As a physics student interested in research, I've learned that Nature generally hasn't been the most reputable science journal. In the past they've featured articles on faster than light motion, published very inaccurate results and later a story that was featured on Slashdot last April on a theorhetical quantum computer that functioned without necessarily being turned on.
Regarless, the point in the story that seems to be missing is how they don't address the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Tracking the motions of electrons around nuclei generally isn't possible. The best we would be able to know would be one component of it's angular momentum and the rest will definitionally remain unknown.
Perhaps a better conceptualization would be the moon around the earth... It travels around the earth in a circular patter. This is about all we could know about the electron. Any other motions (like if the moon was also orbiting on a plane defined by earth's two poles) must remain unknown in quantum mechanics.
I would say read this with caution on what they claim they'd be able to do.
I personally am working on building a small cave lab at my school right now. We're trying to take an open approach to it using x86 machines running Linux and free available libraries. While I think that the hype about has come and gone, it's probably because there isn't a great deal of new and orginal research being done with it. The current application base is pretty limited (more or less to training simulations and pretty pictures) but there is room for development of standards, applications, better user interfaces, and the like.
This is what I'm hoping to work on once everything is up and running. Once a few breakthroughs are made throughout the industry, I'm sure the hype will start up all over again and with the current developments of 3D graphics on the market, it will probably be more realizable since the cost of everything has dropped significantly. We can only look forward.
I swear, anything that is published through Nature has to be the most questionable of all things. Unfortunately, this argument is missing the most important part of quantum computing, the collapsing of the states into the final results. Without that you end up with unknown states, which you can guess the probabilities for all the possible outcomes, which in the end makes you do the whole thing by hand anyway. Trust me, I've got plenty of quantum particles making up my body and I am the master and doing a whole lotta nothing. By their logic, I should not have failed differential equations.
Slashdot Mirror
As a physics student interested in research, I've learned that Nature generally hasn't been the most reputable science journal. In the past they've featured articles on faster than light motion, published very inaccurate results and later a story that was featured on Slashdot last April on a theorhetical quantum computer that functioned without necessarily being turned on.
Regarless, the point in the story that seems to be missing is how they don't address the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Tracking the motions of electrons around nuclei generally isn't possible. The best we would be able to know would be one component of it's angular momentum and the rest will definitionally remain unknown.
Perhaps a better conceptualization would be the moon around the earth... It travels around the earth in a circular patter. This is about all we could know about the electron. Any other motions (like if the moon was also orbiting on a plane defined by earth's two poles) must remain unknown in quantum mechanics.
I would say read this with caution on what they claim they'd be able to do.
CyberBlood
I personally am working on building a small cave lab at my school right now. We're trying to take an open approach to it using x86 machines running Linux and free available libraries. While I think that the hype about has come and gone, it's probably because there isn't a great deal of new and orginal research being done with it. The current application base is pretty limited (more or less to training simulations and pretty pictures) but there is room for development of standards, applications, better user interfaces, and the like.
This is what I'm hoping to work on once everything is up and running. Once a few breakthroughs are made throughout the industry, I'm sure the hype will start up all over again and with the current developments of 3D graphics on the market, it will probably be more realizable since the cost of everything has dropped significantly. We can only look forward.
CyberBlood
While everything stated in this paper is all well and good and valid, he's missing the fundamental point of innovation.
You make no progress with pessimism.
CyberBlood
I swear, anything that is published through Nature has to be the most questionable of all things. Unfortunately, this argument is missing the most important part of quantum computing, the collapsing of the states into the final results. Without that you end up with unknown states, which you can guess the probabilities for all the possible outcomes, which in the end makes you do the whole thing by hand anyway. Trust me, I've got plenty of quantum particles making up my body and I am the master and doing a whole lotta nothing. By their logic, I should not have failed differential equations.