Before we start on quantum
Imagine that every week for twenty years, people message you asking you to comment on the latest wolf sighting, and every week you have to tell them: I haven’t seen a wolf, I haven’t heard a wolf, I believe wolves exist but I don’t yet see evidence of them anywhere near our town.
Then one evening, you hear a howl in the distance, and sure enough, on a hill overlooking the town is the clear silhouette of a large wolf. So you point to it — and all the same people laugh and accuse you of “crying wolf.”
Now you know how it’s been for me with cryptographically relevant quantum computing.
I’ve been writing about QC on this blog for a while, and have done hundreds of public lectures and interviews and podcasts on the subject. By now, I can almost always predict where a non-expert’s QC question is going from its first few words, and have a well-rehearsed answer ready to go the moment they stop talking. Yet sometimes I feel like it’s all for naught.
Only today did it occur to me that I should write about something more basic. Not quantum computing itself, but the habits of mind that seem to prevent some listeners from hearing whatever I or other researchers have to tell them about QC. The stuff that we’re wasting our breath if we don’t get past.
Which habits of mind am I talking about?
- The Tyranny of Black and White. Hundreds of times, I’ve answered someone’s request to explain QC, only to have them nod impatiently, then interrupt as soon as they can with: “So basically, the take-home message is that quantum is coming, and it’ll change everything?” Someone else might respond to exactly the same words from me with: “So basically, you’re saying it’s all hype and I shouldn’t take any of it seriously?” As in my wolf allegory, the same person might even jump from one reaction to the other. Seeing this, I’ve become a fervent believer in horseshoe theory, in QC no less than in politics. Which sort of makes sense: if you think QCs are “the magic machines of the future that will revolutionize everything,” and then you learn that they’re not, why wouldn’t you jump to the opposite extreme and conclude you’ve been lied to and it’s all a scam?
- The Unidimensional Hype-Meter. “So … [long, thoughtful pause] … you’re actually telling me that some of what I hear about QC is real … but some of it is hype? Or—yuk yuk, I bet no one ever told you this one before—it’s a superposition of real and hype?” OK, that’s better. But it’s still trying to project everything down onto a 1-dimensional subspace that loses almost all the information!
- Words As Seasoning. I often get the sense that a listener is treating all the words of explanation—about amplitudes and interference, Shor versus Grover, physical versus logical qubits, etc.—as seasoning, filler, an annoying tic, a stalling tactic to put off answering the only questions that matter: “is Quantum real or not real? If it’s real, when is it coming? Which companies will own the Quantum space?” In reality, explanations are the entire substance of what I can offer. For my experience has consistently been that, if someone has no interest in learning what QC is, which classes of problems it helps for, etc., then even if I answer their simplistic questions like “which QC companies are good or bad?,” they won’t believe my answers anyway. Or they’ll believe my answers only until the next person comes along and tells them the opposite.
- Black-Boxing. Sometimes these days, I’ll survey the spectacular recent progress in fault-tolerance, 2-qubit gate fidelities, programmable hundred-qubit systems, etc., only to be answered with a sneer: “What’s the biggest number that Shor’s algorithm has factored? Still 15 after all these years? Haha, apparently the emperor has no clothes!” I’ve commented that this is sort of like dismissing the Manhattan Project as hopelessly stalled in 1944, on the ground that so far it hasn’t produced even a tiny nuclear explosion. Or the Apollo program in 1967, on the ground that so far it hasn’t gotten any humans even 10% of the way to the moon. Or GPT in 2020, on the ground that so far it can’t even do elementary-school math. Yes, sometimes emperors are naked—but you can’t tell until you actually look at the emperor! Engage with the specifics of quantum error correction. If there’s a reason why you think it can’t work beyond a certain scale, say so. But don’t fixate on one external benchmark and ignore everything happening under the hood, if the experts are telling you that under the hood is where all the action now is, and your preferred benchmark is only relevant later.
- Questions with Confused Premises. “When is Q-Day?” I confess that this question threw me for a loop the first few times I heard it, because I had no idea what “Q-Day” was. Apparently, it’s the single day when quantum computing becomes powerful enough to break all of cryptography? Or: “What differentiates quantum from binary?” “How will daily life be different once we all have quantum computers in our homes?” Try to minimize the number of presuppositions.
