Some problems are best left unsolved

I always have my phone in my pocket so I can take photos, film something interesting or make a phone call. Today I didn't need to since one of my students, Mazen, filmed it for me. Well it's not that interesting really, just a trolley running down a slope. What caught my attention was what was happening behind the camera, or to be more precise on the camera itself. To keep in focus with the trolley Mazen had to move the lens. This proved to be quite difficult since the trolley is accelerating so the rate of turning the lens also had to increase. Would be interesting to compare the movement of the lens to the movement of the trolley (an EE for next year maybe?). Whilst on the subject of the EE (all my students have finished by the way so congrats to them for that) the person standing next to me, as we go out of focus at an ever increasing rate, is Joonas Govenius. He did an EE in physics some years ago. it was about the whether the depth of a swimming pool affects the speed of a swimmer (it does). I used his abstract in the EE section of my book. He went on to study physics at Princeton and is now doing a PhD in quantum computing in Helsinki. Interesting that there are some problems that can't be solved with the 1's and 0's of the classical computer which is a good thing when it comes to working out how to crack the algorithm used to protect my bank account from hackers. So quantum computers will be able to solve those problems. Hmm, not sure that's a problem I want to be solved. Lets hope they are also able to create some new problems that quantum computers can't solve.