Willow, Our Quantum Chip

Are DWave still in the running? They used my PerfectTablePlan table seating software back in 2007 as the front end to demonstrate solving a combinatorial seating problem: https://www.perfecttableplan.com/newsletters/newsletter10_we...

I think the idea here is that the choice on which hypothesis to verify is based on the risk assessment of the scientist whose goal is to optimize successful results and hence better theories are more likely to surface. In this way one does not need to form a consensus around the theory but instead make consensus on what constitutes a successful result.

Ideally this would be true, but funding agencies are already preloaded with implicit asssumptions what constitutes a scientific progress.

There are compelling arguments to believe in the many-worlds interpretation.

No sign of a Heisenberg cut has been observed so far, even as experiments involving entanglement of larger and larger molecules are performed, which makes objective-collapse theories hard to consider seriously.

Bohmian theories are nice, but require awkward adjustments to reconcile them with relativity. But more importantly, they are philosophically uneconomical, requiring many unobservable — even theoretically — entities [0].

That leaves either many-worlds or a quantum logic/quantum Bayesian interpretations as serious contenders [1]. These interpretations aren't crank fringe nonsense. They are almost inevitable outcomes of seriously considering the implications of the theory.

I will say that personally, I find many-worlds to focus excessively on the Schrödinger-picture pure state formulation of quantum mechanics. (At least to the level that I understood it — I expect there is literature on the connection with algebraic formulations, but I haven't taken the time to understand it.) So I would lean towards quantum logic–type interpretations myself.

The point of this comment was to say that many-worlds (or "multiverses", though I dislike the term) isn't nonsense. But it also isn't exactly the kind of sci-fi thing non-physicists might picture. Given how easy it is to misinterpret the term, however, I must agree with you that a self-aware science communicator would think twice about whether the term should be included, and that there may be not-so-scrupulous intentions at play here.

Quick edit: I realise the comment I've written is very technical. I'm happy to try to answer any questions. I should preface it by stating that I'm not a professional in the field, but I studied quantum information theory at a Masters level, and always found the philosophical questions of interest.

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[0] Many people seem to believe that many-worlds also postulates the existence of unobservable parallel universes, but this isn't true. We observe the interaction of these universe's every time we observe quantum interference.

While we're here, we can clear up the misconception about "branching" — there is no branching in many-worlds, just the coherent evolution of the universal wave function. The many worlds are projections out of that wave function. They don't discretely separate from one another, either — it depends on your choice of basis. That choice is where decoherence comes in.

[1] And of course, there is the Copenhagen "interpretation" — preferred among physicists who would rather not think about philosophy. (A respectable choice.)

>who I feel

You're basing things on your feelings, not personally knowing the person. I know you've alluded to that, but seriously, just stop.

> I worry when I see a person presented as an authoritative leader in the Quantum Computing domain demonstrate in their external presentation.

I'm not sure why how someone dresses makes you worry, especially since you aren't even involved in QC. Stop worrying about things you can't control, especially someone else's appearance. Has Burning Man taught you nothing? If you think it taught you to be biased towards someone based on their appearance, then I think you completely missed the point.

>as already happened with Google Glass

You may not know this, but he was tapped to lead the Google Glass project, and quickly got out of it. He felt that the silicon at the time was not capable of producing the results people wanted in the form-factor they were expecting. He was right. Of course tech has improved since then and better VR/AR glasses in a convenient form factor are just now starting to be a thing, but Google Glass is long since shuttered.

He didn't just come out of nowhere, he's been involved in actual AI (not LLMs) for decades. His company was bought by Google and is the basis for their computer vision systems, which is how he ended up at Google.

As for you supposing he's into "healing crystals" or any other wooo nonsense simply based on how he dresses, I have never known him to talk about such things at all, in all our conversations throughout the decades.

> This person's aesthetic reminds me of this.

You are barking up the wrong tree, and you should maybe tone down your judginess of others. I have news for you - you can't tell a book by its cover, but you sure are trying to. You just come off as being jealous that someone can have fun and also be a pioneer in QC. No doubt any person at the top of their field has plenty of haters, based on nothing more than "he doesn't dress like I expect him to".

there is so much skepticism on quantum computing that instead of inflated marketing words one should always start by what the biggest problems are, how they are not still solved yet, and then introduce what the new improvement is.

Otherwise there is no knowing if the accomplishment is really significant or not.