The (Quantum Computing) House of Cards

In the physics community, there is a house of cards built upon a nearly fanatical belief in the universality of quantum mechanics – i.e., that quantum wave states always evolve in a linear or unitary fashion.  Let’s call this fanaticism the Cult of U.

When I began this process a couple years ago, I didn’t realize that questioning U was such a sin, that I could literally be ostracized from an “intellectual” community by merely doubting U.  Having said that, there are a few doubters, not all of whom have been ostracized.  For instance, Roger Penrose, one of the people I most admire in this world, recently won the Nobel Prize in Physics, despite his blatant rejection of U.  However, he rejected U in the only way deemed acceptable by the physics community: he described in mathematical detail the exact means by which unitarity may be broken, and conditioned the rejection of U on the empirical confirmation of his theory.  As I describe in this post, Penrose proposes gravitational collapse of the wave function, a potentially empirically testable hypothesis that is being explored at the Penrose Institute.  In other words, he implicitly accepts that: a) U should be assumed true; and b) it is his burden to falsify U with a physical experiment.

I disagree.  In the past year, I’ve attempted (and, I believe, succeeded) to logically falsify U – i.e., by showing that it is logically inconsistent and therefore cannot be true – in this paper and this paper.  I also showed in this paper why U is an invalid inference and should never have been assumed true.  Setting aside that they have been ignored or quickly (and condescendingly) dismissed by nearly every physicist who glanced at them, all three were rejected by arvix.org.  This is both weird and significant.

The arXiv is a preprint server, specializing in physics (although it has expanded to other sciences), supported by Cornell University, that is not peer reviewed.  The idea is simply to allow researchers to quickly and publicly post their work as they begin the process of formal publication, which can often take years.  Although not peer-reviewed, arXiv does have a team of moderators who reject “unrefereeable” work: papers that are so obviously incorrect (or just generally shitty) that no reputable publisher would even consider it or send it for peer review by referees.  Think perpetual motion machines and proofs that we can travel faster than light.

What’s even weirder is that I submitted the above papers under the “history and philosophy of physics” category.  Even if a moderator thought the papers did not contain enough equations for classification in, say, quantum physics, on what basis could anyone say that they weren’t worthy of being refereed by a reputable journal that specializes in the philosophy of physics?  For the record, a minor variation of the second paper was in fact refereed by Foundations of Physics, and the third paper was not only refereed, but was well regarded and nearly offered publication by Philosophy of Science.  Both papers are now under review by other journals.  No, they haven’t been accepted for publication anywhere yet, but arXiv’s standard is supposed to be whether the paper is at least refereeable, not whether a moderator agrees with the paper’s arguments or conclusions! 

It was arXiv’s rejection of my third paper (“The Invalid Inference of Universality in Quantum Mechanics”) that made it obvious to me that the papers were flagged because of their rejection of U.  This paper offers an argument about the nature of logical inferences in science and whether the assumption of U is a valid inference, an argument that was praised by two reviewers at a highly rated journal that specializes in the philosophy of physics.  No reasonable moderator could have concluded that the paper was unrefereeable. As a practical matter, it makes no difference, as there are other preprint servers where I can and do host my papers.  (I also have several papers on the arXiv, such as this – not surprisingly, none of them questions U.)

But the question is: if my papers (and potentially others’ papers) were flagged for their rejection of U… why?!

You might think this is a purely academic question.  Who cares whether or not quantum wave states always evolve linearly?  For example, the possibilities of Schrodinger’s Cat and Wigner’s Friend follow from the assumption of U.  But no one actually thinks that we’ll ever produce a real Schrodinger’s Cat in a superposition state |dead> + |alive>, right?  This is just a thought experiment that college freshmen like to talk about while getting high in their dorms, right? 

Is it possible that there is a vested interest… perhaps a financial interest… in U?

Think about some of the problems and implications that follow from the assumption of U.  Schrodinger’s Cat and Wigner’s Friend, of course, but there’s also the Measurement Problem, the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, the black hole information paradox, physical reversibility, and – oh yeah – scalable quantum computing. 

Since 1994, with the publication of Shor’s famous algorithm, untold billions of dollars have flowed into the field of quantum computing.  Google, Microsoft, IBM, and dozens of other companies, as well as the governments of many countries, have poured ridiculous quantities of money into the promise of quantum computing. 