- Anchoring on Specific Marketing Claims. “What do you make of D-Wave’s latest quantum annealing announcement?” “What about IonQ’s claim to recognize handwriting with a QC?” “What about Microsoft’s claim to have built a topological qubit?” These questions can be fine as part of a larger conversation. Again and again, though, someone who doesn’t know the basics will lead with them—with whichever specific, contentious thing they most recently read. Then the entire conversation gets stuck at a deep node within the concept tree, and it can’t progress until we backtrack about five levels.
Anyway—sorry for yet another post of venting and ranting. Maybe this will help:
The wise child asks, “what are the main classes of problems that are currently known to admit superpolynomial quantum speedups?” To this child, you can talk about quantum simulation and finding hidden structures in abelian and occasionally nonabelian groups, as well as Forrelation, glued trees, HHL, and DQI—explaining how the central challenge has been to find end-to-end speedups for non-oracular tasks.
The wicked child asks, “so can I buy a quantum computer right now to help me pick stocks and search for oil and turbocharge LLMs, or is this entire thing basically a fraud?” To this child you answer: “the quantum computing people who seek you as their audience are frauds.”
The simple child asks, “what is quantum computing?” You answer: “it’s a strange new way of harnessing nature to do computation, one that dramatically speeds up certain tasks, but doesn’t really help with others.”
And to the child who doesn’t know how to ask—well, to that child you don’t need to bring up quantum computing at all. That child is probably already fascinated to learn classical stuff.
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Comment #1 April 7th, 2026 at 7:21 am
Thanks for this post. Sadly, this superficiality applies to every kind of discourse, these days, including ones that are highly consequential such as politics, international relationships, war, and other life-or-death situations. Very depressing, but you are a bulwark which gives a glimmer of hope to humankind.
Thanks!
Comment #2 April 7th, 2026 at 7:45 am
So what you’re saying is that it’s all hype, right?
I Kidd, I Kidd 😉
Comment #3 April 7th, 2026 at 8:30 am
Very insightful yet humorous post, I snorted and nearly choked on my drink on the Q-day question. : )
On points 1 and 2, I wonder could this be an ensemble effect similar to the [Center squeeze](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_squeeze)? Perhaps, individually most people are moderate, but taken as a whole appears to be unidimensionally bicolored.
I resonate a lot with 3 and 6, having been bombarded with equally silly AI questions from friends around me for almost a decade. It appears that when a field is in the vogue, people tend to feel an irresistible urge to know more about it, yet are unwilling to put in the necessary effort to understand the core details (such as take a few minutes to read Figure 7 of https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05229). Interestingly/unfortunately, this negative trait is shared even by scientists (working in a different field such as high energy physics) who ought to behave better.
Comment #4 April 7th, 2026 at 8:34 am
The frustration could be because stabilizability is not discussed enough. Space flight requires a variety of things to be stabilizable (combustion for starters) before anything can lift beyond 100 m. Atom bombs have analogous requirements (shaping the initial shock wave, else even critical mass will not suffice). A discussion of the threshold theorem may help for QC before reviewing new developments. You probably already have reviewed it in your blog but there may be churn in your readership and the new guys will find it hard to see how to go from “nothing” to “something” in QC.
Comment #5 April 7th, 2026 at 9:58 am
It’s been my experience that a well-described elevator pitch for “what’s the bottom line then if I don’t understand any of this” is a part of effectively communicating research, whether we like it or not. The number of people interested in “so when does the internet break” simply far exceeds that interested in Shor versus Grover.
It’s best if you stick to true things that are still legible and get the point across. The Manhattan Project comparison for why it’s premature to be asking a lot of these questions. The fact that you’re a scientist, not a hedge fund manager or a prophet, and you’re the wrong person to ask about investment tips of the exact date of the next breakthrough. The admission that yeah, right now to tell any of it apart from snake oil, one needs to either understand or trust the science. “I understand it, so I hope you trust me when I say the science is real, even if there’s no ETA on everyone’s cryptography being broken.”
Comment #6 April 7th, 2026 at 10:36 am
Ben #5: I agree, and I’m totally willing to give people elevator-pitch bottom lines! “Yes, this would eventually break the Internet if left unfixed.” “Yes, fixes are available.” “No, this won’t happen tomorrow, but by 2030? I don’t know and neither does anyone else.” “What else is it good for? Well, quantum simulation, and hopefully some more, but finding big, clear advantages over classical for AI and optimization has been a struggle” Etc.
