1 And the LORD looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.<\/p>\n
2 And the LORD said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.<\/p>\n
3 Make thee an ark, and this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred qubits, the breadth of it fifty qubits, and the height of it thirty qubits.<\/p>\n
4 And Noah asked the LORD, What is a qubit?<\/p>\n
5 And the LORD replied unto Noah, A qubit is a two-level quantum system, that may be found in either the state which thou shalt term 0 or the state which thou shalt term 1.<\/p>\n
6 Or, verily, it may be found in any arbitrary linear superposition of those two states.<\/p>\n
7 And Noah said unto the LORD, Oh, right. And what am I supposed to make these of, gopher wood?<\/p>\n
8 The LORD replied, I hear trapped ions<\/a> are good for this sort of thing.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 9 And error correction shalt thou make in thine ark, placing it within a decoherence-free subspace. <\/p>\n 10 And thou shalt take into thine ark all of the numbers, that you may make use of them for efficient finding of prime factors. And thou shalt–<\/p>\n 11 Not all of the numbers, Noah interrupted the LORD.<\/p>\n 12 And the LORD said unto Noah, What do you mean?<\/p>\n 13 Well, Noah replied, if the ark is to be 300 by 50 by 30 qubits, then the maximum number to be stored within it must be no greater than 2450000<\/sup>.<\/p>\n 14 While verily that is a large number, still it is finite. And thus it is not possible for the ark to contain all of the numbers.<\/p>\n 15 That is even before we implement error correction, further reducing the number of available qubits.<\/p>\n 16 And the LORD replied, I say unto thee, 2450000<\/sup> is greater than 10135463<\/sup>, which is greater than the grains of sand in the desert, or stars in the sky.<\/p>\n 17 Yea, verily, it is greater by far than the number of protons in the visible universe which I have made.<\/p>\n 18 Is this not close enough to infinite for all practical purposes, thou ungrateful wretch?<\/p>\n 19 And Noah replied, Yes, oh great LORD, it is a magnificiently large number. Verily.<\/p>\n 20 But even so, must we be restricted solely to positive integers?<\/p>\n 21 For truly, the number of reals is greater by far than the number of integers, to say nothing of 2450000<\/sup>. And then–<\/p>\n 22 And the LORD said, Speak not to me of the square root of negative one, lest I become wroth with thee, and start smiting things.<\/p>\n 23 But Noah spoke on, saying, How then shall we keep track of the phase of the wavefunction?<\/p>\n 24 For is not the Schrödinger Equation explicitly complex?<\/p>\n 25 And the LORD said, Look, this was obviously a terrible idea. Forget I said anything.<\/p>\n 26 And Noah held his tongue. Though he did continue to wonder for many days afterwards, what use hath the LORD for a quantum computer?<\/p>\n ————<\/p>\n (A silly idea, inspired by yet more rain and flooding in New York, which lodged in my head and wouldn’t go away until I typed it out. Apologies to Peter Shor, Bill Cosby, and God.)<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 1 And the LORD looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. 2 And the LORD said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with… Continue reading This Week’s Reading in the Church of the Larger Hilbert Space<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[665,332,92,93,236,227,180],"class_list":["post-5866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bible","tag-computing-2","tag-physics-2","tag-quantum","tag-religion-2","tag-silly","tag-weather","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5866\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}