There is a long history of this technology, and the comparison to cold fusion is unwarranted. This is peer reviewed, accepted science. The basic technique was worked out under a DoE study in Texas, with an Australian collaborator. She (Dr. Michelle Simmons, who is widely respected in this field) then Went out and raised money to scale-up.
The basic idea is that they use scanning probe microscopes to create structures on a silicon surface with atomic precision, which can then be manipulated by the surrounding chip as a solid-state qubit. You still need error correction, but it ends up being a small constant factor rather than combinatorial blowup.
Full disclosure: I’m fundraising a startup to pursue a different manufacturing process that would enable the same type of quantum computer, but with nitrogen vacancies in diamond instead of silicon (and therefore still higher reliability).
One way or the other, highly reliable quantum computers are right around the corner and are going to take a lot of people by surprise.
This is also something that people outside academia apparently don't understand. Peer review doesn't tell you anything about the validity of the science. It only ensures the methodology was correct. The original Pons & Fleischmann paper passed peer review and was published in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry. It only got retracted after other people tried and failed to reproduce it. If you want to know whether science is legit or not, look out for reproduction by independent actors - not peer review.
Indeed. Peer review is table stakes for the conversation, not an acceptance criteria for "true". Plenty of things get published that are generally regarded as wrong by those who work in the field.
There's journal peer review, and then there's scientific community peer review which involves acceptance of ideas and replication. They're not the same thing and unfortunately not often distinguished in speech or writing ("peer review" describes both). I thought that on HN it would be clear I was talking about the latter.
In this case, three separate labs have replicated this work. It's solid.
Peer review in fundamental science is almost universally understood straightforwardly as part of the process of publishing said science. The other kinds you are referring to (there's actually more than one) are more common in other fields. Peer review in physics is very far from acceptance in general.
Maybe, but that’s a very recent redefinition of terms. Peer review as a standardized mechanism in the 70’s - 90’s depending on the field. Until very close to the present saying “passing peer review” meant something akin to the Popperian notion of “ideas that survive attempts at falsification by the broader community of scientific peers.” In all my interaction with academia pre-pandemic, it meant precisely this. Something wasn’t peer reviewed because it was published (surviving the editorial process), but because it was published and cited by later works without credible refutations emerging.
The basic idea is that they use scanning probe microscopes to create structures on a silicon surface with atomic precision, which can then be manipulated by the surrounding chip as a solid-state qubit. You still need error correction, but it ends up being a small constant factor rather than combinatorial blowup.
Full disclosure: I’m fundraising a startup to pursue a different manufacturing process that would enable the same type of quantum computer, but with nitrogen vacancies in diamond instead of silicon (and therefore still higher reliability).
One way or the other, highly reliable quantum computers are right around the corner and are going to take a lot of people by surprise.