The trouble is, often the people will then disagree! Or I’ll see on their faces that they’re giving my bottom lines no more weight than Michio Kaku’s or whoever else is the last person they heard spout off about QC. So then it’s like, why don’t I explain this, so that you can rely not on my authority or anyone else’s but on actual object-level understanding? But maybe I should just give up at that point?
Comment #7 April 7th, 2026 at 11:58 am
I see you’re following in the footsteps of Eliezer Yudkowsky, getting so frustrated at people not understanding what you’re saying that you resort to explaining the basic principles of rationality in hope that this will help.
Comment #8 April 7th, 2026 at 12:04 pm
Scott, re your sobering #6: alas as you said none of us has access to the elusive proof-of-expertise beam, which forcefully flips the “person I am talking to actually does know what they are talking about” bit in the other person’s brain. Indeed many people sadly do not properly care about that bit and whether it has been properly set or not. I don’t pretend I have a solution for this. The two leads I can _maybe_ think of are:
1. The approach one might colloquially refer to as ‘More Dakka’. Dropping some other big names at the forefront of science and industry and saying “ask them, they’ll tell you the same thing.” Brute forcing the skepticism into submission with zero ground-level facts, in the venerable style of Twitter. I understand why you do not find this so appealing, though maybe this kind of thing is regrettably the price of admission to the battleground of ideas in this day and age.
2. Pulling off an actual “explain the object level stuff like I’m 5” as you alluded to. This is deceivingly difficult. I’ve written a few explainers regarding cryptographic attacks for moderately non-technical audiences, much simpler stuff than what you’re dealing with here, and the pressures and constraints regarding what to simplify, what to cut, how to communicate the essence of it were still close to unbearable. I’m convinced it’s possible for QC and would make a positive difference, but I’m not so sure even that would go all the way to solving the problem! The world is full of controversies where the object level has been very clearly explained, and yet somehow experts still have to deal with the exact reaction you described.
Comment #9 April 7th, 2026 at 2:20 pm
Itai Bar-Natan #7:
I see you’re following in the footsteps of Eliezer Yudkowsky, getting so frustrated at people not understanding what you’re saying that you resort to explaining the basic principles of rationality in hope that this will help.
LOL, I had exactly that thought while writing the post!
This wouldn’t even be the first instance where I reached similar conclusions as Eliezer did, but took 20 years longer to do so. 😀
Comment #10 April 7th, 2026 at 10:07 pm
“Just cherry pick specific subclasses of specific problems and lo and behold! INSTANT speedups”
Yeah I don’t have to get all quantumy to do THAT. I can do integer factorization in LOGARITHMIC TIME!!! WOOOO!!! Look at MEEE!!! As long as that integer is a power of 2 (or n or whatever). YAHOOOO
Basically the same thing
Comment #11 April 8th, 2026 at 12:00 am
Your ‘wise child’ is really just a vehicle for indirect self-promotion.
Comment #12 April 8th, 2026 at 6:39 am
beeefer #10: Your comment confuses speedups of instance-tailored classical algorithms over generic classical algorithms, with speedups of quantum algorithms over all possible classical algorithms for the same instances. The latter are inherently more interesting, although yes, obviously more so the more the speedup is for something someone cares about. That’s why Shor’s algorithm was such a big deal for the wider world, because it breaks much of the encryption that the world actually uses (not just that it hypothetically could use).
Comment #13 April 8th, 2026 at 6:42 am
Rainer #11: You could argue that the wise child of the original Passover Haggadah is “just a vehicle for promoting the Haggadah’s messages.” In general, it’s really hard to say what you think is true without someone accusing you of “self-promotion.”
Comment #14 April 8th, 2026 at 8:10 am
Scott,
The 4 major fields that have seen lots of interest have similar traits
1. AGI
2. Fusion power
3. QC
4. Curing cancer.
All have been victims of high expectations and misses, decades long ups and downs. And today’s state of the art is nowhere near achieving the goal, until an unknown breakthrough is achieved. There has been quite a bit of incremental progress for sure, which also has given the impression of a breakthrough and the subsequent hype. Compare this to the LHC development, the Higgs boson was pretty much a sure shot, one of the reason such a high investment was taken up by state funding(and fission power in the first nuclear era). Until the threshold is crossed ( i.e. the breakthrough needed is known and feasible ) to achieve the goal, the opinions will oscillate in the entire spectrum of scepticism to utopia, and should be expected.
