The New Quantum Era

Chapter 3. A Quantum Mechanical Kludge

Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.

Niels Bohr

That an event celebrating the progress being made toward computers harnessing quantum physics would culminate in a challenge to the axioms of the field itself might seem odd, but the controversy was not new. In fact, from its inception as a collection of answers to the most vexing problems in physics at the turn of the 20th century, quantum mechanics has struck many scientists as plainly impossible and incorrect or at least incomplete. This may have something to do with the fact that the answers were struck upon out of a desperate attempt to make our explanations of the universe work.

Humans are very odd animals. Not content with securing requisite calories and water for continued existence, fending off or evading predators, and spending the rest of our time procreating and lazing around, at some point in our hidden collective past, we decided that a good thing to do with our unusually large brains was to ask the question, “why?” Our first answers were more fiction than fact, contributions to the corpus we call “ancient myth.” However, knowledge about how the world worked that proved handy, often in the form of advice about how to grow things or raise animals, tended to be passed along, orally at first, from generation to generation, slowly accumulating more value. As recordkeeping improved in the Fertile Crescent and North ...