Perspectives on Current Issues Quantum Computing: Theoretical versus Practical Possibility
Gheorghe Sorin Paraoanu · 2011
An intense effort is being made today to build a quantum computer. Instead of presenting what has been achieved, I invoke analogies from the history of science in an attempt to glimpse what the future might hold. Quantum computing is possible in principle—there are no known laws of Nature that prevent it—yet scaling up the few qubits demonstrated so far has proven to be exceedingly difficult. While this could be regarded merely as a technological or practical impediment, I argue that this difficulty might be a symptom of new laws of physics waiting to be discovered. I distinguish between ‘‘strong’’ and ‘‘weak’’ emergentist positions. The former assumes that a critical value of a parameter exists (one that is most likely related to the complexity of the states involved) at which the quantum-mechanical description breaks down, in other words, that quantum mechanics will turn out to be an incomplete description of reality. The latter assumes that quantum mechanics will remain as a universally valid theory, but that the classical resources required to build a real quantum computer scale up with the number of qubits, which hints that a limiting principle is at work.