The Good News thread

[LegitHyperbole]

haxxiy said:

LegitHyperbole said:

Almost. They don't know is the issue, neither do the physicists and when science hit a moment like this it is exciting, same as web breaking what's known, the last two years have shown that we still aren't even close to knowing what we don't know, from Webs images to how far LLMs can go by just scaling up. I have faith here, this is the first actual door opening in particle physics since the mid point of the last century and no, I don't think the Higgs was exciting nor do I think anything to do with particle accelerators as anything less that a waste of time, minds and resources. There is something here, I can smell it. 

What we need is testing exotic scenarios (e.g., can you observe macroscopic superpositions?), but to my knowledge no one has proposed a viable experiment yet. We'll get there someday, but that won't be settled by quantum hardware, even if it scales to millions of qubits.

What it can get us is tremendous advances in material science and protein folding. I was once very skeptical of them, but now I think we'll see some viable quantum computers in the early 2030s, probably around the same time as the first generalist artificial intelligences. Exciting days ahead.

Exciting days is an understatement. Oh, and it's difficult to devise an experiment cause these things are such small scale, it would be easier and take less time to get to the edge of the known universe by 400,000 time than it would be to zoom into the planck length, the smallest proposed scale (apparently backed by math but I don't believe it). At at sub atomic scales the best that can be done is particle accelerators and these only show an instance of a shadow of what is happening, not even close to the true story.