blake johnson

Paul Davies’ article in the nytimes has garnered a lot of commentary on my usual blog reading list. For instance, there is a lot going on in the comments at Dave Bacon’s site and Chad Orzel has started more discussion.

For what it’s worth, while I usually find Davies to be a bit suspect, I would agree that there is an element of science which requires faith. On a very basic level, the scientific method is based upon the belief that the universe is ordered by laws and that these laws can be probed by experiment. It requires belief that if one repeats an experiment one should get the same result. I have written about this before a long time ago.

Some good news: two new papers from my lab (I am an author on both) will appear in the September 20th and 27th issues of Nature. In the September 20th paper we demonstrate a device which produces single microwave photons on-demand. The September 27th paper shows multiplexed read-out and control of two qubits coupled by a quantum bus. We also take some steps toward a two-qubit gate.

It is kind of funny that these papers will appear nearly simultaneously since the photon on-demand paper was submitted 5-6 months earlier.

Chad Orzel has a nice post that pretty much sums up my feelings on Richard Dawkins. Maybe some day I’ll actually read The God Delusion, but having heard summaries of his arguments, it sounds like he says nothing new and that he severely misrepresents the nature of science.

Finally, an article on a popular press site with a healthy dose of skepticism regarding D-Wave’s announcement.

Incidentally, D-Wave has posted some details of their implementation on the arxiv. I have only had a chance to skim it so far, but I was amused to see that their readout scheme couples their qubits to an LC circuit, and they measure the phase shift of the resonator. This is an idea which has become increasingly popular after my lab demonstrated it in 2003 (Patrice Bertet published results for an harmonic oscillator readout of their flux qubits, and I understand that John Martinis’ group has now coupled their phase qubits to a resonator).

Quantum computing is in the news today (such as this article which carries the dubious front-page text of “Quantum computers ready to go commercial”, and here which is much more accurate) because Canadian start-up D-Wave demo’ed their 16-bit “quantum computer” yesterday. Quantum computer is in scare quotes in that sentence because their demo did not provide enough details to say one way or another whether their system is actually a quantum computer, because all they showed was some pretty graphics and solutions to problems which they claimed were being run on their hardware. It’s going to take a lot more than that to appease the scientific community.

Dave Bacon provides a fair critique (warning: very technical!) as well as amusing commentary (not very technical) on the hype that this is getting in the press.

I think that what D-Wave is trying is pretty neat, but I am very skeptical at this point.

Update: Apparently D-Wave themselves are not willing to state with certainty that their machine is truly quantum. See the AP article on CNN.