Physics Today

Yeah, from

Physics Today, our favorite periodical.

Man, it's great.

Except here where I've got to say the XKCD that says there's nothing more annoying than a physicist approaching a new problem for the first time could not ring truer.

The revival came largely through Bryce DeWitt.

In 1970, DeWitt published Quantum Mechanics and Reality in Physics Today.

He took Everett's technical language of relative states and presented its startling implication in much more vivid terms.

Perhaps all possible outcomes of a quantum experiment occur.

The phrase many worlds became the label that stuck.

It also produced immediate resistance.

Physics Today published a debate in 1971, including responses from several physicists and a reply from DeWitt.

The controversy was not over whether quantum mechanics works.

The broader technical literature on decoherence, that's when a qubit's fragile quantum state gets scrambled by noise from its environment, still treats it as a live, unresolved research problem, not a settled constant you engineer around.

Physics Today's standing explanation is blunt about it.

quantum computers are highly susceptible to errors because the coherent states that give them their power are easily damaged by uncontrolled interactions with the environment, which is exactly why quantum error correction exists in the first place, as a defense mechanism against a problem physics hasn't closed out.

and current industry analysis backs that up with hard numbers.

... be off salary.

So, um, so I looked through my May issue of Physics Today magazine, and, uh, there was a, a whole page ad in the career section by NIDS.

Wow.

The National Institute for Discovery Science was looking-