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Comment Re:A quick overview (Score 1) 224

Your continual references to the universe as an entity keeping track and calculating things is extremely misleading for a layman reader. In particular, "one wonders how and where the universe keeps track of all these states" is completely inaccurate, for not only is the universe not a thing which keeps track of anything, but even if it was, any measurement of a continuous observable such as position or momentum has an infinite number of possibilities, obviously far greater than the finite 2^3000 possibilities you talk about. Also, I should note that the choice of a base of two is rather arbitrary, as atoms are generally more complicated than dual discrete states such as electron spin, and the possible eigenstates they could collapse into varies wildly depending on what we are observing.

Comment Re:And this is why I'm skeptical of quantum comput (Score 1) 224

It's not too good to be true, and the confusion only comes from the original post saying misleading things like "The universe keeps track of" and "The universe appears to calculate". The universe is not some entity or object keeping track or calculating at all, and all of these sort of probabilities happen all the time anyway, it is just we haven't constrained the outcomes into a way which gives us computational power. After all, position is a continuous operator, so whenever we look at an electron "the universe keeps track of an infinite number of probabilities", to use the bad phrasing of Okian.

Comment Re:Science isn't critical thinking... (Score 1) 710

I love you are praise being cynical, but there is a difference between being cynical and being in denial. When someone with no training in the field believes that the entire global consensus of people working in the field is entirely incorrect and delusional, that is no longer being skeptical. That is being arrogant enough to presume that your own ignorant and uneducated view point is worth more than the combined knowledge of everyone who studies the field for a living.

Comment Sensationalist Media Strikes Again (Score 1) 2

Once again, even though the IPCC has increased its confidence that global warming is caused by humans, the fantastic journalists at the Telegraph decide to find dissenting voices in an attempt to create more popular articles by disagreeing with global warming. And now, guaranteed, this article will be linked to by climate change deniers as another "piece of evidence" that climate change is just a myth. That irks me.

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