Comment #15 April 8th, 2026 at 9:37 am
Ben #8: Regarding 2, lets not forget Scott’s guest contribution on https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3 🙂
Comment #16 April 8th, 2026 at 12:13 pm
Hello Professor Aaronson,
I could really feel the mixture of long-built frustration and dark humor in your post — especially the “wolf” analogy. The image of finally seeing the clear silhouette of the wolf on the hill after years of warnings immediately reminded me of Ennio Morricone’s iconic soundtrack for Sergio Leone’s *The Good, the Bad and the Ugly*. The lonely howl in the distance, the vast empty landscape, the slow-building tension, and the sudden dramatic reveal — it all felt surprisingly fitting for the story of cryptographically relevant quantum computing. One almost expects Clint Eastwood to appear next to the wolf, squinting into the sunset.
As someone who has been learning quantum computing on my own for the past five years while working in software development for 35 years, your post hit close to home.
I still remember trying to explain what I had learned to a colleague. I told him something like: “It’s not classical programming — it’s more like designing custom circuits with gates, and if the underlying math is correct, it can solve certain problems much faster than today’s computers…” Before I could finish, he enthusiastically completed the sentence for me: “…by running all possibilities in parallel!”
At the time I didn’t feel confident enough to push back strongly. I only replied that the “parallelism” idea wasn’t quite that simple. Even though I had to dust off quite a bit of linear algebra to understand the actual math, that magical parallelism narrative is still very much alive in many conversations I hear.
What struck me most in your post is the importance of focusing on improving the algorithm – that is, designing better circuits – rather than simply adding more qubits. In my software engineering experience, throwing more hardware at a problem rarely solves the real challenge, you always need solid theory behind it. I suspect the same principle applies strongly in quantum computing.
By the way, I strongly laughed at your line about the “superposition of real and hype” — it was both funny and painfully accurate. How easy is falling into that trapdoor.
Your post made me realize how common (and how sticky) these oversimplified mental models are — even among technically educated people. It encouraged me to be more careful with my own explanations going forward and to strive to become the “wise child” rather than falling into black-and-white thinking.
Thank you again for continuing to push back against the hype cycles and for writing with such clarity and honesty. It really helps people like me who are trying to learn properly.
Comment #17 April 8th, 2026 at 3:25 pm
Scott, you are an incredible resource and educator on top of your long list of accolades. I understand that your accomplishments mean that your time is now very limited as we all ask more and more of you to help solve problems.
You should have a special way to suggest people ask for the unscripted answer because what if their question really is about information theory rather than clout. What happens when a curious person who is on their journey has a subtle question, but the dot product of that vector is suspiciously close to a question that has a canned answer?
I can also imagine the scripted repository has been deployed because you’re working on a paper, or five, and the calories are going there! Looking forward to the next ones
Comment #18 April 9th, 2026 at 12:04 am
Gemini says 4 to 48 logical qubit FTQCs are available based on 100’s of physical qubits and is the SOTA. Neven’s law says 2^(2^n) scaling for QC logical qubit density. So we see ECC gone in 3\\pm0.3 years by https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2%5E%282%5En%29%3E100?
Comment #19 April 9th, 2026 at 12:49 am
But there is a Q day…
Q day for Nuclear tech was not the Manhattan test, it was Hiroshima…
When will someone die because a technology allowed a bad actor (including nation states) to cause them harm?
When do we see low grade cryptography used in some non critical tech, but critical to a persons livelihood be broken by someone using a device available to all (for example Claude Opus 4.6 finding critical vulnerabilities)
Hiroshima was 75 years ago – but we dont have more nuclear reactors than nuclear ICBMs.
Whats the chances that QC or so called AGI wont just become another item to use in an arsenal in endless oneupmanship and conflict.
Comment #20 April 9th, 2026 at 1:01 am
@Scott:
If you had near limitless funding and could pursue breakthrough research for 2 problems at the same time, which avenues would you go down right now with the papers revealed in the past few months?
