Vibe Shift: Quantum Supremacy Guy Wins Physics Nobel
Nobel folks don't care about a 2019 Kancel Kulture Kontroversy.
An Englishman, a Frenchman and an American — John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis, respectively — have won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.”
As usual these days, they are all pretty old, born between 1942 and 1958, and are being awarded for work done in the mid-1980s. And they are pale and male as well as stale. (The Nobel Prizes are so prestigious that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences pretty much ignored the DEI Era in choosing the winners of the three hard science Nobels.)
The American quantum computing wizard Martinis was subjected to one of the funnier Cancel Culture controversies when he and his team published an article in 2019 about “quantum supremacy,” a term coined in 2011 by Caltech professor John Preskill to mean when a quantum computer can do something that just can’t be done by a classical computer.
A letter to the editor in Nature then denounced the term “quantum supremacy” as terrifying Physicists of Color by reminding them of “white supremacy:”
CORRESPONDENCE
10 December 2019
Instead of ‘supremacy’ use ‘quantum advantage’
By Carmen Palacios-Berraquero, Leonie Mueck & Divya M. Persaud
We take issue with the use of ‘supremacy’ when referring to quantum computers that can out-calculate even the fastest supercomputers (F. Arute et al. Nature 574, 505–510; 2019). We consider it irresponsible to override the historical context of this descriptor, which risks sustaining divisions in race, gender and class. We call for the community to use ‘quantum advantage’ instead.
Preskill responded that he’d rejected “quantum advantage” precisely because it misses the point: “quantum supremacy” doesn’t represent an advantage in quantity but a difference in quality: when a quantum computer can do something traditional computers simply can’t.
Also, quantum supremacy sounds cooler than quantum advantage.
Sounds like three angry liberal ladies with their panties in a wad, had nothing better to do one day than to make a scene for absolutely no rational reason!
A vast majority of Americans are so over this asinine “DEI Hill” these liberals want to die on! Get a life gurls… there’s way more important things to worry about than your butt hurt phraseology of Supremacy!
Northern Europeans, the quantum supremacy of technological development.