Hoisted from the comments, Rod says
You guys are much more blunt than I usually am (except with students :-). You’re also a lot more succinct.
This particular paper may be wrong, and the authors should be told that, but: as the field grows, and more engineers join, there are going to be more people who start with naive positions. The goal is not to run them off, but to teach them, so they can help us build these things :-).
To which, of course, I can only plead guilty, guilty, guilty. I mean no harm to engineers, that is for sure, especially considering the fact that I am surrounded by them 😉 And damn straight I know how important engineers will be in building a quantum computer, and that physicists all by themselves are more likely to be doomed in this endeavor (but I might add that D-wave or Transmeta might demonstrate that just having the engineering bravado isn’t necessarily enough. Damn straight sometimes those physics and theory people know what the hell they are talking about.)
Continue reading “To Woo Engineers”
It was an unassuming blue-grey volume tucked away in the popular science section of the Siskiyou County Library. “Spacetime Physics” it announced proudly in gold letters across the front of the book. Published in 1965, the book looked as if it hadn’t been touched in the decades since 1965. A quick opening of the book revealed diagrams of dogs floating beside rocket ships, infinite cubic lattices, and buses orbiting the Earth, all interspaced with a mathematical equations containing symbols the likes of which I’d never seen before. What was this strange book, and what, exactly, did those equations mean? How could there be equations and dogs and buses all in the same book? Answering these questions would be the beginning, for me, of a lifelong love of physics. It would also inspire in me a deep love of science books which make you smile, and, more importantly perhaps, led me to works of the physicist John Archibald Wheeler, who would serve as the model of the researcher I have always wanted to be.
And only $70 bucks! Jeez, those D-wave investors overpaid. I wonder how you use it to factor? But the number in the bag and wait?