Comment #21 April 9th, 2026 at 2:18 am
but you didn’t answer the main question: is it really real or not?
or are you saying it is complex?
🙂
kidding aside, I feel for you. being the reference expert on a topic is hard.
just know that many of us also learn quite a bit from what you write, even when we don’t really understand everything you write.
Comment #22 April 9th, 2026 at 2:21 am
Hi Scott,
I’ve been reading your blog on and off for some time now (since SMBC’s “the talk”), but this is my first time commenting, so first I want to thank you for the continued high quality of your articles and your intellectual honesty and rigor. Whenever I read about some new claim regarding QC, my first thought is always “let’s check what Scott says about this”.
In this vein, I find the fact that you’ve been updating your position regarding the probability of CRQCs being on the horizon very significant. I’m sorry about all the bad reactions you’re getting, but I want you to know that there are also less vocal people who take your report of wolf sighting very seriously precisely because we know you’ve never cried wolf before.
Regarding point 4, would you be able to recommend some resources to someone who knows very little about QC, and has been following news from a distance so far, but now realizes that looking under the hood is going to be necessary to follow what’s going on? I’m sure the archives of your blog are full of useful information, but ideally looking for something more structured that would take me from one step to the next?
I’ve never studied QM but am familiar with some concepts like superposition and entanglement (I read Aspect’s recent book on his experiments). OTOH, I studied math, so ideally I’m looking for “explain me like I’m 5 but I’m comfortable with complex vector spaces and tensor products” 🙂
Comment #23 April 9th, 2026 at 6:14 am
What are your predictions about the economics (as opposed to the maths or physics) of quantum computing? Moore’s law happens because lots of people can make money by building faster classical computers. Will quantum computers see a similar effect, or will we get to the point where we have proven the principles and can break RSA and elliptic curves and then see the funding dry up? How much money is there in better quantum chemistry?
Comment #24 April 9th, 2026 at 9:21 am
DiracSpinor #20: I suppose I’d continue working on the two topics that I am working on right now — namely,
(1) better understanding the space of possible superpolynomial quantum speedups, and
(2) figuring out what complexity theory and cryptography can do for AI interpretability and alignment.
I’d just, y’know, be doing them with unlimited funding for students and postdocs, which would help and be very nice. 😀
Comment #25 April 9th, 2026 at 9:24 am
Manuel #22: Thanks for the kind words! If you’re already comfortable with complex vector spaces and tensor products, check out my lecture notes? Or those of Umesh Vazirani, Ronald de Wolf, or many other colleagues? Or the books by Mermin or by Nielsen & Chuang?
Comment #26 April 9th, 2026 at 9:31 am
Jacob #23: Since I would never have predicted that hundreds of quantum computing startups could already be sustained right now, some of them with hundreds of employees, even before we have devices that are useful for pretty much anything, I hesitate to speculate about the field’s economic future! 🙂
To gauge the potential future market for quantum simulation on QCs, one thing people do is look at the current market for software tools to simulate QM on classical computers, which exists but is far from enormous. The question that I find hard to answer is whether a QC will lead to a gold rush of new discoveries in chemistry and materials science — which is less a question of economics than a question of what new materials or chemical reactions are out there to be discovered (and haven’t already been found by classical computation plus trial and error in the lab).
Comment #27 April 10th, 2026 at 9:54 am
Prasanna #14:
Simple and clear exposition of a key consideration.
Comment #28 April 10th, 2026 at 10:02 am
I have a theory about the “quantum hype,” Scott, and I wonder if you could confirm or deny it.
I have this impression that very shortly after Shor’s algorithm was discovered in 1994, there was some hope in the TCS community that maybe NP is contained inside BQP. And maybe it took a few years for this hope to subside, as it started to become clear that NP complete problems are as resistant to quantum algorithms as they are to classical ones. But in the mid-90s, shortly after Schor, there were breathless articles in the popular media saying basically “maybe quantum computers can solve NP complete problems in polynomial time, and what might allow iit is the exponential size of the state space, etc etc”
So maybe the popular media just didn’t catch up with the picture shaping up maybe late 90s, early 2000s that the Shor, Grover tricks don’t work for NP complete problems…
I say this because as a kid my dad had all these issues of scientific american, going back to the 80s. And I seem to remember some breathless articles about “can these new quantum computers solve NP complete problems” from the mid-90s. I think also science fiction from the mid 90s and late 90s also perpetuated this view, for example some of Greg Egan’s work.
