D-Wave Claims Quantum Supremacy

Quantum computing stock market values are up again, as D-Wave got a paper published in AAAS Science, the top American science journal, claiming quantum supremacy. But SciAm reports:

Loud declarations of various types of quantum advantage aren’t new: Google notably made the first such claim in 2019, and IBM made another in 2023, for example. But these announcements and others were ultimately refuted by outside researchers who used clever classical computing techniques to achieve similar performance. In D-Wave’s case, some of the refutations came even before the Science paper’s publication, as other teams responded to a preliminary report of the work that appeared on the preprint server arXiv.org in March 2024. One preprint study, submitted to arXiv.org on March 7, demonstrated similar calculations using just two hours of processing time on an ordinary laptop. A second preprint study from a different team, submitted on March 11, showed how a calculation that D-Wave’s paper purported would require centuries of supercomputing time could be accomplished in just a few days with far less computational resources.

There is also a lot of skepticism about Microsoft's claim of a topological qubit.

Gil Kalai has not conceded, and has doubled down with his Quantum Computing Skepticism.

Let's review the arguments in favor of quantum supremacy. The most common one is that qubits can be 0 and 1 at the same time, just as Schrodinger's Cat can be alive and dead simultaneously. Operations on qubit are thus able to examine an exponential number of possibilities at the same time, leading to an exponential speedup in computation.

Scott Aaronson says that this is wrong, because it misleadingly predicts an exponential speedup where none is possible. Instead he says the speedup comes from negative probabilities.

The QM probabilities are never negative. That is just his way of making destructive wave interference sound mysterious. When you say a computational speedup comes from wave interference, it is harder to understand.

Aaronson falls back on the argument that it is up to the skeptic to prove that quantum computers are impossible, and that would be very interesting, but no one has done that.

The many-worlds folks say that the speedup comes from computation being done in parallel universes. Most people say that there is no way to observe those parallel universes, but we are supposed to believe that they speed up computations somehow.

Feynman's original argumen was that simulating QM can be exponentially slow, so it can be faster by running a quantum experiment. You can do a chemical reaction faster than you can simulate it from first QM principles. Okay, that is true, but it is a big leap to using QM to factor large integers.

Finally, there is the argument that quantum researchers have made so much progress already. Yes, but maybe it is like slimbing trees to make progress towards going to the Moon. There is progress, but the goals seem as far away as ever. Nobody has a convincing experiment showing that quantum computing is possible.

The Aether is not a Rest Frame

Physicist Sean M. Carroll says, in his latest AMA that quantum field theory has no aether because the whole point of the aether is to have a rest frame for measuring motion:

Marson chady or chatty says 50:03 when I was in high school we were told that the 19th century scientists were looking for a medium which they called 50:08 ether in which light waves would propagate eventually the theory of electromagnetism established that there 50:14 was no such medium yet I can't help but think that the original view was Vindicated by Quantum field Theory isn't 50:20 the electron field of quantum field Theory the equivalent of ether uh no it 50:25 is not the equivalent of E I have answered this question or talked about it in various times but it's been a while so let's address it again um the 50:34 fields of quantum field Theory are just the quantum versions of the fields of classical field Theory so if you think 50:41 that classical electromagnetism which is a classical field Theory uh doesn't need 50:47 ether then you don't you think that Quantum Fields don't need ether either the point is that ether was supposed to 50:53 be like you say A medium in which waves propag at whereas in contrast field 50:59 Theory uh classical or Quantum takes the fields as the fundamental independent 51:05 entities uh the waving electron field or the waving electromagnetic field or the 51:10 waving higs field or whatever none of these are waves in something other than themselves okay so that's the 51:17 ontological difference and there's also a practical difference the whole point of The Ether in 19th century physics was 51:24 to allow for there to be a rest frame with respect to which you can measure your motion uh as opposed to the naive 51:31 reading of Maxwell's equations which say there is no uh Universal rest frame so 19th century physicists went to Great 51:37 Lengths to sort of bend over backwards and figure out how you could reconcile the existence of a rest frame determined 51:44 by The Ether with the fact that you couldn't observe it in any way in Maxwell's equations and that's how they 51:49 invented things like Lorent Transformations even before relativity came on the scene but in Quantum field 51:55 Theory there's no rest frame there's no rest frame everything is perfectly relativistically invariant so the whole 52:01 point of the ether is completely missing in Quantum field Theory so I don't think that's an especially useful way of 52:07 thinking about things

No, I don't think that anyone thought that was the point of aether. For my sources, see the essays on aether in the Encyclopedia Britannica by Maxwell (9th ed, 1878) and Larmor (11th ed, 1911). See also Einstein's views on the aether. None of these say that the aether gives a rest frame.

