The good points being made about the tenuous link between current quantum computing theory and anything like reality is consistently undermined by his “old man shouts at clouds” attitude.<p><i>Physicists used to be serious and bloody minded people who understood reality by doing experiments. Somehow this sort of bloody minded seriousness has faded out into a tower of wanking theorists who only occasionally have anything to do with actual matter. I trace the disease to the rise of the “meritocracy” out of cow colleges in the 1960s. The post WW-2 neoliberal idea was that geniuses like Einstein could be mass produced out of peasants using agricultural schools. The reality is, the peasants are still peasants, and the total number of Einsteins in the world, or even merely serious thinkers about physics is probably something like a fixed number. It’s really easy, though, to create a bunch of crackpot narcissists who have the egos of Einstein without the exceptional work output. All you need to do there is teach them how to do some impressive looking mathematical Cargo Cult science, and keep their “results” away from any practical men doing experiments.</i><p>Yeeeaaaah... I’m wildly skeptical of the state of so-called quantum computing, but what does this ranting have to do with anything? Pissing on theorists can be fun, especially in physics where whole fields divorced from anything like a feasible experiment exist (I’m looking at you M-Theory), but dismissing the exercise is downright silly. It wasn’t that long ago that the Higgs Mechanism moved from completely untested theory to observed reality.<p>I’d love to hear a brutally honest assessment of the field in question without it rapidly degenerating into pissing and moaning from an irredeemable ass.