Google on Monday announced Willow, its latest, greatest quantum computing chip. Google's claims about the chip's speed and reliability are noteworthy in themselves, but what really caught the tech industry's attention was an even stranger claim.
Google Quantum AI founder Hartmut Neven wrote in his blog that the chip was so incredibly fast that it must have borrowed computing power from other universes.
So the chip's performance points to the existence of parallel universes and «we live in a multiverse».
HERE IS THE EXCERPT:
Willow's performance on this test is impressive: it completed a calculation in less than five minutes that would take one of the fastest supercomputers today 1025, or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, that's 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This staggering number is beyond the known timescales of physics and far exceeds the age of the universe.
This supports the idea that quantum computing occurs in many parallel universes, consistent with the idea that we live in a multiverse, first proposed by David Deutsch.
Some have taken this disappointing moment about the nature of reality with skepticism, but surprisingly, others on the Internet who claim to understand these things have argued that Nevan's conclusions were more than plausible. The multiverse, while science fiction, is also a field of serious research by the founders of quantum physics.
Skeptics, however, point out that the performance claims are based on a benchmark that Google itself created a few years ago to measure quantum performance. This in itself does not prove that parallel versions of you are not running in other universes — just where the basic metric came from.
Unlike classical digital computers, which calculate based on whether a bit is 0 or 1 (on or off), quantum computers rely on incredibly tiny qubits. They can be on/off or both (somewhere in between), and can also use quantum entanglement — a mysterious connection at the smallest levels of the universe between two or more particles, where their states are linked, regardless of the distance separating them.
Quantum computers use this quantum mechanics to calculate very complex problems that are currently impossible to solve using classical computers.
The problem is that the more qubits a computer uses, the more error-prone they are. So it's not yet clear whether quantum computers will ever be reliable and powerful enough to live up to their hype. Google and Willow's mission has been to reduce these errors, and Neven says they're on track.