Quantum Supremacy: How Quantum Computers will Unlock the Mysteries of Science – and Address Humanity’s Biggest Challenges

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There are many diseases caused by our bodies harming themselves as opposed to foreign invaders. Take COVID-19, for instance. The deaths associated with COVID-19 weren’t as a result of the symptoms of the virus, but rather the cytokine storm created by the immune system going off the rails. In 1948, Richard Feynman finalized his path integral formulation. Prior to that, scientists had observed in photosynthesis that quantum particles tend to follow the path of least action. But how did the particles “know” what that path was? Feynman answered that question. He postulated that because electrons exist in waves, they’re able to experience all paths at once. Me: Yes, but how is the computation performed with qubits? Why is it so powerful? Why do particles have to be entangled?

In 1901, off the coast of a Greek island called Antikythera, researchers discovered the remains of a first-century trading ship. On that ship, they found Roman artifacts that they speculate were being sent as a gift to Julius Caesar. There’s hope, though. Mother nature achieves coherence at regular temperatures in a little process called photosynthesis. So scientists are studying how coherence is achieved in nature in the hope of finding a way to recreate the process in a computer. Kaku gives the reader a vague idea of how quantum computing works, or may work in its various immplementations. He doesn't give you any idea of how you might solve an actual problem (presumably because few people have the mathematical expertise to understand quantum computing on a useful level). Instead he mainly writes about a number of currently unsolved problems that might yield to quantum computers someday. I found the discussion interesting from a general scientific / futuristic perspective but little of it was "about" quantum computing per se. MICHIO KAKU is a professor of physics at the City University of New York, cofounder of string field theory, and the author of several widely acclaimed science books, including Hyperspace, Beyond Einstein, Physics of the Impossible, and Physics of the Future. He is the science correspondent for CBS’s This Morning and host of the radio programs Science Fantastic and Explorations in Science. Genres I'm no expert on quantum mechanics. I took the advice of other reviewers to read Scott Aaronson's review before starting. I have nothing to add to Aaronson's critique but I recommend it for perspective.One more name needs to be added to this esteemed list, that of Hugh Everett. For a long time, scientists argued about the wave theory and the idea that a wave collapsed into a single reality when measured. This was a huge problem to overcome until Everett proposed that maybe the wave doesn’t actually collapse; maybe all versions of the reality experienced by the wave exist simultaneously. In other words, not even the quantum computer revolution can change everything everywhere all at once. On November 16 of that same year, the IBM Eagle was revealed which beat them both with 127 qubits. A year later IBM launched Osprey at 433 qubits. Kaku seems to think the solution to every problem is to give scientists another tool, while leaving the mass of humanity just as stupid as it has always been. So we end up like the juggling act of spinning multiple plates on rods, where the juggler has to run from one rod to the next to keep its plate spinning so it doesn't fall off and shatter. The problem with that approach is that most of humanity's problems have a large behavioral component. For example, you can't stop people from burning fossil fuels just by giving them some green energy. (See the book: The Burning Question: We Can't Burn Half the World's Oil, Coal, and Gas. So How Do We Quit?.) History shows that people almost never stop using an older source of energy when they get a new source. They just add the new source on top of the old sources, because more total energy means more total wealth. Man's first energy source was wood and it still is a major source today. The pattern repeated for hydro, coal, oil, gas, and nuclear. We added new sources to the mix and kept using the old sources. The problem with energy is simple to grasp: the amount of energy we currently consume determines the rate at which we can grow our energy consumption. We can carve out a few percent from current consumption and use it to build more energy infrastructure. So this is not a problem you can solve by increasing the supply of energy. Every increase in supply just increases the rate at which we can increase our demand. The only way to get ahead of this problem is to fundamentally change human psychology. People must come to put a strong value on not contributing personally to climate destruction. People must want to consume less energy than they can. People must stop saying "More" and start saying "Enough."

Me: Very well. I get this: quantum computers will change EVERYTHING. You've described the EVERYTHINNG. It was pretty interesting, and some of this information was new to me. Cancer isn’t a foreign invader; it’s created by our own healthy cells. Once we reach adulthood, some cells are programmed to die as others divide. In the case of cancer, healthy cells forget to die off and instead reproduce at an alarming rate. But just two years later, the Quantum Innovation Institute in China claimed that their quantum computer was 100 trillion times faster than supercomputers. It ran on 113 qubits.Quantum computing could change our perspective on the cosmos. (Illustration: Harmonia Macrocosmica, 1660 / Microsoft, 2022 / Alan Boyle) Kaku's] lucid prose and thought process make abundant sense of this technological turning point.” — The New York Times Book Review He made this point over and over again for a variety of different scientific specialties. This caused the book to take on a more general tone. One after the other, he provided a general overview of each individual field’s promises and challenges. I just felt like he strayed too far from the primary topic. Simulation is the goal of quantum computing. When we can simulate the world around us down to the quantum level, we can begin to analyze some of the many problems that have plagued us since the beginning of time. A personal ’90s music overview that is far from definitive, but nevertheless instructive and often poignant.