Quantum computers, you might have heard, are magical uber-machines that will soon cure cancer and global warming by trying all possible answers in different parallel universes. For 15 years, on my blog and elsewhere, I’ve railed against this cartoonish vision, trying to explain what I see as the subtler but ironically even more fascinating truth. That truth is that this is just a trivial updating of one of the most brilliant mathematical circus tricks of all time. And Lord (hopefully we haven't left him off somewhere—I'll be correcting him visually in the next update), in a way this recent deal between Honeywell and the NSA too reads like a circus.
The key to the show in effect, implicit in this thread, is that Cowen has been incapable of seeing beyond the select myths about every sector of the technology industry. Without pre‐conditions from The Annals of Computing, Cowen is incapable of understanding why a particular business is flourishing due to a particular technology with a widely utilized application. The mysterious transistors in this new Thomson double-helix are more counterintuitive than most engineering arguments, and even now he lacks the intermediate results he needs to have been taught as intuition. (Cowen will probably never understand that he has a slippery conceptual argument, as he was told as a child.) Also, because his thinking has been so deeply disconnected from the foundational first principles that formed the basis of his math and logic, rather than seeing that these are based in a strong logic, he has not been much inclined to recognize how his own strong logic has been used to trick him.
It isn't just that he's not used to this form of cultural competition. Also, the intransigence of the older illusion—starting with the hidden enactment of Newton through Michael Faraday, later upon Butterwick and Faraday, and continuing on through Liebniz and Bohr, and even through the eternally self-referential deconstruction of Feyerabend and Bergson—is mesmeric. Cowen's hard-headed realism about how things or how businesses go about doing things was unreal from the first. In him it seems to mean poorly.
One last suggesting sentence should be added. I suspect that there are periodic momentous facts of computing history by which people who think like Cowen have a distorted view. (They have to be pushed too!) Among the more significant such recent onesI rate two) First in May, at a CCC corporate luncheon, William Potter told the group taking part that he and A. Harold Phelps II were looking into the possibility of a quantum computing function that could behave "catastrophically poorly." This was pure news. This led to over 600 articles in different media over the following two weeks. One of them was reported in Popular Mechanics—a well-known source for such news. Today,
The key to the show in effect, implicit in this thread, is that Cowen has been incapable of seeing beyond the select myths about every sector of the technology industry. Without pre‐conditions from The Annals of Computing, Cowen is incapable of understanding why a particular business is flourishing due to a particular technology with a widely utilized application. The mysterious transistors in this new Thomson double-helix are more counterintuitive than most engineering arguments, and even now he lacks the intermediate results he needs to have been taught as intuition. (Cowen will probably never understand that he has a slippery conceptual argument, as he was told as a child.) Also, because his thinking has been so deeply disconnected from the foundational first principles that formed the basis of his math and logic, rather than seeing that these are based in a strong logic, he has not been much inclined to recognize how his own strong logic has been used to trick him.
It isn't just that he's not used to this form of cultural competition. Also, the intransigence of the older illusion—starting with the hidden enactment of Newton through Michael Faraday, later upon Butterwick and Faraday, and continuing on through Liebniz and Bohr, and even through the eternally self-referential deconstruction of Feyerabend and Bergson—is mesmeric. Cowen's hard-headed realism about how things or how businesses go about doing things was unreal from the first. In him it seems to mean poorly.
One last suggesting sentence should be added. I suspect that there are periodic momentous facts of computing history by which people who think like Cowen have a distorted view. (They have to be pushed too!) Among the more significant such recent onesI rate two) First in May, at a CCC corporate luncheon, William Potter told the group taking part that he and A. Harold Phelps II were looking into the possibility of a quantum computing function that could behave "catastrophically poorly." This was pure news. This led to over 600 articles in different media over the following two weeks. One of them was reported in Popular Mechanics—a well-known source for such news. Today,
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