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In what sense is quantum computing a science?
- whatshisface 8y ago>Up to now, physics has for the most part not been a design science. But my guess is that’s going to change in the coming decades. There are more and more examples where design seems the right way to think: topological quantum computers; new designer phases of matter; the Alcubierre warp drive and other designer spacetimes; constructor theory and universal constructors; programmable matter and utility fog. I'm not sure if the author realizes what the difference between physics and engineering really is. In the 1800s, concepts like entropy and pressure (and the foundations of mechanics) were considered to be exciting fields of research, right alongside the construction of the first steam engines. Although the inventors building the first steam engines were exploiting the cutting-edge physics of the day, they were not in doing so acting as physicists. Engineering is not "the study of heat transfer and classical mechanics," engineering is "the application of physics (or whatever other science is helpful) to practical design problems." If a physicist were to construct or design a physical system to meet some requirements, they would be by definition engineering, whether they were a mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer, or a quantum field engineer. Likewise, if an engineer were to decide that the laws of the system they were working with were not fully understood, they might spend some time working out what they were, and in doing so they would be acting as a scientist.
- C1sc0cat 8y agoAn Engineer is a Scientist with thumbs is how it was explained to me.
- defaultprimate 8y agoScientists discover tools. Engineers use those tools to solve problems.
- checkyoursudo 8y agoMy dad was a aeronautical engineer and my father-in-law is an electrical engineer. I would say their work was not really like my wife's (when she was a scientist). The scientists in my life have seemed more like chefs coming up with the recipes and the engineers more like line cooks making the operation of the restaurant actually happen. That's probably a really terrible analogy. I don't mean at all to say that the engineers don't understand the science (I have no idea! and it probably varies from eng to eng), but the actual work I hear or heard them talk about over the course of decades seems very different, whereby "scientist with thumbs" doesn't really seem accurate. Although maybe that is more true now than in the past? For the last 10 years or so, my f-i-l's main complaint is that newly graduated engineers only understand theory and models and have zero practical experience coming out of a degree program. Though, he ... let's just say, he exaggerates a lot, so I don't know how accurate that is. My engineer-for-45-years father seems very little like a scientist.
- C1sc0cat 8y agoDepends where you worked :-) my first job was at a world leading hydrodynamics research place on campus at CIT (Cranfield) Our Boss was Presediuent of the Mech engineers and the boss of CIT The civil's
- amelius 8y agoNot entirely true, because engineers also implicitly validate scientific results, and this activity is explicitly part of the scientific method.
- fouc 8y agoThere's also the "theoretical physicist" vs the "experimental physicist", the experimental physicist is closer to the engineer, and validates the results.
- checkyoursudo 8y agoI mean, literally everybody implicitly validates scientific results all day every day, no?
- sound1 8y agoYes but we either validate what was already proven or something else for which the theory doesn't yet exist. Both are completely unhelpful for scientific progress in my opinion.
- jessriedel 8y ago> Engineering is not "the study of heat transfer and classical mechanics," engineering is "the application of physics (or whatever other science is helpful) to practical design problems." I basically agree, but there's an important human-institutional aspect to this: An alternate useful definition of physicist (engineer) is "a person who work in a physics department/lab (engineering department/shops)". And despite common misconceptions, the sort of thing that binds departments together is not the goal of the work (learning basic laws vs. building useful things) but rather the collection of techniques/tools/ideas that people learn and apply in those places. In other words, even though the goals of "materials physics" have for decades been much closer to engineering and design, there is a reason people continue to call it physics: because, at least for the time being, the sort of training you go through to become a materials physicist is mostly done in a physics department, and the methods by which materials physicist evaluate each other is closer to physics than to engineering.
- quantum_state 8y agoDid the author mean to say that he wanted to design a new set of law of nature? As far as it is known, not yet possible.
- Buldak 8y agoI tend to view "science" as quintessentially a "success term." We call a discipline a science if we have a high degree of confidence in its results. In this sense, math is a science, and whether psychology or economics are scientific has less to do with their subject matter than whether we think they produce real knowledge. I like this notion of science because it helps to account for the broader sense of "science" you see in earlier periods of history, before it became more narrowly associated with experimental science. More importantly, I think it gets at what actually interests us in the designation of "science."