Maxwell wrote:

The hypothesis of an aether has been maintained by different speculators for very different reasons. To those who maintained the existence of a plenum as a philosophical principle, nature's abhorrence of a vacuum was a sufficient reason for imagining an all-surrounding aether, even though every other argument should be against it. ...

But besides these high metaphysical necessities for a medium, there were more mundane uses to be fulfilled by aethers. Aethers were invented for the planets to swim in, ...

The only aether which has survived is that which was invented by Huygens to explain the propagation of light. The evidence for the existence of the luminiferous aether has accumulated as additional phenomena of light and other radiations have been discovered; ...

Whatever difficulties we may have in forming a consistent idea of the constitution of the aether, there can be no doubt that the interplanetary and interstellar spaces are not empty, but are occupied by a material substance or body, which is certainly the largest, and probably the most uniform body of which we have any knowledge.

In quantum field theory, the vacuum is not empty, and could be regarded as a medium for the propagation of light, and for electrons and everything else.

The story is often told that Einstein invented relativity in order to disprove the aether, show that there can be no rest frame. This story is false, as Einstein did not invent relativity, and what he said about the aether was essentially the same as what Lorentz wrote ten years earlier. The theory of relativity does not say whether there can be a rest frame.

I wonder why people keep telling this silly story. My guess is that people like to believe that the aether was some sort of superstitious belief of lesser men, and that rejecting it was a great intellectual accomplishment, along with rejecting God, the monarchy, and geocentrism.

Carroll is also asked to speculate about the development of general relativity:

nichel Kramer says if Einstein had 2:00:51 not veloped general relativity when he did how soon would it have been developed well we don't know um I don't 2:00:57 think it would have taken that long like it wouldn't have taken 50 or 100 years we already had all the tools right we 2:01:03 had riemanian geometry we had special relativity it's possible for example 2:01:08 that minkowski or minkovsky to be a little bit more correct would have developed it Herman minkovski of course 2:01:14 um was the first to promote the idea of thinking about relativity in terms of SpaceTime and he was a mathematician he 2:01:21 had actually taught Einstein uh so it was 1907 2 years after Einstein's special relativity papers that minkovsky 2:01:27 first said we should think about it in terms of SpaceTime um Einstein eventually settled on general relativity 2:01:33 in 1915 but minkovski passed away in 1909 so he didn't really get a chance to 2:01:39 follow up on his Insight that we should think about things in terms of SpaceTime maybe he would have come up with it but 2:01:45 you know it's an interesting fact about the progress of physics that the progress of physics on theoretical 2:01:51 physics is usually led by physicists not by mathematicians with overwhelming um 2:01:57 probability not that it's impossible to imagine mathematicians doing it but when we think back to how general relativity 2:02:04 came about and there were you know real mathematical issues there and a lot of important steps were taken by 2:02:11 mathematicians benovsky is one David Hilbert of course is another but still it was a physicist it was Albert 2:02:16 Einstein who actually put it together because that physics insight about 2:02:22 the principle of equivalence and how gravity works and things like that that's the bread and butter of physicists not mathematicians the 2:02:29 question is was there any other physicist who would have thought the same way as Einstein there were certainly physicists who had the same 2:02:36 mathematical chops that Einstein did but the physical Insight that he had was unmatched since Galileo basically uh and 2:02:43 has still been unmatched since so it might have taken a while but the tools were there so I don't think it would have taken too 2:02:49 long

I agree that physicists are better at physical insight than mathematicians, but his examples are distorted.

