This graph [1] available on Wikipedia answers this question. The level of carbon 14 in the atmosphere (in the southern hemisphere) roughly doubled between 1955 and 1963 ish. This coincides with the era of above ground nuclear testing. Since then it has been decaying back to the baseline.
Indeed, I may have misread the GP comment, understanding that it stated that C-14 appeared because of the nuclear tests. They may have meant the addition. I did try to correct my mistake by answering my own question...
There is not an "OS" or anything even remotely like it. For now these things behave more like physics experiments than computers.
You can play around with "quantum programming" through (e.g.) some of IBM's offerings and there has been work on quantum programming languages like q# from Microsoft but its unclear (to me) how useful these are.
The Majorana particles in Microsoft's set-up are "quasi-particles". They aren't really fundamental particles, but excitations in the system which behave (roughly, in some appropriate sense) like particles. They aren't neutrinos.
> “There’s no slam dunk to know immediately from the experiment” that the qubits are made of topological states, says Simon. (A claim of having created Majorana states made by a Microsoft-funded team based in Delft, The Netherlands, was retracted in 2021.) The ultimate proof will come if the devices perform as expected once they are scaled up, he adds.
I'm not sure what that has to do with my previous comment but yeah, pushing the boundaries of science is kinda difficult and you can make mistakes.
My understanding is that they pretty convincingly showed that the thing they built acts as a qubit. This means that if its not doing what they think its doing (the "topological" / Majorana stuff) then they accidentally made a qubit which works some other way. That isn't outside the realm of possibility but it is fairly unlikely.
The point is that Grothendieck, easily one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, who regularly proved deep and fundamental facts about prime numbers, cared so little about particular numbers that he accidentally gave an easy to see non-prime as an example of a prime.
He was used to working on completely different levels of abstraction, so when faced with concrete numbers he could easily make a mistake that a school-child (or hacker news commenter) could spot.
The formal class is called BQP, in analogy with the classical complexity clas BPP. BQP contains BPP but there is no proof that it is stictly bigger (such a proof would imply P != NP). There are problems in BQP we expect are not in BPP but its not clear if there are any useful problems in BQP and not in BPP, other than essentially Shor's algorithm.
On the other hand it's actually not completely necessary to have a superpolynomial quantum advantage in order to have some quantum advantage. A quantum computer running in quadratic time is still (probably) more useful than a classical computer running in O(n^100) time, even though they're both technically polynomial. An example of this is classical algorithms for simulating quantum circuits with bounded error whose runtime is like n^(1/eps) where eps is the error. If you pick eps=0.01 you've got a technically polynomial runtime classical algorithm but it's runtime is gonna be n^100, which is likely very large.
I don't think it's completely clear (to me) that quantum networking is an oxymoron. I would enthusiastically agree that its very complicated and the real world use cases are incredibly limited.
As far as your routing/switching qualms go I think they are mostly addressed by entanglement swapping? Person A and person B can each make an entangled pair and send me half, and I can (locally) do stuff which leads to the halves they keep at home becoming entangled. Then they can use teleportation or whatever to do whatever they want between themselves without me knowing anything about it.
The I can locally do stuff is completely understood theoretically/mathematically. I hand waved because this isn't a forum where those technicalities are particuarly relevant.
Neither of Gödel's two incompleteness theorems apply to quantum mechanics.
The two theorems apply to logical systems which prove facts about the natural numbers. While this is an incredibly broad class of things, it doesn't include physical theories like quantum mechanics.
Guess I Dunning Kruegered, when I thought physics is based on mathematics and logical systems, to which a theory (itself having been proven) aught apply.
My bad. You’re right. It was group theory and cryptanalysis. Number theory comes in later in the 1970s for public key cryptography (1976 publicly, early 1970s at GCHQ). So the military work on it really started in the late 1960s.
Computer science has the Turing award and mathematics the Fields medal. Neither is exactly equivalent to the Nobel but they're similar levels of prestige.
The Nobel prize fields and criteria are a bit random, they're essentially just whatever Alfred Nobel wrote in his will.
Within their respective fields, not in general. What makes the Nobel so unique and desirable is that everybody knows what it is and is impressed by it. Mentioning that you've won a Nobel prize will impress people and open doors in virtually any circumstance. Saying you have a Turing award will mostly lead to blank stares from anybody outside the field.
