Re: Seth Lloyd and Stephen Wolfram both claim our universe acts like a quantum computer.

malibu wrote:
Sam Wormley wrote:
malibu wrote:

a. QM is ***.

b. There will never be a quantum computer.

Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics

"Quantum mechanics is a fundamental branch of theoretical physics
with wide applications in experimental physics that replaces
classical mechanics and classical electromagnetism at the atomic
and subatomic levels. It is the underlying mathematical framework
of many fields of physics and chemistry, including condensed matter
physics, atomic physics, molecular physics, computational chemistry,
quantum chemistry, particle physics, and nuclear physics. Along
with general relativity, quantum mechanics is one of the pillars of
modern physics".


PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE
The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News
Number 801 November 16, 2006 by Phillip F. Schewe, Ben Stein,
and Davide Castelvecchi www.aip.org/pnu

UNWIRED ENERGY. Recharging your laptop computer or your cell phone
might one day be done the same convenient way many people now surf
the Web---wirelessly. At this week's AIP Industrial Physics Forum,
in San Francisco, Marin Soljacic (MIT) spoke about how energy could
be transferred wirelessly by the phenomenon of induction, just as
coils inside power transformers transmit electric currents to each
other without touching. The idea of wireless energy transfer is not
new. Nikola Tesla was working on the idea more than a century ago
but failed to develop a practical method.
In the new MIT scheme, a power transmitter would fill the space
around itself with a non-radiative electromagnetic field---meaning
that its energy would not ripple away as electromagnetic waves.
Energy would only be picked up by appliances specially designed to
resonate with the field; most of the energy not picked up by a
receiver would be reabsorbed by the emitter. Contrary to more
traditional, radiative means of energy transmission such as
microwaves, it would not require a direct line of sight. It would
be innocuous to people exposed to it. With designs proposed by
Soljacic in a paper with Aristeidis Karalis and John Joannopoulos,
an object the size of a laptop could be recharged within a few
meters of the power source. Soljacic (m...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) and
his MIT colleagues are now working on demonstrating the technology
in practice. (solja...@xxxxxxx, Tel: 617-253-2467)

ENTANGLED IONS HAVE BEEN "PURIFIED" at record levels by NIST
researchers, providing another tool that will be helpful in
constructing real-world quantum computers. Entanglement is a
quantum-mechanical property in which multiple particles, such as
photons or atoms, become interlinked so that measuring a previously
undetermined property in one particle instantly determines the
property of the others. Particles must be entangled for them to
work together in a quantum computer. However, entanglement is a
fragile property that is easily destroyed by outside disturbances,
such as stray magnetic fields, which can demolish this special
quantum property through a process known as decoherence.
Even when particles become entangled, experimenters might not get
the results they desire, especially if the entangled pairs are
further manipulated. For example, if researchers would like
entangled particles to have the same values of "spin" (e.g.,
spin-up) when they're finally measured, they're not going to get
this desired "correlation" 100% of the time. This is troublesome,
as quantum computers and other quantum devices depend on particles
that are entangled in the intended fashion.
To combat this last entanglement complication, enter the idea of
"purification," first proposed by Charles Bennett of IBM and his
colleagues a decade ago (Bennett et al., Physical Review Letters, 29
January 1996) and first
demonstrated with pairs of photons (Kwiat et al., Nature, 22
February 2001). Essentially a distillation process, purification
improves the probabilities that the entangled particles will have
the desired correlations (e.g., the same value of spin). In the
process, researchers can verify that they have indeed purified the
particles.

In the NIST demonstration, ultraviolet lasers first entangle two
pairs of beryllium ions. The lasers then "cross-entangle" a member
of the first pair with a member of the second. In the process the
lasers perform a number of "purifying" operations that raise the
chances that the ions will be properly correlated. Measuring the
cross-entangled pair provides information on whether the other two
entangled ions were purified. The researchers found that the
purification process worked 30% of the time in entangled ions, much
higher than previous demonstrations involving photons.

OK, I'll give QM a 30% score- but that's stretching it.

John


Progress!

.