You know, for years, many people who were discussing this blog were asking: What do axioms of quantum mechanics have to do with Motl's being right-wing? And the answer was "virtually nothing", of course. Those things really were assumed to be uncorrelated and it was largely the case and it surely should be the case. But it is no longer the case. The whole political machinery of raw power – at least one side of it – is now being abused to push physics in a certain direction.You know, for years, many people who were discussing this blog were asking: What do axioms of quantum mechanics have to do with Motl's being right-wing? And the answer was "virtually nothing", of course. Those things really were assumed to be uncorrelated and it was largely the case and it surely should be the case. But it is no longer the case. The whole political machinery of raw power – at least one side of it – is now being abused to push physics in a certain direction.Maybe Motl is on to something.
Sean M. Carroll has written a preposterous book advocating the many-worlds version of quantum mechanics. It is being widely promoted in the left-wing news media, while right-wing sources either ignore or trash it. Is that a coincidence?
There is something about the left-winger that wants to believe in parallel universes. Carroll also says:
If the universe is infinitely big, and it looks the same everywhere, that guarantees that infinite copies of something exactly like you exist out there. Does that bother me? No.I think that this is a left-wing fantasy. Do right-wingers about such unobservable egalitarianism? I doubt it.
The left leaning side of political thought eventually subverts everything it touches into some flavor of Marxist collectivist orthodoxy one way or another and comes back to the same premise of there being no accountability for one's own individual actions/successes/failures (with the strangest exception of those they oppose or have wealth the left wishes to appropriate), due to:
ReplyDelete*You have no free will, so there is no morality or choice or good or evil for that matter, only utility to the collective tribe and its ambitions.
*There is another duplicate of you out there, either by MWI, or in another endless series of diverging universes, so there is actually nothing unique about you, the individual is insignificant.
*Because everyone is either a victim or oppressor, everything is about (and can only be about) victims and oppressors, and any who question this belief on any grounds instantly is branded one of the 'oppressors', who for this crime should be relieved of their legal rights, any due process, and their personal property because... stuff.
*There is no individual merit, only the political weight of the group the individual belongs to, which must also be classified into the intersectional hierarchy of pathetic/helpless/victim-hood in order to have any status or power.
Sean M. Carroll is not actually a physicist. He is foremost an activist with an agenda based on leftist politics more than science, and will use whatever tools at his disposal to that end.
What do you think of IBM's announcement of a 53-qubit quantum computer ready to go in the cloud in mid October?
ReplyDeletehttps://www.technologyreview.com/f/614346/ibms-new-53-qubit-quantum-computer-is-the-most-powerful-machine-you-can-use/
@Craig,
ReplyDeleteDo you really think if they had an actual quantum computer that they would be putting it 'in the cloud'? If the damn thing actually did anything spectacular (like cracking encryption outrageously fast), do you really think the powers that be would let it be used for infotainment of the masses?
Willing to bet that their new 'most powerful machine you can use' can not actually do anything useful faster than a conventional binary computer. The quantum effects they are hyping and trying to exploit for computational advantage are just artifacts of the math model, not the reality it attempts to describe.
This seems similar to the announcement they made in 2017, that they had built a quantum computer with 50 qubits. They didn't mention that they never tested it and it wasn't even functioning.
DeleteSo I wonder if the machine they release to the public on the cloud will really even work properly. If it really worked properly, why haven't they published something explaining their tests?
I found this:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.cnet.com/news/ibm-new-53-qubit-quantum-computer-is-its-biggest-yet/
“but IBM hasn't yet tested the 53-qubit model”