Patrick points me to Working for the Revolution by Freeman Dyson, which is a review of
Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics
Theoretical physicists are now divided into two main factions. Those who
look forward to another revolution mostly believe that it will grow out of
a grand mathematical scheme known as string theory. Those who are content
with the outcome of the old revolution are mostly studying more mundane
subjects such as high-temperature superconductors and quantum computers.
String theory may be considered to be the counterattack of those who lost
the debate over complementarity in physics in Copenhagen in 1932. It is
the revenge of the heirs of Einstein against the heirs of Bohr. The new
discipline of systems biology, describing living creatures as emergent
dynamic organizations rather than as collections of molecules, is the
counterattack of those who lost the debate over complementarity in biology
in 1953. It is the revenge of the heirs of Bohr against the heirs of
Einstein.
You heard that correctly. Quantum computing is mundane.
“String theory may be considered to be the counterattack of those who lost
the debate over complementarity in physics…”
I believe he doesn’t understand complementarity.
Yuk!!! So nobody in Quantum Computation or Condensed Matter is working for the revolution? Say what? Where is all that criticism of string theory coming from? Oh, right! That’s it! It’s just hot air.
Is the book that contains that quote, or is it the review? I can imagine that Dyson would never say that. (I don’t want to pay $3.00 to find out)
The quote is Dyson writing in the New York Review of Books. I don’t think it’s an insult – Dyson just has high standards for radicalism. In the same review he indirectly (but cheerfully) characterizes his own work as “conservative mediocrity”.
Well, if you can get quantum computing operating in 11 dimensions, then it’ll be exciting. And 12? You’ll be hotter than an overused iPhone!
Well, if you can get quantum computing operating in 11 dimensions, then it’ll be exciting. And 12?
That’s easy: 11d is a two-time theory with 9 spatial dimensions coming from the octonionic triality of tricategorical higher topos (quantum) logic, and 12d is a three-time theory, a la Sparling’s twistor triality picture.
I think the statement is interesting. The quote doesn’t say that QC is mundane. It says that it is more mundane than string theory. Which is true whether or not string theories actually describe anything related to nature.
My main issue with the paragraph is that the set of physicists looking for a revolution/unification think it will come from string theory. I for one suspect that whatever subsumes GR/QC will be very different from the existing approaches and the key insights will be empirical, coming from observation and experiment, not theory.
An even crisper classification is between physicists who believe that their state-space is non-dynamical (Newton, Schroedinger, Dyson himself, and more generally, field theorists and quantum information theorists) versus those who believe that their state-space *is* dynamical (general relativists, string theorists, quantum geometers).
History seems to indicate that Mother Nature sides with the latter! That is to say, “Everything that exists is dynamical, Hilbert space exists, therefore Hilbert space is dynamical.” 🙂
An even crisper classification…
Er, I just changed sides, then.