Here is an interesting conjecture: Considering that the gravity is what is keeping the mass held together in the sun, and in a "Black Hole" in space, it is the intense gravity that is claimed to prevent even light from escaping, could a star actually be a black hole that somehow became "ignited" so that a fission/fusion reaction started, and kept going??
That would even explain exploding stars, where at some point the gravity is reduced to the point where it can no longer hold the fusion core together. Consider that all stars are radiating energy that never returns. A gravitation failure would be a logical explanation.

 

Here is an interesting conjecture: Considering that the gravity is what is keeping the mass held together in the sun, and in a "Black Hole" in space, it is the intense gravity that is claimed to prevent even light from escaping, could a star actually be a black hole that somehow became "ignited" so that a fission/fusion reaction started, and kept going??
That would even explain exploding stars, where at some point the gravity is reduced to the point where it can no longer hold the fusion core together. Consider that all stars are radiating energy that never returns. A gravitation failure would be a logical explanation.

Not even wrong but can we move this line of questions to the physics topics, please.

 

could a star actually be a black hole that somehow became "ignited" so that a fission/fusion reaction started, and kept going??

Actually it is just the opposite. The fusion reaction is what stops the star from collapsing further. It becomes a black hole, under some conditions, after it has burned out. Under other conditions it becomes a neutron star.

 

Actually it is just the opposite. The fusion reaction is what stops the star from collapsing further. It becomes a black hole, under some conditions, after it has burned out. Under other conditions it becomes a neutron star.

and most stars, like our own, just become Degenerate dwarfs (Electron degeneracy pressure keeps it from collapsing further).

 

and most stars, like our own, just become Degenerate dwarfs (Electron degeneracy pressure keeps it from collapsing further).
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Yep, white dwarf was the other option I could not bring to mind. Thanks. It all depends on the starting mass.

 

Yep, white dwarf was the other option I could not bring to mind. Thanks. It all depends on the starting mass.

and once we get past neutron degeneracy pressure all sorts of wild things are theorized.

 

Google unveils 'mind-boggling' quantum computing chip

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Google has unveiled a new chip which it claims takes five minutes to solve a problem that would currently take the world's fastest super computers ten septillion – or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years – to complete.

 

Google unveils 'mind-boggling' quantum computing chip

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Yet they can't be bothered to tell anyone what problem it supposedly solved.

 

This is an interesting article about the problems using quantum computers and magnetic memory.

 

Yet they can't be bothered to tell anyone what problem it supposedly solved.

The reason for not providing any explanation is that NONE of those involved with creating the press release we are shown have even the slightest hint of understanding the explanation in even the most basic terms.
That is why we are not even presented with a shred of actual data. And why they simply repeat the same tired comparison. The writers do not even understand the time units used for the description.

 

Yet they can't be bothered to tell anyone what problem it supposedly solved.

Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip


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As a measure of Willow’s performance, we used the random circuit sampling (RCS) benchmark. Pioneered by our team and now widely used as a standard in the field, RCS is the classically hardest benchmark that can be done on a quantum computer today. You can think of this as an entry point for quantum computing — it checks whether a quantum computer is doing something that couldn’t be done on a classical computer. Any team building a quantum computer should check first if it can beat classical computers on RCS; otherwise there is strong reason for skepticism that it can tackle more complex quantum tasks. We’ve consistently used this benchmark to assess progress from one generation of chip to the next — we reported Sycamore results in October 2019 and again recently in October 2024.

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Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip

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I'll get excited when it plays chess.

Oldie but goodie:

 

Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip

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I remember their Sycamore claims with the random circuit sampling (RCS) benchmark.


https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.12753
Google’s Quantum Supremacy Claim: Data, Documentation, and Discussion

The specific sampling task performed by Google is referred to as random circuit
sampling (RCS, for short). Google’s announcement of quantum supremacy
was compared by various writers (see, e.g., [1]) to landmark technological
achievements such as the Wright brothers’ invention of a motor-operated airplane, the launching of Sputnik, and the landing of humans on the moon,
as well as to landmark scientific achievements such as Fermi’s demonstration
of a nuclear chain reaction, the discovery of the Higgs boson, and the LIGO
detection of gravitational waves.
...
Regarding Google’s quantum supremacy claim, a very short summary is
that by now classical algorithms are ten orders of magnitude faster than those
used in the Google paper, and largely refute Google’s fantastic claims. (See,
e.g., [22, 21, 34, 12, 13, 23].) The Google paper claims that their ultimate task
that required 200 seconds on the quantum computer would require 10,000
years on a classical supercomputer. With the new algorithms the task can
be completed in a matter of seconds.

