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Existing quantum computers are evidence against a strawman of the Copenhagen interpretation, which is "everything the size of an atom or smaller is quantum, eve
by knzhou 7y ago
Existing quantum computers are evidence against a strawman of the Copenhagen interpretation, which is "everything the size of an atom or smaller is quantum, everything bigger is classical, and whenever the two touch, a collapse occurs". This is of course silly and arbitrary, and has been known by physicists to be false for nearly as long as quantum mechanics has been around; there are plenty of quantum effects that involve objects bigger than an atom. Quantum computers are simply another example.
Any genuine interpretation of QM will agree on what a quantum computer outputs, because by definition, interpretations are ways of changing the words you drape around a calculation, not the result of the calculation itself. So quantum computers don't support or oppose any genuine interpretations. They only oppose strawmen.