Scientists use quantum device to slow chemical process by factor of 100B

Not an expert, but what I'm understanding is this:

With a regular simulation, whether analogue or digital, you create a mathematical model, and evaluate that model in some way to get a result, which hopefully matches the actual phenomena in whatever it is you were trying to simulate.

Here, it's more like instead of measuring the phenomena, they instead measured something that is physically related to that phenomena. There seems to be no modelling involved.

My (non-expert) brain maps it to this. Your output is a curve of some kind with the same mathematics as the problem you actually care about. The term “Quantum computing” can really refer to a number of quantum mechanical systems with fundamentally different properties (e.g., boson vs fermion) that have the same mathematics as some classes of problems

> Kind of like how simulating anything in detail tends to be a lot slower than the actual thing you're simulating?

From the article[1]:

Our approach avoids the limitations of direct experiments on molecular systems, where only few observables such as spectra and scattering cross sections can be measured. [...] A further advantage comes from the ratio (r) of the ion’s natural timescale (ms) and the measurement speed (ns), leading to an increase in the observable timing resolution of r ∼ 10^6. This improves the achievable resolution of chemical dynamics measurements relative to ultrafast observations.

So seems this would be more like running a computer simulation with a super-short timestep, allowing you to extract more details of a process. It's only related to the wall-clock in that they're using a physical analog system, rather than a computer.

> Not following if there was any breakthrough here or not.

Again from the paper:

Our approach to quantum simulation using an MQB trapped-ion system makes chemical dynamics that are otherwise unmeasurable directly accessible in the laboratory. This is a key demonstration of the utility of small-scale quantum computational devices to offer practical insights into chemical dynamics and resolve intractable problems in chemical physics.

Seems the measurement itself was a showcase for the techniques developed.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.07320

This is really a bad idea to study anything. Actually this is what sets aside naïve hobbyist interested in Physics vs someone studying Physics systematically and efficiently as part of PhD program. I did this mistake repeatedly. I started with annotated version of Newton's Principia, spent about a year just pulling my hair and gave up to realize how much time I had lost in all kind of minutia, noise and random things that were completely useless to develop good understanding of core principles. I repeated this mistake yet again by buying Maxwell's original publications and wasting yet another year. And then again with Einstein's original papers and wasting yet another year.

I thought I would do differently and everyone else was doing wrong. I was the one doing wrong. I didn't learned much from all these original manuscript. I also lost precious years which I could have obtained real Masters degree. It is super important to understand that original manuscripts have tons of noise and baggage that only make sense in historical context. They also have unbacked goods which are super hard to digest, if you can digest at all. A ton of experts have already spent their lives distilling these original writings that fits with everything else, easy to digest and doesn't have all that noise. So, get a good textbook and follow that. Stop chasing original manuscripts.