I’d like to pose the question: why should our universe be governed by physical laws that make the No-Cloning Theorem true? I mean, it’s possible that there’s some other reason for our universe to be quantum-mechanical, and No-Cloning is just a byproduct of that. By the way, here’s my #1 piece of research advice to the students in the audience: if you want to become immortal, just find some fact that everyone already knows and give it a name! If you read Stephen Wiesner’s paper from 1968, which founded quantum cryptography, the No-Cloning Theorem already played a central role-although Wiesner didn’t call it that. Almost everything we’re talking about at this conference, from QKD onwards, is based in some way on quantum states being unclonable. I refer, of course, to the No-Cloning Theorem. The subject of this talk is a deep theorem that stands as one of the crowning achievements of our field. So I’ll do something in between: I’ll tell you about research directions in quantum cryptography that are also jokes. When Yi-Kai asked me to give an after-dinner talk, I wasn’t sure whether to try to say something actually relevant to quantum cryptography or just make jokes. OK, but that’s not what I wanted to talk about. Do any of you know what kind of wall could prevent that? Maybe a metaphysical wall. Forget about illegal immigration and smuggling: I don’t even want Americans and Mexicans to be able to win the CHSH game with probability exceeding 3/4. Personally, though, I don’t think the wall proposal goes far enough. Don’t mess with Texas! As you might’ve heard, many of us Texans even support a big, beautiful, physical wall being built along our border with Mexico. I do, however, need to register a complaint with the organizers, which is: why wasn’t I allowed to bring my concealed firearm to the conference? You know, down in Texas, we don’t look too kindly on you academic elitists in Washington DC telling us what to do, who we can and can’t shoot and so forth.

It’s wonderful to be here at QCRYPT among so many friends-this is the first significant conference I’ve attended since I moved from MIT to Texas.

Thanks so much to Yi-Kai Liu and the other organizers for inviting me and for putting on a really fantastic conference. You could compare to my after-dinner remarks at QIP’2006 to see how much I’ve “”matured”” since then. The following are the after-dinner remarks that I delivered at QCRYPT’2016, the premier quantum cryptography conference, on Thursday Sep.

No clone theorem