Quantum winter is coming
As a person who works in Quantum Computing, I can concur that there&#x27;s hype in the field; one of the professors in my university has a quantum machine learning (TM) startup that seems to be performing well, even though most of the faculty and grad students can tell you that it&#x27;s bullshit.<p>However. This paragraph straight up displays a fundamental lack of understanding by Hossenfelder:<p>&gt; Last time I looked, no one had any idea how to do a weather forecast on a quantum computer. It’s not just that no one has done it, no one knows if it’s even possible, because weather is a non-linear system whereas quantum mechanics is a linear theory.<p>Unitary evolution generated by the Schrödinger equation is a linear map on _probability amplitudes_, just like how classical (probabilistic) computing performs linear operations on _probability distributions_. The commonly used quantum circuit model is a superset of classical logic gates and can accomplish anything a probabilistic classical computer can, so if anything is possible in a classical computing scheme, it&#x27;s also possible in the quantum circuit scheme.<p>I don&#x27;t have much sympathy for her since this is not the first time Hossenfelder has displayed a lack of understanding, recently she has published a paper criticizing another one [1], now replaced with a much shorter text due to being told [2] by the authors of the original paper.<p>Yeah I get it, it&#x27;s dumb when the president of BofA is talking about how QC is &quot;the next big thing&quot;, I know it&#x27;s not coming Soon^TM, but saying &quot;we will never have a quantum computer because the current ones suck&quot; has the same energy as &quot;the world doesn&#x27;t need more than 5 computers&quot; imo.