Horrible article. If the point is that some press release of the universities overhype the new results and make them almost ridiculous, I agree. But a rant about that could be written in a much better way.<p>Some highlights:<p>> <i>Back in January, boffins at the University of Cambridge’s Biochemistry department published a paper reporting that they had successfully powered a microprocessor continuously for more than six months with a combination of algae, water and ambient light.</i><p>OK, that's just a weird solar panel. It converts light into electricity. Nothing unusual, but perhaps it's less efficient than a conventional solar panel.<p>> <i>The intriguing aspect of some of these projects is that they purport an energy source that is somehow perpetual. You start them up and they just keep going indefinitely, or at least until the algae get bored or the bio-implant patient stops producing glucose by inconsiderately popping their clogs.</i><p>It's not a perpetual, as the solar panel in your roof is not perpetual.<p>> <i>Look at the immense amount of money and brain power being invested into quantum computing – a computer concept that makes no sense whatsoever outside a 1950s pulp sci-fi novel by L Ron Hubbard.</i><p>Quantum computers make sense, a lot of sense, at least for some very specific problems. I'm not sure if the amount of error corrections will make them impractical for big interesting problems, but they are definitively working for very small problems.<p>> <i>Every time I try to explain what a quantum computer is to an acquaintance outside our industry, I get one of those out-of-body experiences in which I can hear myself talking a load of impossibility bollocks.</i><p>I agree. Quantum mechanics is weird. Quantum computers are weird. It's difficult to explain them without saying eigenvectors and eigenvalues, so if you want to have a casual conversation about them, you need to give before a good matrix algebra course to your audience.<p>> <i>Researchers at the University of Lancaster’s Physics department, Royal Holloway London, Landau Institute and Aalto University in Helsinki cooled superfluid helium-3 to almost -273.15°C inside a rotating refrigerator, created two "time crystals" (which are impossible) and brought them into touch (which is impossible).</i><p>No idea why he thinks they are impossible. There are plenty of molecules with a minimal energy in a state with spin that is not zero, and even particles with a minimal energy with an angular momentum that is not zero. Time crystals are somewhat like a weird extension, but I guess to explain them it's necessary to
explain eigenvalues and eigenvectors again.<p>> <i>And this is what will be running our supercomputers in the future? Who needs an uninterruptible power supply when your computer runs on crystals that are in constant, repeating motion in time despite no external input?</i><p>The idea is that the time crystals have a weird property at the minimum level of energy. If you want to explain it with common words, then something in them is rotating. The weird part is that you can stop them and use the break energy to power another like you can do stopping a classic flywheel. The "rotating" state is the minimum, and you can't extract energy from it to power a computer.