And what is that promise?  Well, I have an answer, which I’ll detail in a future post.  But here’s the summary: if there is any promise at all, it depends entirely on the truth of U.  If U is in fact false, then a logical or empirical demonstration that convincingly falsifies U (or brings it seriously into question) would almost certainly be catastrophic to the entire QC industry. 

I’m not suggesting a conspiracy theory.  I’m simply pointing out that if there are two sides to a seemingly esoteric academic debate, but one side has thousands of researchers whose salaries and grants and reputations and stock options depend on their being right (or, at least, not being proven wrong), then it wouldn’t be surprising to find their view dominating the literature and the media.  The prophets of scalable quantum computing have a hell of a lot more to lose than the skeptics.

That would help to explain why the very few publications that openly question U usually do so in a non-threatening way: accepting that U is true until empirically falsified.  For example, it will be many, many years before anyone will be able to experimentally test Penrose’s proposal for gravitational collapse.  Thus it would be all the more surprising to find articles in well-ranked, peer-reviewed journals that question U on logical or a priori grounds, as I have attempted to do.

Quoting from this post:

As more evidence that my independent crackpot musings are both correct and at the cutting edge of foundational physics, Foundations of Physics published this article at the end of October that argues that “both unitary and state-purity ontologies are not falsifiable.”  The author correctly concludes then that the so-called “black hole information paradox” and SC disappear as logical paradoxes and that the interpretations of QM that assume U (including MWI) cannot be falsified and “should not be taken too seriously.”  I’ll be blunt: I’m absolutely amazed that this article was published, and I’m also delighted. 

Today, I’m even more amazed and delighted.  In the past couple of posts, I have referenced an article (“Physics and Metaphysics of Wigner’s Friends: Even Performed Premeasurements Have No Results”), which was published in perhaps the most prestigious and widely read physics journal, Physical Review Letters, but only in the past few days have I really understood its significance.  (The authors also give a good explanation in this video.)

What the authors concluded about a WF experiment is that either there is “an absolutely irreversible quantum measurement [caused by an objective decoherence process] or … a reversible premeasurement to which one cannot ascribe any notion of outcome in logically consistent way.”

What this implies is that if WF is indeed reversible, then he does not make a measurement, which is very, very close to the logical contradiction I pointed out here and in Section F of this post.  While the authors don’t explicitly state it, their article implies that U is not scientific because it cannot (as a purely logical matter) be empirically tested at the size/complexity scale of WF.  This is among the first articles published in the last couple decades in prestigious physics journals that make a logical argument against U.

What’s even more amazing about the article is that it explicitly suggests that decoherence might result in objective collapse, which is essentially what I realized in my original explanation of why SC/WF are impossible in principle, even though lots of physicists have told me I’m wrong.  Further, the article openly suggests a relationship between (conscious) awareness, the Heisenberg cut between the microscopic and macroscopic worlds, and the objectivity of wave function collapse below that cut.  All in an article published in Physical Review Letters!

Now, back to QC.  After over two decades of hype that the Threshold Theorem would allow for scalable quantum computing (by providing for fault-tolerant quantum error correction (“FTQEC”)), John Preskill, one of the most vocal proponents of QC and original architects of FTQEC, finally admitted in this 2018 paper that “the era of fault-tolerant quantum computing may still be rather distant.”  As a consolation prize, he offered up NISQ, an acronym for Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum, which I would describe as: “We’ll just have to try our best to make something useful out of the 50-100 shitty, noisy, non-error-corrected qubits that we’ve got.”

Despite what should have been perceived as a huge red flag, more and more money keeps flowing into the QC industry, leading Scott Aaronson to openly muse just two months ago about the ethics of unjustified hype: “It’s genuinely gotten harder to draw the line between defensible optimism and exaggerations verging on fraud.”

Fraud??!!

The quantum computing community and the academic members of the Cult of U are joined at the hip, standing at the top of an unstable house of cards.  When one falls, they all do.  Here are some signs that their foundation is eroding:

·       Publication in reputable journals of articles that question or reject U on logical bases (without providing any mathematical description of collapse or means for empirically confirming it).

·       Hints and warnings among leaders in the QC industry that promises of scalable quantum computing (which inherently depends on U) are highly exaggerated.

I am looking forward to the day when the house of cards collapses and the Cult of U is finally called out for what it is.