In my PhD I did study systems in higher dimensions (including fractal dimensions) and it is not a metaphor and no, I did not visualize them, it was more like defining a mathematical representation of the system geometry and working on top of it.
Yes, I didn’t think people would be so amazed by it either. Like it’s mind-blowing that this works or has been thought of. But we first did it once as well, some people just discover it late in life I guess (or not at all).
It's not a particle, it is a quasi-particle. Those are field manifestations that happen on solid state, like solitons and holes, so it is cool, but no fundamental change do the standard model or anything like that.
About your first point, "outpaces current supercomputers, solving tasks in minutes that would otherwise take billions of years.", that is the point of the article. They used their computer to model a system that can't be verified with a classic computer algorithm, so no, we are not certain that it is solving anything.
About the other points, quantum computers are massively different from classic ones, so much that there are very few algorithms for them. For example, GPUs are faster at matrix multiplication because it can be implemented independent parallel threads, but they suck at other problemas. A quantum computer is good for running quantum algorithms [1], of which there are very few at the moment, and most of them are useful for simulating quantum physics. It is not a "faster" classic computer in any way.
Well, fair enough I suppose. Although a superficial reading would suggest this sort of technology is at least fifty years away from being deployable at opposite ends of a submarine cable to double the capacity without doubling the cable-laying. It reads like it's in the very early experimental stage, where they're barely demonstrating the plausibility, let alone the viability.
Quantum computing seems to be in the same realm as nuclear fusion as a power source. My Quantum theory professor used to say that in the 1960's, when he was a physics student in the Soviet Union it was "the energy of the future, in 20 years everything will be powered by nuclear fusion".
When i was an undergrad student 20 years ago I did hear that "soon, quantum computing will change the world", and yet here we are, every year someone builds a new machine but no one has yet to factorize that 21 = 7x3 in a general way.
You could also say we are already using fusion power - via solar panels. We have a massive ball of plasma powered by fusion in the sky and we are harvesting the energy it creates at an ever growing scale.
Whether we'll be able to replicate it profitably at small scale is a question.
Some part of geothermal energy comes from gravity which could be argued is not related to fusion (even if the matter undergoing gravity was created in fusion)
Geothermal energy is derived from differences in kinetic energy between different layers of the planet (so extracting it saps kinetic energy from the planet's rotation). The energy stored in the Earth's rotation comes from the kinetic energy in the Solar nebula, which itself comes from stellar explosions in the primordial universe, which themselves were caused by fusion.
Wait, you had a quantum theory Prof in the 60s, but you also were an undergrad 20 years ago? That's a ~40 year period in between, makes me curious to what happened.
The professor taught GP quantum theory during the '00s, and in the '60s that same professor was a physics student in the USSR, where it was said that by the '80s fusion would power everything.
A big problem in science in general is reproducibility. There are thousands of papers being published every month with peer review, which prunes out the most obvious errors, but the whole system is built on trust.
Very few labs around the world are tasked with testing results instead of trying to produce new science, and in this specific case, only google has access to the device being built and the computation tested by them impossible to verify with classic computers, unlike Shor's algorithm which is trivial to test with known primes.
I kinda read this paper, and holy crap, it's what we used to call in college "one of those guys", during the early 2000's.
A computer scientist or engineer who is reasonably competent in his area, but that for some reason decided that he is the one who is going to unify all of physics with his pet theory based on a superficial understanding quantum theory and relativity (always special relativity, never general relativity).
