodynamics, and statistical mechanics. Professor Schumacher has spent sabbaticals working at Los Alamos National Laboratory and as a Moore Distinguished Scholar at the Institute for Quantum Information at California Institute of Technology. He has also done research at the Isaac Newton Institute of Cambridge University, the Santa Fe Institute, the Perimeter Institute, the University of New Mexico, the University of Montreal, the University of Innsbruck, and the University of Queensland.