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Thomas
@aviationdoctor.eth
I know some people are skeptical of Google’s Willow announcement (the editorial insertion of a reference to the computation happening in parallel universes didn’t help). But I can’t shake the feeling that we’ve witnessed the Chat GPT moment of quantum computing
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Nico
@nicom
I actually really liked the multiverse point. Because this is exactly what it is. Hard to understand but this is just exactly it.
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Thomas
@aviationdoctor.eth
The issue with it is that it’s not in the technical paper, only in the blog post, which appears to have been editorialized for sensationalism over accuracy. As much as I enjoy the multiverse interpretation, a more mundane one is that quantum computing taps into more dimensions of available compute than classical computers, but that doesn’t require infinitely many universes to coexist alongside ours, from which we somehow steal computing cycles
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Nico
@nicom
It's one of the quantum theory interpretation, the Everett's Many-Worlds interpretation. I like it and remember that all interpretations of this theory are interpretation, even the Copenhagen one. So I'm not sure we can say one is better than the other when both end to the same result (almost). And I like the multiverse idea so much. That's so elegant.
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Thomas
@aviationdoctor.eth
I was also referring to Everett’s theory (who himself argued against calling it an interpretation, but rather a theory in the scientific sense, i.e., an explanation consistent with observations). What I’m arguing comes from that Everett himself didn’t mention multiple worlds or universes in his original PhD paper. He merely stated that the wave function is real (independently from the observer) and doesn’t collapse into a single state, but instead the system branches into a product of relative states (relative here being how the states of subsystems are to each other). The description of infinitely many universes, each with a physical existence, and each very slightly different from each other in one product-of-relative-states way, is a narrative that was tacked onto Everett’s paper post-hoc by others. 1/2
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Thomas
@aviationdoctor.eth
It’s poetic but also oddly wasteful — why do we need full universes surrounding the discrete system that has branched, including those parts of the universe that are beyond the cone of causality relative to that system? In fact there are infinitely many other examples in math of solutions that are valid on paper but lack a corresponding instantiation in the physical world. An example is the time in free fall equation — its quadratic, so it has both positive and negative solutions. But only the positive one makes sense because negative time doesn’t. Another example is Schrödinger’s wave function itself — a negative probability density is meaningless and yet can be derived. So all I’m saying is that I prefer to be cautious about this late editorialization by the blog post author —as much as the MWI is fun to think about— and not assume that QC is borrowing computing cycles from other literal universes out there (just like they might be borrowing from ours). 2/2
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Nico
@nicom
What can I say after that 🤣 Let's stick to "all the possible outcomes" then instead 😅
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Thomas
@aviationdoctor.eth
One of my all-time favorites mathematical results that is correct and yet doesn’t translate into our physical world is how the sum of natural numbers can be shown to equal -1/12 https://chatgpt.com/share/675d1051-e684-8005-ac07-f20107b4f5f5
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