Tuesday, September 8, 2020

SciAm rewrites quantum supremacy history

Neil Savage writes in SciAm:
When researchers at Google announced last fall that they had achieved “quantum superiority” — a point at which a quantum computer can perform a task beyond the reach of regular computers — some people wondered what the big deal was. The program, which checked the output of a random number generator, was of limited practical value and did not prove that the company’s machine could do anything useful, critics said.
This use of quotation marks is curious, because the same author wrote in SciAm last year:
Hands-On with Google’s Quantum Computer

Staking its claim for “quantum supremacy,” the company pulls back the curtain on its landmark Sycamore chip ...

All this chilling and vibrating, Google’s quantum team says, has allowed it to achieve quantum supremacy, the point at which a quantum computer can do something that an ordinary classical computer cannot.

Apparently SciAm has decided that the word "supremacy is racist, because it invokes images of white supremacy, slavery, lynchings, and the KKK. So it has purged the word, and retroactively gone back and changed quotes.

Another SciAm article declares:

The Idea that a Scientific Theory can be 'Falsified' Is a Myth

It’s time we abandoned it ...

Falsification is appealing because it tells a simple and optimistic story of scientific progress, that by steadily eliminating false theories we can eventually arrive at true ones. ...

But if you propagate a “myth-story” enough times and it gets passed on from generation to generation, it can congeal into a fact, and falsification is one such myth-story.

It is time we abandoned it.

Maybe it is time we abandoned Scientific American as a source of hard science news and developments.

Update: Evolutionist professor Jerry Coyne attacks the latter article, as SciAm argued that evolution is a theory that cannot be falsified.

1 comment:

  1. A theory can not be falsified? Seriously?

    Oh gee, let me think, Oh yes! I have an excellent such theory in mind!
    You see, carbon dioxide runs the climate, a little trace gas does this all by itself! If it gets hot in the summer, my theory of carbon dioxide supremacy is true! If it gets cold in the winter, my theory of carbon dioxide supremacy is ALSO true! If any evidence (like all of ice core samples and pretty much all geologic record)demonstrates that carbon dioxide levels actually follows temperature change (never preceding), then VOILA! It's just wrong and you ignore it, because then you would be an unbeliever or *gasp* a DENIER! Isn't that grand?

    Any 'scientific' theory that ever places obedience above evidence is neither science or theory, it's just control dressed up in important sounding terminology.

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