- claudiawerner 8y agoOn the other hand, whether or not philosophy is a science is also up for question; if we go by what you're saying, we can approximate "real knowledge" to be "progress", but whether or not philosophy makes progress is hotly debated in metaphilosophy. There are some interesting arguments on this[0] site about it. In particular, as you note, the notion that science is purely empirical/"experimental" is relatively new, and outside of the Anglosphere, at least, it was common to see philosophy take up the name of science through words such as Wissenschaft - both Kant and Hegel published works which had their titles translated as the "Science of Logic", for instance. But most people seem to agree that the crudest formulation of science as that which is falsifiable (a la Popper) is inadequate; as the SEP notes, astrology is falsifiable and would thus qualify as a science! Furthermore, research has shown that what we regard as "science" published in the Nature journal actually doesn't usually come in the form of starting with a falsifiable hypothesis, but the research is exploratory in the first place. Defining science is tricky, and I think we should reconsider how much weight we assign to the term as a proxy for the concepts of rigor, progress, replicability, ability to provide new knowledge, to confirm old knowledge etc. [0] http://www.philosophyisscience.com/ http://www.philosophyisscience.com/
- marcosdumay 8y ago> astrology is falsifiable and would thus qualify as a science To qualify as science it should also not have been falsified. There is simply no problem in astrology being a candidate here, it's not reject because of form, but because of the contents.
- scottlocklin 8y agoThe author never used the phrase "glass bead game" -which pretty well describes quantum computing's relation to anything you could consider science or engineering. I guess he does use the words "Alcubierre warp drive" which is about right, except we don't have 1000s of Alcubierre warp drive experts running around publishing papers and pretending like they're not playing make believe.
- jackfraser 8y agoYou do realize you can sign up for D-Wave Leap and execute programs on a quantum annealer ten minutes from now, right? It's far from a glass bead game. Just because you and I don't know how to make an annealer do something useful doesn't mean others aren't already getting exciting and useful results from it.
- scottlocklin 8y agoIt is a glass bead game. D-Wave is a LARP. FWIIW I use annealing all the time in non-gradient optimization problems. My X220 thinkpad from 2012 is faster than d-wave's thing. The only interesting quantum computer is one which achieves actual quantum supremacy. There's a really obvious reason why this will never happen (well really obvious to me). It's the same reason you can't solve NP-hard problems using soap bubbles.
- klyrs 8y agoDWave has a live action role-playing game now? Gotta dig out my boffer sword; I haven't done this since high school...
- scottlocklin 8y agoY'awl can downvote all you like; the national academy of sciences agrees with me: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/the-us-national-academies-reports-on-the-prospects-for-quantum-computing https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/the-u...
- peteradio 8y agoThe fundamentals of quantum computing are absolutely a science. The hypothesis, discovery and characterization of useful quantum systems is done in Physics labs all over the world. Beyond that, is Computer Science not considered a fundamental science?
- reikonomusha 8y ago“Proper” computer science as studied and understood in academia is really a branch of mathematics, not science.
- mkirklions 8y agoThe last 10 years of seeing Academia decide what is a valid has convinced me Academia has limited weight in the real world. Don't sweat their opinion, Industry drives the world.
- ziaddotcom 8y agoThis dichotomy keeps popping up in the comments. I think Academia is resolving and leveling up beyond this. https://eecs.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/abet_letter_to_everyone_rev7.pdf https://eecs.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/abet_letter_to... Also when MIT moved to python vs scheme not to dumb down the CS, but to more emphasize combing and programming complex systems on the fly (robotics etc).
- msla 8y agoIt's a branch of mathematics which wouldn't be considered a single branch without the practical concerns of programming driving it. You have everything from computability, sure, but you also have queuing theory (networking), formal grammars (parsers, compilers), relational algebra (database queries), and whatever else I'm forgetting, all under one banner, because all of them are useful to the same practical field.
- wybiral 8y agoQuantum computing boils down to unitary matrix operations over complex space. It's very straightforward. But the way those pieces behave in more complicated systems and the emergent properties they give rise to can be studied... Scientifically. Some of it will be encompassed by computer science in that algorithms will still have the same metrics, but there may be other metrics for which to study quantum algorithms.
- reikonomusha 8y agoYou really can’t boil down quantum computing to something that doesn’t include probability distributions and measurement.
