The discovery of the transistor didn't bring an iPhone overnight. Same with many other scientific discoveries that had to go through a long engineering phase. I see a similar trend happening now with quantum computation, which has seen great leaps over the past 20 years and continues to accelerate in both academia and industry.

It's my opinion that, at least in America, we live in a less intellectually disciplined and intellectually favored society. Anti-intellectualism, even in nominally educated portions of society, seems to be on the rise. This unfortunately has the effect of making science look stagnant to the larger population, and unless there are gadgets of instant gratification that science explicitly produces, it'll remain somewhat obscure to folks uninterested in advancement for the sake of advancement.

As for the multiverse stuff, I'm not sure why you think that it has to do with the arbitrary selection of constants. The multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics doesn't say "anything happens and it all happens in separate multiverses", but rather that—in simple terms—non-deterministic events like measurements bifurcate into separate universes. But QM still posits that the results of these non-deterministic events are each probable, and each obey the same laws of physics equally. In other words, it has a more "butterfly effect" on us, keeping physical constants as truly constants, not a "splitting of universal laws effect".

Yeah, I coulda been one of those guys: I even had a pretty good idea for an imaginary QC platform and a position in a major research institution. I couldn't live with myself: I got a job in the valley.

Physics and science in general looks stagnant to the larger population because it is actually stagnating. Stating otherwise is mendacity of the highest order.

Considering that the only way to even observe Higgs is to build a multi billion dollar collider I'd bet on that one.

Mate, what are you on about? We manipulate life almost at will, we have proven theorems that were unsolved for centuries, etc. Your limited imagination and your apparent lacking ability to see things in perspective make no rule.

Cure for cancer? Cure for any genetic disease? Antibiotic resistant bacteria?

Given the forum, let's assume you're a little more familiar with tech: Perfect encryption? NLP that understands meaning? Do you see now how it's a fallacy to take cutting edge scientific breakthroughs and demand instantaneous applications, and if these aren't met, discard the breakthroughs as having little meaning?

(background: PhD in Biophysics, I've cloned genes and run huge simulations of protein folding, as well as worked in genomics and pharmaceutical chemistry).

No, this is absolutely wrong. There are entire families of solutions to the measurement problem and we have no firm idea which one is correct. There are even multiple mechanisms to get behavior that looks like this but is based on very different, often less weird, principles (see e.g. Einselection).

> It means most of the fundamental constants are arbitrary, for one thing.

No, this is wrong and unrelated. You're confusing two ideas. One is where the universe "forks", as you say, during eigenstate collapse, the other is that there is a space of universes with different physical constants. These are unrelated. Eigenstate collapse doesn't change physical constants.

I think that the quantum computer guys think that they are about to deliver as well.

But that doesn't mean it's "frustrated". There's a lot of progress being made. There's just a long way to go. Quantum algorithms are hard.

Fusion guys have always claimed they're underfunded w.r.t. experiments and in fairness fusion does get kinda hot so I could see it being expensive.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusi...

I don't have an answer myself, but it seems to most people, "delivery" doesn't mean "when it's useful", but rather "when it's usable, useful, and generally available for use."

If we use that as a benchmark, quantum computing has definitely hit "usable". It is teetering on "useful". And the beginnings of "generally available for use" have been explored by a few industrial players [0, 1].

[0] Rigetti Computing's Forest: http://forest.rigetti.com/

[1] IBM Research's Quantum Experience: http://www.research.ibm.com/quantum/

The problem with fusion is commercial viability. Building something for billions of dollars that can barely put out more energy than you put in isn't commercially viable. At any rate, fusion seems more like a very tough engineering problem, the physics has been there for a long while.

With quantum computing there are also no real signs that a quantum computer will beat a "classical" computer at anything any time soon. It always was and still is very difficult to get quantum systems to scale and you need a large enough system to make a difference and it may be impossible to do so. Again a lot of this is more of an engineering problem though admittedly the line between physics and engineering can be blurry since it's not always clear whether something can't be done because you've reached a fundamental limitation vs. having a clever enough design.

It's possible someone will eventually solve the problems in these areas (assuming there aren't fundamental reasons we're just not aware of yet why it's impossible) but IMO the odds are low and you need some sort of breakthrough.

John Martinis' group is planning to do that within the next two years [1][2]. Ten years might be realistic for solving useful problems faster and cheaper, but the esoteric speedups are right around the corner.

