You're getting into zen-existential "if a tree falls in the forest..." territory here and there is only one right answer, regardless of how adamantly someone may deliver another answer, how many votes it gets or how many letters follow the answerer's name.
The question boils down to whether the physical (including "quantum") world exists outside a person's perception of it. Since not one person alive truly understands the nature of consciousness, human existence, human perception or death (or even the complete nature of "quanta"), the right answer at this time is "I don't know." Any other answer is a hypothesis, not a fact.
Hypotheses (guesses) are fine - they keep a discussion going, and fuel more experiments to search for indisputable truth. But, far too often, scientists parlay non-facts as fact, usually to push an agenda. When they do they are no better than the religionists they often scoff at for pushing faith as fact. In both camps "I don't know" needs to be said more often, eliminating hubris, posturing and agendas, and demonstrating the rare quality of honesty.
A bit of history: 1st: ‘computers’ were people trained to solve complex problems (see movie “hidden figures”) 2nd: computers used to be big and expensive. They needed specially trained people to operate them. Then came mini-computers which took up less space, but had limited function and were used to control machines (look up Naked Mini). Then Intel decided rather than use a complex custom circuit to use a programmable system to, if my memory server, run a Mainframe disk drive. A couple of hobbyists wrote an article for Popular Electronics using that processor and a bunch of 100 pin connectors (because they found those on sale for the 50 or so kits they thought they would sell) They got a thousand orders within a week and the hobby computer craze started. A couple of kids in California though they could sell pre-built hobby computers for those who didn’t want to solder their own and allowed others to write programs for it (you may have heard of that company…Apple).
Up until this point if you wanted more than one person to have access to a computer (or wait in line for hours to access the mainframe, you had to connect using a simple keyboard and monitor setup.
While we now can have in our hands computers which are far more capable than the old mainframes there are somethings that your desktop can’t provide: reliability and scale. A computer center (whether its company owned, shared or a cloud center) has is redundant communications links, 24/7 power with regularly tested backups and the reliable hot swappable components. On a mainframe you can replace processors, memory , mass storage without shutting anything down. On a smaller scale, what looks like a tower computer, if its a server will have redundant power supplies, error correcting memory and mass storage which can support disk failure with replacement disk able to be swapped in and the system restored in the background. What happens when say the redundancy fails, major airlines have to stand down operations for several days. What happens if the bank’’s data center fails, all their ATMs stop issuing money.
Looking forward for the book. I have all your books. This is exiting.
Thank you!
You're getting into zen-existential "if a tree falls in the forest..." territory here and there is only one right answer, regardless of how adamantly someone may deliver another answer, how many votes it gets or how many letters follow the answerer's name.
The question boils down to whether the physical (including "quantum") world exists outside a person's perception of it. Since not one person alive truly understands the nature of consciousness, human existence, human perception or death (or even the complete nature of "quanta"), the right answer at this time is "I don't know." Any other answer is a hypothesis, not a fact.
Hypotheses (guesses) are fine - they keep a discussion going, and fuel more experiments to search for indisputable truth. But, far too often, scientists parlay non-facts as fact, usually to push an agenda. When they do they are no better than the religionists they often scoff at for pushing faith as fact. In both camps "I don't know" needs to be said more often, eliminating hubris, posturing and agendas, and demonstrating the rare quality of honesty.
A bit of history: 1st: ‘computers’ were people trained to solve complex problems (see movie “hidden figures”) 2nd: computers used to be big and expensive. They needed specially trained people to operate them. Then came mini-computers which took up less space, but had limited function and were used to control machines (look up Naked Mini). Then Intel decided rather than use a complex custom circuit to use a programmable system to, if my memory server, run a Mainframe disk drive. A couple of hobbyists wrote an article for Popular Electronics using that processor and a bunch of 100 pin connectors (because they found those on sale for the 50 or so kits they thought they would sell) They got a thousand orders within a week and the hobby computer craze started. A couple of kids in California though they could sell pre-built hobby computers for those who didn’t want to solder their own and allowed others to write programs for it (you may have heard of that company…Apple).
Up until this point if you wanted more than one person to have access to a computer (or wait in line for hours to access the mainframe, you had to connect using a simple keyboard and monitor setup.
While we now can have in our hands computers which are far more capable than the old mainframes there are somethings that your desktop can’t provide: reliability and scale. A computer center (whether its company owned, shared or a cloud center) has is redundant communications links, 24/7 power with regularly tested backups and the reliable hot swappable components. On a mainframe you can replace processors, memory , mass storage without shutting anything down. On a smaller scale, what looks like a tower computer, if its a server will have redundant power supplies, error correcting memory and mass storage which can support disk failure with replacement disk able to be swapped in and the system restored in the background. What happens when say the redundancy fails, major airlines have to stand down operations for several days. What happens if the bank’’s data center fails, all their ATMs stop issuing money.
Quantum can change a lot of things, but the main challenge now is to turn it into money and real-world applications (Quantinuum and IQM are working on it. https://thebigbyte.substack.com/p/europe-quantum-technology-iqm-quantinuum