It has long been known that party politics exhibits quantum effects. (An excerpt, that I’m sure is not retaliation for Sokal’s hoax, is “…we show evidence using the Smith et. al data that a tenet of a classical model that has animated work in the field appears violated in a form that gives way naturally to embrace of the superposition principle and then suggest that the classical formalisms and theories of preference separability might best be viewed as special cases of the quantum versions.”)
But what use is this theory, if we can’t apply it to any situations of practical relevance? Finally, the theory of quantum politics has found a way to explain current politics with A Quantum Theory of Mitt Romney, in an article that actually does a better job of explaining complementarity, uncertainty, etc. than do a lot of popular articles (quantum leap, not so much).
As an example of what this new theory explains, here is a Feynman diagram depicting a collision between a Romney and an anti-Romney that yields an electron and a $20 bill.
O brave new quantum world!
They messed up the “entanglement” bit, confusing it with “the act of observing cannot be separated from the outcome of the observation”.
For me, a more serious, deliberate, and still-ongoing experiment collides the LANL/DOE/ARDA/QIST Roadmap (both v1.0 and v2.0) with the series of roadmaps that the National Intelligence Council (NIC) has produced, which are titled (slightly inconsistently) Global Trends 2010, Global Trends 2015, Mapping the Global Future 2020, and (most recently) Global Trends 2025 (Google finds all of them).
Upon inspection, we see that these two sets of roadmaps, one by scientists and the other by strategic analysts dovetail nicely in many important respects; for example the QIST Roadmap of 2004 envisioned that by 2012 FTQC would be what NIC calls “a disruptive civil technology.” Moreover, the NIC/QIST roadmaps are alike too in the in both cases, the first-edition roadmaps got most of the details wrong.
An obvious and sobering difference, though, is that NIC has systematically learned from each successive roadmap, and has applied those lessons-learned to specify a sequence of ever-better roadmaps.
So when is the QM/QC/QIT community similarly going to synthesize its lesson-learned? As with any practicing researcher, my research is guided by a personal synthesis of the lessons-learned from QIST … but as for a more global synthesis, this is not a task any one person, or any one institution, can reasonably undertake.
And surely, synthesizing QIST’s lessons-learned is an essential task for the QM/QC/QIT community … as the NIC understands.
I’d be interested to read the NIC’s Global Trends 1960-2010, and find out what their fidelities turned out to be with Actual World History 1960-2010.
There’s no need to wonder, Aram … see the NIC’s Global Trends 2010 for a view of the future as foreseen from 1996. Rather like the QIST Roadmaps for quantum computing, the performance of these older NIC forecasts is mixed.
Reviewing its older roadmaps has guided the NIC to take increasing care to avoid modes of reasoning that amount to “Scenario X cannot happen, because the consequences would be unpalatable.” An example of new-style analysis that seeks to avoid this too-common roadmapping pitfall is the Brooking Institute’s recent Addressing U.S.-China Strategic Distrust (2012, a Google search finds it).
There is of course solid historical precedent for scientists taking an integrated interest in these matters … John von Neumann for example mapped his own in-depth appreciation of Roman history onto 20th century themes. Very broadly speaking, a recurring theme is:
• history is about the past;
• intelligence is about the present;
• enterprise is about the future; and
• STEM operates at the triple point.