Is this your understanding of what happened? Or am I totally wrong? And in particular, when did it become clear that the mid-90s quantum tricks wouldn’t work for NP complete problems?
I vaguely remember you talking about some theorem that “generic” Grover-type tricks can only produce quadratic speedups, but I can’t remember who that was
Comment #29 April 10th, 2026 at 10:33 am
Julian #28: That’s an extremely interesting theory, and is almost certainly responsible for part of it. Once the narrative “quantum computers basically solve NP in polynomial time by trying all possible solutions at once” had gotten lodged in the public imagination, it became almost impossible to dislodge, regardless of what any expert tried to explain. And that narrative did get lodged very early on!
But I also wouldn’t want to understate the role of the corporatization of QC, which started in earnest ~15 years ago. That’s what really put a megaphone in front of the “QCs solve hard optimization problems instantly by trying all answers at once” narrative—and made it, in the most egregious cases, not merely a matter of honest confusion but of misleading people for financial gain.
As a side note, I wouldn’t want to blame Greg Egan for this, as his sci-fi novel Quarantine, which speculated about quantum mechanics letting you solve NP-hard problems in this way, came out way back in 1992 … even before the experts knew the BBBV Theorem, which showed why Grover is optimal for black-box searching! 😀
Comment #30 April 10th, 2026 at 11:24 am
Wait. How could Grover have been devised in 1996, but BBBV, which says Grover is optimal for the generic preimage problem, have been proved in 1994? I am confused.
Comment #31 April 10th, 2026 at 11:56 am
Julian #30: Yup! As I love pointing out whenever I teach this stuff, Grover’s algorithm was proven to be optimal before it was discovered to exist. BBBV were annoyed that they could “only” prove a lower bound of √N queries, rather than the “obviously correct” N. Only when Grover’s algorithm was published, a couple years later, did they understand why their lower bound argument got stuck at √N.
(This is far from the only time such a thing has happened in complexity theory, or even quantum complexity theory.)
Comment #32 April 10th, 2026 at 7:01 pm
Manuel,
I humbly suggest this site as something I learned a lot about QC from. https://quantum.country/
Comment #33 April 11th, 2026 at 9:47 am
“ The Tyranny of Black and White.”
I enjoyed your post.
I apologize but I don’t believe the common man is the most culpable for this tyranny. Granted that his education promotes binary reasoning but the many experts that provide simple answers are most culpable. Unfortunately not all credentialed experts share your commitment to scrupulously honest portrayal of results and possibilities even in their particular areas of expertise. Many have some pecuniary interest in black and white (all black now but I know how to turn it white). They are interested in retaining research grants or selling books or receiving popular acclaim, etc.
As best I can tell David Deutsch is credited as the source of “computing all possible results at the same time” by invoking MWI. I can’t find his second paper from 1985, outside a paywall, that is often cited in this regard. David Deutsch himself has shown no doubt at all about MWI so for him it is settled science but just lacking the confirmation experiment at this particular time.
Off topic-
Artemis 2 was a complete failure in that no photos of an alien base on the dark side of the moon and no indication of the alien crafts that reportedly dogged the Apollo lunar missions. Bad news for the moon landing hoax crowd that the astronauts didn’t all die traveling through the Van Allen Belt.
Many people believe bizarre things but the future tends to ultimately sort the bizarre false from the reasonable. Deutsch reportedly has a scheme to use an appropriate quantum computer to provide proof of MWI. I am looking forward to the future sorting this.
Comment #34 April 12th, 2026 at 8:14 am
Scott do you agree with “Gemini says 4 to 48 logical qubit FTQCs are available based on 100’s of physical qubits and is the SOTA. Neven’s law says 2^(2^n) scaling for QC logical qubit density. So we see ECC gone in 3\\pm0.3 years by https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2%5E%282%5En%29%3E100?” We should see ECC (if everything works as planned efforts) be replaced or made 1000+ bit?
Comment #35 April 12th, 2026 at 12:19 pm
Wow, I love your writing.
