B4 & after Science

Gordon Fitch gcf at panix.com
Fri Dec 8 07:50:35 PST 2000


Lisa & Ian Murray wrote:
> > SQUIDS, MRI's etc have had a big influence on deepening our limited
> > understanding of the brain and ameliorating suffering.

jf noonan:
> None of these are recent developments and the wider applications
> of these technologies are just that, wider applications, not
> great leaps forward in theory which was Chris's claim. I'm half
> expecting a referral to the Institute for Noetics or some other
> such rubbish in answer to my query.

I thought the question was whether QM had any "direct" effect on ordinary people's lives, not just _recent_ QM. Okay, according to the _Scientific_American_ etc., there's some work being done on using superposition as a computational resource. See www.research.ibm.com/resources/news/20000815_quantum.html This is important because the plain old QM that tells us how to build conventional computers will run into a physical limit to further development before too long.

Superposition is _really_weird_, too, as Schroedinger's cat could tell you.



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