It's 50 years from now and your oldest son is busy trying to set up the new Quantium 8 powered home computer (bum bum bum bum...) without getting in a Quantum entanglement. You watch from the sidelines, not pretending for a millisecond to understand the new black box of spinning electrons and infinitesimally precise guiding lasers with its enormous, near absolute zero, cooling mechanism now sat on your kitchen table, but you at least have some solace. After all, you were around when the fastest computer in the world could only do a few billion calculations a second instead of the trillions and trillions your digital watch can do now. You were around when the internet was but a flicker of recognition in Bill Gates' corporate manipulating eye and not the mass transit globally evolving hyperweb it is today. You might not know much more about computers than you did 50 years hence, but surely you can't know less? Can you?

"Even the most ignorant cannot know less than nothing. After all, negative knowledge makes no sense. But, although this may be true in the everyday world we are accustomed to, it has been discovered that negative knowledge does exist in the quantum world. Small objects such as atoms, molecules and electrons behave radically different than larger objects -- they obey the laws of quantum mechanics....

...What could negative knowledge possibly mean? "If I tell it to you, you will know less," explained Dr Andreas Winter." - Link

And so history repeats itself, as is always the way, but where your father found it difficult simply to program the video recorder without getting in a cold sweat you'll have to contend with realms of knowledge that actually exist beyond the perceived rules of logical order. Your kitchen has a box in it that can quantify all the possible outcomes of the Big Bang in less than the time it would take you to sit down in your rocking chair. Go rest your weary brain in the home built anti-gravity chamber. Your generation has deserved a break.

What is a Quantum Computer anyway?

Categories: Science, Weird, Future, Computing, Physics, News, Technology, Quantum Computers, Quantum Physics

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