Poincare, Minkowski, Grossmann, and Hilbert were all primarily mathematicians, and they were the chief originators of relativity theory, after Lorentz. Poincare published the first relativistic theory of gravity. Poincare and Minkowski both died before general relativity. Einstein's first general relativity version was a joint work with Grossmann, and his second was a joint work with Hilbert. Einstein also worked with mathematicians Levi-Civita and Ricci.

Carroll says that Minkowski's 1907 spacetime was two years after Einstein, but it is doubtful that Einstein's work was any influence at all. Minkowski's spacetime was based on Poincare's spacetime.

Boycott Math to Save Greenland

American professors have been whining about possible Trump administration budget cuts, as if this is the end of scientific research. Now Peter Woit wants to boycott the scheduled 2026 Philadelphia meeting of the International Congress of Mathematicians!

The 2022 meeting in St. Petersburg Russia was canceled, because of pro-Ukraine political activists. This was unfortunate. It only punished Russian mathematicians and conference organizers who had nothing to do with Ukraine politics. Russia was not using these conferences for political gain. Only the supposedly free westerners were.

American and European scientific organizations are sometimes more politicized than Russian ones under Stalin.

Woit is from Latvia, so maybe he hates Russia. But does he also hate Philadelphia? He laments that it may be hard to find a host country that meets his ideological purity test, as he says the world is going fascist.

John Baez chimes in that he moved to Scotland to escape Trump!

Here is the only sensible comment:

Alessandro+Strumia says:
February 26, 2025 at 2:08 am

I could attend the ICBS conference in China because it says «This conference is a purely academic event. It does not promote any political opinion». I cannot attend conferences at Perimeter, not even on zoom, because it forces to accept a Code of Conduct that contains political elements including DEI (“inclusivity, equity, diversity”) and I am not Marxist. Removing all these woke Codes of Conduct that did not exist a decade ago seems to me a better contribution to freedom than avoiding conferences in the US.

Yes, it is embarrassing that Russia and China can keep politics out of scientific conferences, but the USA and Europe cannot.

Scott Aaronson also has Trump derangement:

Trump and Vance’s total capitulation to Vladimir Putin, their berating of Zelensky in the Oval Office for having the temerity to want the free world to guarantee Ukraine’s security, as the entire world watched the sad spectacle. ...

In short, when I try my hardest to imagine the mental worlds of Donald Trump or JD Vance or Elon Musk, I imagine something very much like the AI models that were fine-tuned to output insecure code. ... It’s as though, by pushing extremely hard on a single issue (birtherism? gender transition for minors?), someone inadvertently flipped the signs of these men’s good vs. evil vectors.

He makes an analogy to AI LLM models that turn evil.

He is a smart man, but it is hard to believe that he really does not understand the USA's reluctance to guarantee Ukraine's security.

Russia and Ukraine are minor corrupt countries on the other side of the world with an ugly border dispute. It probably would have been resolved peacefully, except that the USA and Zelensky keep threatening to put NATO weapons on Russia's border. Russia says that it is defending itself from NATO expansion. Maybe Putin is lying, but USA involvement is making things worse, and it is time to pull out.

Maybe you disagree, and that's fine, but how it is that Aaronson cannot even see the logic behind Trump's position?

Professor Dave Blasts Dr. Bee Again

Professor Dave has a popular Youtube channel, with twice the subscribers of Dr. Bee. He posts a lot of good videos explaining textbook material, and sometimes debunks charlatans and quacks. I mentioned his attacks before.

Now he says she is a grifter for cash in a 1.5 hour rant:

Sabine Hossenfelder Can’t Stop Acting Like a Complete Fraud

Professor Dave Explains
3.64M subscribers

I've already made two videos about Sabine Hossenfelder's gradual decline into deception and charlatanry, but her behavior has gotten so bad lately that it's time to make another one. This time, after examining her latest pathetic stunt, it's time to bring in some physicists to comment on the ridiculous things she's been spewing. Those would be Eluned Smith, Aram Harrow, and Tracy Slatyer, all professors of physics at MIT. Most of you were already on board, but if you Sabine fanboys wouldn't listen to me before, maybe you'll listen to them.

He says a lot of her videos are okay, but she has drifted down the right-wing rabbit hole. He ends up calling her a nazi.