- wybiral 8y agoThose probability distributions are typically represented as complex vectors and quantum gates as unitary matrix operations on those vectors. Here's a quantum computer simulator [1] I wrote years ago that allows you to construct quantum circuits using the most common quantum gates found in literature. This is all done by the application of complex matrices. On the right there is the probability distribution that taking a measurement would result in. [1] https://github.com/qcsimulator/qcsimulator.github.io https://github.com/qcsimulator/qcsimulator.github.io Edit: It's worth noting that we can study quantum computing without a quantum computer, just as we can study computing without a classical computer. Edit 2: Here's Grover's Algorithm in my simulator where you can see that the probability of measuring the correct "hidden" oracle value is 96% after only three applications of the diffusion operator: https://qcsimulator.github.io/?example=Grover%27s%20Algorithm https://qcsimulator.github.io/?example=Grover%27s%20Algorith...
- urgoroger 8y agoI think the commentor's point is that measurement (which is a key component of quantum computation) is not a unitary operation.
- ziaddotcom 8y agoWhat about the part where you have to make and verify a working quantum computer?
- kickopotomus 8y agoPerhaps I am misunderstanding the author or simply not fully grasping the concept of "design science"[0], but it seems as if they are simply trying to reclassify engineering with a term that sounds more "science-y". [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_science#cite_note-cross2001-20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_science#cite_note-cross...
- klyrs 8y agoSpeaking from experience, as somebody who works in quantum computing. * Theoretical physicists make hypotheses, and find abstract circuits to accomplish a goal; experimental physicists work closely to validate those circuits -- a cycle of experimentation, hypothesis testing, and lots of statistics (aka science). * Circuit designers find concrete implementations of those circuits, and work closely with fab to produce them. Fab employs chemists and physicists to test, characterize, and refine their processes through experimentation, hypothesis testing, and lots of statistics (aka, science). * When experiment-laden chips come back from fab, the circuit designers and theoretical physicists work with experimental physicists and lab technicians to characterize/validate the implementation through experimentation, hypothesis testing, and lots of statistics (aka, science). * Individual devices are assembled into processors by an architect, who has a high-level understanding of the circuits, fab processes, and algorithms that use the processors -- coordinating a larger feedback loop with algorithm researchers involving experimentation, hypothesis testing, and lots of statistics (aka, science). Scienceless design is a myth worthy of quashing. Our process isn't much different than those employed in the classical computing realm. I'd claim that quantum computing isn't even groundbreaking, in this regard: there's probably a billion person-hour trail of scientific studies that took us from the Antikythera device to the 7nm node (cough cough, or 10nm; who's counting?) and the architectures built thereupon. If you're doing "design" without "science" as a subroutine; you're probably just following a recipe.
- trhway 8y agoIn the same as exobiology - we can make models compatible with our current physics/chemistry/etc and study those models, write papers, have conferences, grants... ie. do a science. One day it may happen to be useful upon encountering a life on another planet matching the models.
- porpoisely 8y agoIt isn't a science. It doesn't delve into natural laws. Quantum computing, like computer science, is mathematics. The applied versions of quantum computing and computer science is engineering. One of my professor's biggest pet peeves was the misnomer "computer science". He always said that he was a mathematician and not a scientist. Turing was a mathematician, not a scientist.
- Koshkin 8y agoOutside the US mathematics is a science. (Because deduction is part of the scientific method.)
- willio58 8y agoEven in the US some people including myself consider math to be very similar to if not under the umbrella of science.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> Outside the US mathematics is a science. (Because deduction is part of the scientific method.) That's a reason for math to be recognized as an important tool for science (and a certain level of it a prerequisite for certain science work), but lacking an empirical component, it makes no sense to consider it a science.
- porpoisely 8y agoWhether math is a science isn't a matter of location. It's a matter of definition. Math is not a science by definition anywhere. Deduction is used in philosophy as well. Doesn't make philosophy or logic a science. And the major underpinning of the scientific method is empirical, not deductive. Can you point to where the scientific method is used in mathematics? It isn't. It's why math has axioms and theorems and proofs while science has hypothesis, theories and empirical tests. How can I empirically test that the square root of 2 is irrational? I can't because math is not a science. And I don't need to because it has been proven that square root of 2 is irrational. In math, once proven, it's always true. In science, theories are true until they've been proven to be false. In science, theories are falsifiable. In math, theorems are not. They are true forever.
- justicezyx 8y agoTheoretical quantum computing is a science.
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