Can Quantum Beat Classical? #poem #poetry #physics #computing

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Electron, electron, where’s the electron? Fun in chemistry as well as physics.

Up, down.

On, off.

Faster than paper and pen.

Zero, one.

Voltage, none.

I can imagine what’s happening.

Qubits are different.

Qubits are waves.

Qubits entangle

A frequency’s phase.

Glitches arise,

Coherency’s lost

And thousands of answers

Have to be tossed.

Errors arise

From incoming noise,

The world’s an annoyance

For physics’ new toys.

By Kate Rauner, with thanks to livescience.com and Subhash Kak of Oklahoma State University. Prophet in his own land or Luddite? I can’t tell.

Interested? Here’s more:

Quantum mechanics often defies intuition. But this concept shouldn’t be couched in perplexing language. Think of a vector positioned in the x-y plane and canted at 45 degrees to the x-axis. Some might say that this vector simultaneously points in both the x- and y-directions. That statement is true in some sense, but it’s not really useful. Describing a qubit as being simultaneously in both ↑ and ↓ states is similarly unhelpful. And yet, it’s become almost de rigueur for journalists to describe it as such.

[Instead] things get weird. With the quantum bit, those two states aren’t the only ones possible. [Intrigued? Go read the article by Mikhail Dyakonov]