A fatal-headshot scooping

In science, getting “scooped” generally means that someone else announces a discovery, maybe by posting or publishing a paper, that steals the thunder from something you’re working on. Maybe they reached the same conclusions as you but got there quicker — or maybe they discovered something more interesting that trivializes your work. Sometimes it’s not so bad and you can still get something out of it, like putting a paper out quickly and claiming an independent discovery or publishing an alternative way to reach the same conclusion. Other times there’s nothing to be salvaged — so you ditch everything and move on to something else. This is a story about a time I was scooped as a graduate student that falls into the second category.

I’d been working on something for a while — several months at least. It had to do with space-bounded quantum computation but the details aren’t really important for the sake of the story. It was very technical, and I’d built up a lot of mathematical machinery to make it all work. I was nearly done with a paper about it, and I’d used the results I’d discovered as the basis for a thesis proposal that I had to submit and defend as a part of my PhD degree requirements. That part went fine and my thesis proposal was accepted.

A professor I worked with knew Peter Shor and had arranged for me to visit him for a couple of days. Peter was at AT&T Research at the time, before he moved to MIT. I prepared a talk on what I’d been working on and travelled to New Jersey. I was excited to share my results and of course I also hoped to make a good impression.

About an hour or two before my talk, one of the postdocs working with Peter showed me a new paper he’d just learned about: Reversible space equals deterministic space by Lange, McKenzie, and Tapp. The title alone struck fear into my heart. I quickly read the paper, which is both simple and beautiful, and it probably took me about 90 seconds to understand how it worked. And I saw that it was a fatal headshot to my work. This wasn’t a case where I could claim the independent discovery of something or salvage an alternative proof — everything I’d done was essentially trivialized by this work and no longer worth the paper I’d printed it on. It was pretty devastating to be honest. As a graduate student, publishable results were few and far between and each felt precious. And this was more because it was going to be the basis of my thesis.

So that was bad — but then I had to give the talk. The reality was that what I’d come prepared to speak about was now trivial and pointless and I was basically just wasting everyone’s time. But I couldn’t give the talk I’d prepared and not tell them what I’d recently learned, so I explained the situation and went through what I’d prepared. The audience was mercifully small but it did include Peter. Eric Rains was there as well — Eric moved on to other subjects but his work on quantum information theory from this period is well known and had a significant impact on the field. Anyway, it was a hard talk to give and it surely did not impress, but at least it ended.

I have a memory of flying home feeling defeated and shell shocked, but after I returned home I just went back to work and started something new. I never once touched that nearly completed paper again, and now decades later I no longer seem to have it in my files. And everything turned out fine. I found new results and wrote a different thesis than what I’d proposed — and if anyone on my committee realized they didn’t mention it. Of course it also didn’t matter what people thought of me, that wasn’t the point of the visit.

I hope there’s some encouragement to be found in this story. Looking back now, I wouldn’t choose not to have had this experience — I learned from it. We tend to hide our failures and struggles as we focus on our successes and accomplishments, but we’re all subject to the luck of the draw and things don’t always go as we might have hoped. So if you face a setback you’re not alone. To my eye the only thing to be done is to put one foot in front of the other and move forward.