He interviews physics professors to explain that Physics really has been making big progress, and that he public taxpayers have benefited so greatly that they should happily fund further research.

Listen for yourself, and tell me whether you are convinced. One said that supersymmetry might have explained a few things, but those explanations have been ruled out by the LHC collider. That was progress. I agree that was progress, but I did not see any benefit to the taxpayers.

I think she is correct that most of the funded research is of no tangible value. The video guests do not directly rebut her, but instead ramble about how research often has value.

Strangely, they never address superdeterminism. Of all her videos, that is the subject where she has the greatest expertise, and it is also the one with her kookiest views. Superdeterminism is so kooky that it is reasonable to reject everything she has to say, if she believes in it. But that is not what he does.

It is true that high-energy theoretical physics has stagnated for about 50 years. We have had 50 years of 1000s of papers on new theories and models, and they have nearly all failed. The last big advance was the standard model. String theory, supersymmetry, grand unified theories, and many others have gone nowhere. Everyone thought that the LHC would discover new physics, but it did not.

He gives the argument that the electron was discovered as pure scientific research, and it had big commercial payoffs decades later. So maybe the Higgs boson will similarly have commercial payoffs someday. That is just silly. The Higgs is not going to have any commerical utility. It cost $10 billion jus to make one at the LHC accelerator.

Update: Dr. Quantum Supremacy piles on

Sabine #17: I very often agree with your acerbic takes, or at least enjoy them. Not always. To me, superdeterminism is a candidate for the most insane idea in the history of physics — certainly 1000x more insane than anything the string theorists have ever come up with. But even your superdeterminism advocacy wouldn’t merit a comparison to RFK Jr.

No, what merits the comparison to RFK Jr. is this recent video of yours. There, with comically unconvincing caveats (“I’m not necessarily saying this should happen, just that it will“), you speak approvingly about the imminent destruction of publicly-funded academic science, in favor of just letting Musk, Bezos, et al. fund whatever they feel like.

Yes, superdeterminism is insane, but so is many-worlds, and Aaronson endorsed it in 2021. So they are all promoting fringe and insane versions of quantion mechanics.

Aaronson is mainly upset that Hossenfelder predicts an end to taxpayer funding of whatever academics want to study, especially fringe ideas with no real world relevance. She compares academic research to Communism, where central government committees decide what to fund, and make political decisions with little public accoutability.

He praises this comment:

For instance, there’s a whole genre of articles claiming that some experiment has shown that quantum processes can rewrite the past, foresee the future, or take a negative amount of time. The AMO physicists hopefully all know the real story is “our experiment checked that textbook QM works exactly as expected, but if QM _wasn’t_ true you’d need some crazy retrocausality to get the same results”, but they choose not to communicate that subtlety. It seems to be a game they play to get into top journals. But then the public just gets more confused, and convinced that physicists don’t know what’s going on.

Yes, you could say the same about arguments for superdeterminism, many-worlds, or Bohmian mechanics. Those arguments all depend on QM not being true, but that subtlety get omitted. Most quantum weirdness arguments work that way. For example, Bell proved that if QM were false, and were a some sort of classical theory instead, then it would have nonlocal properties.

Update: He goes on to explain:

The basic problem here is that Bell’s Theorem is a theorem. And it shows that you can’t have a secretly classical theory that

(1) reproduces the prediction of QM for two entangled particles and

(2) is free of “fine-tuning” — i.e., a conspiracy of initial conditions sufficient to force random number generators to produce particular outputs, human brains to make particular choices, etc., in order to cause the entangled particles to be measured in certain bases and not others.

Furthermore, over the decades, the “Bell deniers” (superdeterminists and others) have shown that they’re willing to generate an unlimited amount of verbiage, and even “math,” in an attempt to evade these simple points—thereby wasting unlimited amounts of everyone else’s time, in a sort of intellectual denial-of-service attack.

A response says: "I’ll let you determine the best use of your own time". Ha, ha.

Aaronson is correct, but seems to miss the point. Hossenfelder is not a Bell denier, but arguing for option (2). That is, reality is a secretly classical theory with a fine-tuned conspiracy to fool us into all our experiments being wrong.