Comment #36 April 13th, 2026 at 1:46 am
> Horseshoe theory
It’s the Smale horseshoe, stretching and folding over and over, until the claims are all a blur 😉
Comment #37 April 13th, 2026 at 8:28 am
I think a lot of the skepticism is due to the ‘water on mars’ effect. With that, I mean the following: for the last 20 years, there have been announcements in the popular press that we’ve discovered water on mars. But what has shifted in the mean time is what that we mean with that: it’s gone from ‘there may be some frozen water under the poles’ to ‘we’re pretty sure half the planet was covered in an ocean at some point’. But because those nuances are too difficult to write about, each discovery gets simplified to ‘we found water on mars’. That then drives disillusionment, since the layman doesn’t understand why it was worth looking for more evidence, since we already found water on mars 5 years ago (and 10 years, 15 years, etc).
The fundamental point here is that there’s a real disconnect between the expectations of scientists, for who every breakthrough is the stepping stone to the problem that the next generation spends their career solving, and everyday experience, where such multi-decade processes of building up technological capabilities don’t really exist (or are not perceived as such when they do).
Comment #38 April 13th, 2026 at 8:50 pm
I’ve read a few pages of this and understand just enough to say “wow, cool”:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.06322
It’s about the size of quantum computer required to resolve some conflicts between classical gravity and QM. 1600 qubits seems to be enough even for universe-scale theories.
Comment #39 April 13th, 2026 at 10:44 pm
asdf #38: The theories that a scalable quantum computer would help to refute are specifically the ones that deny quantum mechanics, replacing it by some underlying classical model (eg, a cellular automaton at the Planck scale). These are the theories of, eg, Gerard ‘t Hooft, Stephen Wolfram, or Tim Palmer. Pretty much no one working in quantum gravity per se (strings, AdS/CFT, etc) takes such proposals seriously. For the mainstream, a QC will “merely” confirm what we already firmly believed—namely, that quantum mechanics is true—and will then provide a new tool for doing, eg, simulations of quantum gravity models that weren’t feasible otherwise.
The paper you linked is basically just restating the above, which has been conventional wisdom in QC for decades, and indeed a central motivation for me and others to get into QC in the first place. I’m totally fine if people enjoy the paper, as long as they understand that it isn’t saying anything beyond this.
Comment #40 April 14th, 2026 at 9:36 am
Scott #39,
Thanks for engaging with this. Quick questions on the 500 logical qubits threshold: is that number surprising or more or less expected? What would you guess is the lower bound, e.g. the point where things start getting genuinely interesting for ruling things out? Or do you think boson sampling experiments could (or have) already close the deal before fault-tolerant machines arrive?
Comment #41 April 14th, 2026 at 6:33 pm
A fake medical paper (that included a thanks to Starfleet Academy) and gullible AI’s that began disseminating information about a fake disease identified in the fake paper and you have the general background of Bixonimania.
The paper apparently even started receiving citations in papers in peer reviewed journals presumably via ever helpful AI’s.
Comment #42 April 15th, 2026 at 7:58 am
Re: Black and White thinking
“I apologize but I don’t believe the common man is the most culpable for this tyranny. Granted that his education promotes binary reasoning but the many experts that provide simple answers are most culpable.”
The problem is mostly psychological and it has to do with attitudes towards uncertainty. Human brains are wired to be prediction machines because that is what has allowed us an evolutionary advantage. Prediction machines LIKE TO PREDICT.
Uncertainty is an uncomfortable and nearly intolerable state for many human brains. That’s why religions were invented. To give answers aka predictions in the face of the truly unknown. Black and white thinking is a product of the anxiety produced by human organism when it is unable to make predictions in the face of the unknown.
The best way to overcome black and white thinking is to build up a higher and higher tolerance for uncertainty. Learn to live with not knowing.
Comment #43 April 15th, 2026 at 8:09 am
FWIW, I also see conspiracy theory making as also rooted in the psychological anxiety around uncertainty. When you don’t understand something that causes you anxiety AND you are uncomfortable with uncertainty itself or you find it nearly intolerable, then it is quite easy to come up with a conspiracy theory that provides a band-aid to place over that intolerable uncertainty.
Comment #44 April 15th, 2026 at 8:46 am
Adam Treat #42
“Uncertainty is an uncomfortable and nearly intolerable state for many human brains.”
