Opening Quantum Computing To the Public

director_mr writes "Tom's Hardware is running a story with an interesting description of a 28-qubit quantum computer that was developed by D-Wave Systems. They intend to open up use of their quantum computer to the public. It is particularly good at pattern recognition, it operates at 10 milliKelvin, and it is shielded to limit electromagnetic interference to one nanotesla in three dimensions across the whole chip. Could this be the first successful commercial quantum computer?"

Comments

Re:Still not easy to build at home

[Thing 1]

This is only a little better than the quacks who talk about "quantum healing energy"; they're exploiting the vague term "quantum computing" and the small amount of understanding to try and make a quick buck from investors.

While I agree with you that this device may not be all that it is advertised to be, I must strongly object to your analogy.

I can feel a tingling in my fingertips when I'm "running the energy". There are several methods that I have studied, Jin Shin Jyustu, the book Quantum Touch, and Donna Eden's methods (both books and videos).

It took me about 40 hours of practice before I began feeling the tingling. It's similar to a body part falling asleep, but it is not numb, just tinging. Other people feel it as a temperature difference (either warmer or colder), and others feel it as pressure. There is no "sixth sense"; it comes to you in a form of your existing senses.

I say all this, because I know that energy is part of my human existence, and although I only have a short amount of practice, I have seen benefits. Perhaps I'm overreacting to your wording; perhaps you also agree that energy healing is real, but merely object to practitioners using the trendy term "quantum" along with it. In that case, no worries. But if you meant that there is no such thing as energy or healing benefits from breathing deeply and placing your fingers lightly on specific parts of the body, I can say that I have direct experience that proves the existence of energy.

Just because our instruments are not yet capable of measuring it, doesn't mean that it doesn't exist; just as hundreds of years ago, we couldn't measure bacteria, but they still infected us. The difference is that hundreds of years ago, nobody could "detect" bacteria, whereas I can feel the energy as it's moving. I cannot see it; others can. I want to develop that skill.

Re:D-Wave's Quantum Computing Crackpottery

[Louis Savain]

Honestly, mr. Savain, if your ideas were in fact anything but complete bullshit (and you weren't such a complete asshole when it comes to presenting those ideas) someone might actually take you seriously. You remind me of Gene Ray and his Time Cube, and I don't think I'm the only one.

As I wrote elsewhere, opinions are like assholes. Everybody's got one. You forgot to explain why your opinion matters to me. The last time I checked, you don't put food on my table. Neither do D-Wave, David Deutsch, Stephen Hawking and all the other crackpots in the physics community who believe in time travel and quantum computing. LOL. And yet, nothing moves in spacetime.

There is no dynamics within space-time itself: nothing ever moves therein; nothing happens; nothing changes. [...] In particular, one does not think of particles as "moving through" space-time, or as "following along" their world-lines. Rather, particles are just "in" space-time, once and for all, and the world-line represents, all at once the complete life history of the particle.

From "Relativity from A to B" by Dr. Robert Geroch, U. of Chicago

[Spacetime is] Einstein's block universe (in which, too, nothing ever happens, since everything is, four-dimensionally speaking, determined and laid down from the beginning).

Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations

I myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isn't forbidden by the over-arching laws of physics we usually eventually find a technological way of doing it.

David Deutsch (source: NOVA OnLine)

Now who is the crackpot, me (who, like Popper and Geroch, does not accept time travel and insists that nothing can move in spacetime) or David Deutsch? The answer depends on whether you are an ass kisser or you are on the side of truth and honesty.