Is Quantum Theory a Fiat Lie?
Maybe, Maybe Not
Nice description of Quantum Computing! At least the intellectually cool view.
That said, this math approach to reality hides a lot that we do not know and it is often just as much fun to note these things.
I am on the side of Einstein that said that God does not place dice. To me this quantum mechanics stuff is just a statistical description of what we do not understand. Einstein also took a statistical description to brownian motion but discovered the atom. So we should all be asking ourselves what are we missing that all we can see (or, as they say, not see) are probability waves (and virtual photons)?
Spin back to James Clerk Maxwell. In and around 1850 he and others were seriously toying with the idea that reality was composed of vortices spinning around. Oddly, if you go through the fun of reading his writings, you see he pretty much developed his entire theory of electricity and magnetism imagining these electrical and magnetic things as vortices. However, he, and some others that he mentions, came up with some very creative and neat measurements of these vortices which turned out to be the measurements that formed the basis for his theory of electromagnetism.
As he was writing his great Treatise on this ten years later, he had been criticised for continuing his ‘vortex’ metaphor, since the math did not require the metaphor. So, in that great work, he eliminated all his prior imaginations. But out of that worthless non-mathematical imagination came things like light is just electrical and magnetic waves in motion tied in a dance of the same stuff, light has constant speed no matter what, and you could predict a million other things that you could measure like how atoms are held together when electrons and protons were not even known yet.
What he lost, by the way, was any notion of why two different poles attract, and same poles repel. Turns out this is just a sign. In quantum mechanics, it is just a +/- 1. That is the explanation. But, by the way, if you think of spin as something like real spin, which, of course, the mathematicians warn against, then you can get the poles as left or right spinning vortices that screw in or out of each other to perfectly match forces between same and different poles.
Quantum computing is really neat but imagine how neat it will be when we actually figure out what is really going on! Maybe the imagination should be allowed into the guts of the statistics, just as Einstein did with brownian motion when he proved atoms existed.
Somebody, someday, is going to be frustrated enough with some of our quantum explanations to move us into another interesting world that we do not yet know. Perhaps imagining the vortices will come back. Who knows.
As René Descartes said “God is nature and God cannot lie.” He jumped through the hole of imagination to figure out how to reformulate Euclid’s proofs in terms of Algebra by rethinking geometric logic:
Is Quantum Computing just a fiat lie?