1: https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00263 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgMWommXxU8

One question I'd have is whether quantum simulation is indeed the fastest way to solve the quantum speckle problem on a classical computer. The other related thing to think about is whether the output of a quantum speckle computer can only be explained by the large state space and quantum mechanics or whether there are alternative explanations.

So definitely an interesting direction but even if they're successful we're still not quite there. When we have a quantum computer doing useful work with exponential speedup over classical computers that would be something and even then we only have a very limited set of algorithms at the moment.

They give arguments for this in the paper. Intuitively, if there's some fast way to classically sample a random quantum circuit then that means most quantum circuits should be easy to simulate classically. But that doesn't seem to be the case: we don't have algorithms that go fast on most circuits but go slow in highly specialized cases. It's the other way around.

> whether the output of a quantum speckle computer can only be explained by the large state space and quantum mechanics or whether there are alternative explanations.

Given that all the engineering was based on quantum mechanics, it would be very surprising if the machine worked based on something else. It's quite difficult to make things accidentally work like that. It'd be like trying to build a car, confirming it can take you from place to place, then realizing that actually you made a hang-glider by accident.

The mentioning of quantum computers is very interesting in the following sense: If one were able to build a sufficiently large quantum computer, this would provide strong evidence that the (at the moment rather hypothetical) theory whether quantum mechanics is rather an emergent phenomen by a deterministic process (cellular automaton)

> https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1548

which the Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft worked on for the last years is probably wrong. To quote p. 79-80:

"Such scaled classical computers can of course not be built, so that this quantum computer will still be allowed to perform computational miracles, but factoring a number with millions of digits into its prime factors will not be possible – unless fundamentally improved classical algorithms turn out to exist. If engineers ever succeed in making such quantum computers, it seems to me that the CAT is falsified; no classical theory can explain quantum mechanics."

On the other hand, if we seriously get into trouble building a sufficiently large quantum computer (despite our best efforts), this would at least to me provide evidence that 't Hooft is on something - since that this is a prediction that his Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics provides.

The Hooft thing is that there are limits on computation due to the process of the universe and that if a classical computer that was at the plank scale, runs at plankian speed (help help I am using terms I can't understand!!!) and covered the whole of the universe couldn't do it from the beginning of time to heat death... then nor can an arbitrary QC. Shores algorithm does factors in (log n)^3 maybe we'll find that there are physical limits on the scale of QC which hold it below hundreds of millions of qbits where a plankian computer could be synthesised, and/or it may be that such a computer can't run at high clock speeds, and because of this BQP algorithms can't be run on problems that are not allowed in the sense that they somehow solve the universe.

I don't think anyone has any reason to believe this is true in an engineering sense but there is every reason to believe that large QC will be very, very difficult in an engineering sense and I think that the people building one do expect to run into problems of this sort eventually, but at the moment they are delighted to find that they are able to do things at the lower end that will create devices that are going to be transformational for reasoning about some components of the physical universe - for example simulation of the interactions of very large molecules - maybe mapping seconds of a virus interacting with a cell membrane using months of QC ?

Edit: ah, yes, and also the slightly more generic mandatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/678/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/20/fusion-energy-react...

Many people have treated this as a hoax, or a joke. But the work is being done by Lockheed-Martin's Skunk Works, which has quite a track record. (The U-2, the SR-71, and stealth aircraft came out of there. ) Lockheed-Martin is doing this with their own money, and last year, when asked about it, the CEO said it was doing well enough they were putting more money in.

[1] http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.htm...

According to the researcher translation table, fusion is still a long ways off. https://xkcd.com/678/

Many of the scienctists of that post war era were hounded mercilessly for decades ever after, throughout the cold war.

If one were to try and obfuscate a scientific field, and introduce enough confusion such that whirlpools of disagreement ensnare the casual hobbyist, how would that take shape?

Conspiracy theory: in the early days after the H-bomb, there was research into finding some way to make an H-bomb without needing an atomic bomb just to get the energy to start the thermonuclear reaction. This would have resulted in a "clean" H-bomb, and also the ability to make smaller ones. This research was unsuccessful.

Maybe it was really a success. Too much of a success, What if it became too easy to do? Perhaps progress in fusion is deliberately held up because there's a way to make an H-bomb that doesn't require an A-bomb.

Why, isn't that un-testable as well, even more so than stringtheory, pretty much by definition?