China has been investing massively in science. China has a few really good universities itself, as well as many Chinese people studying in prestigious places abroad who come back to contribute to science in those universities (just as people from every other country in the world do). Science is a global pursuit, and the fact that China puts a large amount of money and manpower towards it means it can contribute significantly. While it was the case (and in some cases still is the case) that China had to catch up to meet the standards of the USA and western countries, they have been catching up quickly and an increasing amount of the work done in China is now groundbreaking. This is not surprising. The only thing you need is smart people, knowledge, and massive funding. And the knowledge-part of that can be learned from scientific publications or the international exchange of scientists.

If the USA wants to make sure they stay somewhere near the top, they should not attempt to 'curtail academic collaboration'. That doesn't help anyone, and only slows down global science. It also might have the effect that the collaborations will simply move to China-Europe instead of China-USA, which would speed up progress in China and Europe, but not the USA. The only thing that can help the USA stay on top (if they are on top) is to do more and better science than anyone else, not to somehow try to make other people do less or less good science.

I have to disagree to part of your statement. It certainly is a very bad popularization. But it doesnt even go as far as claiming that quantum computing is fundamentally more efficient than classical computing. It just claims that a certain problem that is quantum-mechanical in nature, is hard to solve classically. That such a problem might be easier to solve on a quantum computer seems likely, but that would fall under the umbrella of quantum simulation more than quantum computing.

To try to make my point clear more concisely: The paper states a certain class of physical phenomena is hard to calculate classically. That in itself does not prove much about the usefulness of a quantum computer, except that a quantum computer could be useful in simulating this particular phenomena itself, but even for that no proof is provided.

The actual research article written by the physicists say nothing about the universe being simulated.
arxiv link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.038...

It simply states that the particular problem they study is hard to calculate, and scales exponentially with the number of particles involved. This exponential scaling is often found for anything including quantum mechanics, and is nothing new. The new thing is proving how hard these calculations are for the particular problem the authors are studying.

The completely ridiculous conclusion that this somehow means that the universe is not a simulation comes from the author of the popular summary given in cosmos. So the slashdot header: 'research shows' is False. The research paper only showed certain things are hard to calculate.

Last time I checked its much harder for most humans to learn a second language and competently translate documents than it is to learn to drive.

There is still one program where I regularly regret not using ctrl-s often enough. Mathematica.

Very much agreed. Nature is not restricted by what we can compute.

It makes me wonder though. It makes sense that we cannot restrict physics to behave according to our computational prowess, but we if we turn this logic onto itself? Is the line of reasoning explored in the article inconsistent with Goedels theorem? Or should I hurry and go back to a computational complexity course?

Like some other commenters, I have a problem with these units.
The most obvious interpretation of the sentence would be to look at how much CO2 a car produces per year. But since the mobile industry has an equivalent CO2 output equal to a number of cars per year, this ends up being an amount of CO2/year/year. Should I interpret this as the rate at which the Co2 emissions are growing then?

Alternatively, it could be the total CO2 output of a car during its lifetime, or the amount of CO2 produced in making a car. In these cases. Any way, either the sentence is wrong, or ambiguous. Now which is the right interpretation?

I think cameron just found a way to get more attention for his movie.

My apologies for that, I had no idea. I just guessed it would be the same procedure as for the word 'someone' and 'anyone', about which I am fairly sure that they are written as one word. Next time, I will know better.