Indeed, Alan Watts taught that anxiety stems from chasing a future-based illusion and trying to control the uncontrollable. He argued that uncertainty is the foundation of possibility and creative energy. True living requires abandoning the pursuit of certainty and embracing the present moment, which is the only time life actually occurs.
Comment #45 April 15th, 2026 at 9:57 am
Adam Treat #42
I agree with much of what you write and have written here a few times about the brain’s evolved fundamental role as a prediction machine. My belief is that education should provide appreciation for uncertainty in complex situations rather than the certainty of conclusions. My belief then is that US education has come to provide the conclusions of ideological certainty rather than appreciation for the uncertainty that must arise when you have a lot of messy variables. In this regard teachers/professors have assumed the role of the priesthood but without the traditions associated with the major religions. (I have thought that US academia is like a Borg Cube on many issues but I don’t know enough about Borg Cubes to draw this analogy).
If you accept the predictor role for the brain then you would expect that more intelligent brains are better able to make predictions and are therefore better able to recognize and accommodate uncertainty. Teachers and professors that provide conclusions in a priestly manner then provide two cases-1) Their native intelligence is not much different then the population average. This likely covers most cases. 2) Although they understand the uncertainties they are still ideologically driven to provide their beliefs as facts.
In the UK quite often the parental attitude was something like-I drove a bus my entire life and fine occupation for my son. In the US the attitude was more Disneylike-There are no boundaries (including genetic potential) and you can be whatever you wish upon a star to be! This has provided a large formally educated population that looks to what they have versus what they wished to have and think-This really blows. If their education were more fact based then their personal objectives would be based on realistic expectations and the realizations in the future less shocking. US public education has become truly an ideological basket case with entire schools failing to perform at grade level and students with a perfect GPA requiring remedial math in college.
Sorry for the length of this Adam Treat and I do agree with you but still believe fact based education, with conclusions only as good faith discussion topics, could ameliorate the human tendency to believe certainty. This tendency as you note is the natural order and doesn’t require any education at all to prevail.
I see major companies are announcing large training programs now to provide workers capable of performing required tasks. It will be interesting to see how basic they are required to go for remedial education.
Comment #46 April 15th, 2026 at 1:59 pm
…and then you have Hasan Piker speaking with apparent acclaim at the Yale commencement ceremony equating the US to Nazi Germany and stating he prefers Hamas to the US. Wow. I would certainly contribute to a GoFundMe account to help him live with Hamas.
He basically calls all Americans that are not on the left “reactionaries” that will be shown to be paper tigers when violence begins. He apparently has no clue about how well armed the “reactionaries” are in the case of the current US.
Comment #47 April 16th, 2026 at 9:34 am
Abstract Factoid #44
I enjoyed the video. Such wisdom. I will apply this next time we are in the car set to go to schools, with seat belts fastened ready to turn the key, and a daughter announces-I forgot my book bag. Previously I would have been upset but now my response will be-Excellent, no planning to ruin our school trip experience. We are so fortunate.
Comment #48 April 16th, 2026 at 10:57 am
#46
Here is the Piker speech at Yale and not commencement as stated.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gzBASPaRoJo
Comment #49 April 18th, 2026 at 4:20 am
RIP Michael Rabin, at age 94, a pretty high score as I like to put it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_O._Rabin
Comment #50 April 20th, 2026 at 2:14 am
[…] and cryptography. He also wrote a good piece on how hard it is to get people to deal with the uncertainty of future quantum capabilities. (You can guess how many “jokes” he has to hear about […]
Comment #51 April 21st, 2026 at 12:00 am
Scott #39 yes thanks, that’s a good description. QM tells me also, though, that a Bell experiment should work properly even when its endpoints are in separate galaxies. That seems hard to test directly, but maybe there are some more localized consequences. I saw a mention of “entanglement overload” in the context of the ER=EPR conjecture but I wasn’t able to figure out what that was supposed to mean.
Comment #52 April 23rd, 2026 at 9:03 am
And to the existential child, who doesn’t care about computers and asks if the cat is death and alive at the same time and if facts are just local illusions of an observer you answer?
Comment #53 May 2nd, 2026 at 12:45 am
@Edo #52: search this blog for “Zen anti-interpretation”