 

And the very worst part of it all is that AI technology is being used by the phone scammers to enhance their schemes to rip me off.
I advocate making it a serious felony to spoof a caller ID. A fine of $1000 per offense first time. AND, if the callis via internet from another country, DISCONNECT THAT COUNTRY FROM THE INTERNET CONNECTION TO THE USA. A total disconnect might convinve the government of whatever country to take some action!!!

 

And the very worst part of it all is that AI technology is being used by the phone scammers to enhance their schemes to rip me off.
I advocate making it a serious felony to spoof a caller ID. A fine of $1000 per offense first time. AND, if the callis via internet from another country, DISCONNECT THAT COUNTRY FROM THE INTERNET CONNECTION TO THE USA. A total disconnect might convinve the government of whatever country to take some action!!!

Not very realistic or practical.

Perhaps we should start closer to home.

Any time a caller from any state spoofs a caller ID, everyone in that state is disconnected from the internet, since a total disconnect might convince the government of that state to take some action.

A more realistic and reasonable approach would be to assess fees and tariffs based on the volume and/or fraction of spam/spoof traffic originating from different places, be it countries or states. There should be a simple mechanism of reporting fraudulent calls, such as hanging up and then hitting #something on your phone. Those get tallied up against the originator of the call, at what ever level the service provider can assign the origination, be it a specific customer or simply a country. There's an allowance for a background level of false reports, but above that the originator gets assessed higher rates or tariffs that increase exponentially as the scale of the problem increases.

 

Several of the countries where many of the calls originate from have governments and operations rather different from the USA, and may deal with those folks in a different manner.
But still at the very least, shutting off international internet phone calls would certainly be appropriate. OR, at least monitoring those calls, since a caller ID of some kind must already be in place.
Consider that I receive at least 20 of those calls every day, and I need to at least check the ID because new clients do call me.

 

Yet they can't be bothered to tell anyone what problem it supposedly solved.

It might be better to look at what they didn't solve. For example, factoring:
y^3+3*x*y^2+3*x^2*y+x^3=(y+x)^3

I don't think they can do that yet, or perhaps not with a more complex factoring problem.

From what I read, it would take 100000 qubits to solve practical problems. They still have problems with noise.

It seems they believe that by making these milestones they will eventually reach stardom

What's going to happen if they ever do reach that point. Most of us will have nothing to do anymore but play tic tac toe. Considering that when people get older they tend to lack the new knowledge of the younger generation, it's going to make everyone old even at 20.

 

There is a lot more than just new knowledge that is quite important. And all of those hings that quantum computing is supposed to be able to do so rapidly are the sort of thing that I never ever had to do in my long engineering career. Really!!!And most other folks will have even less use for those capabilities. It is probably about as useful as knowing the distance to the brightest star. Already the computers of five years ago are able to provide an answer faster than I can key in the question.

 

There is a lot more than just new knowledge that is quite important. And all of those hings that quantum computing is supposed to be able to do so rapidly are the sort of thing that I never ever had to do in my long engineering career. Really!!!And most other folks will have even less use for those capabilities. It is probably about as useful as knowing the distance to the brightest star. Already the computers of five years ago are able to provide an answer faster than I can key in the question.

Sure -- you may not have had to do any of them in your long engineering career, but so what? You and I have both benefited from a long string of things that other scientists and engineers have solved in THEIR careers that we've never encountered in ours. Similarly, lots of people have benefited from things that you and I have done in our careers that they would say are about as useful as knowing the distance to the brightest start -- despite relying on those very things every day and just not being aware of how it impacts them.

How many people are even aware of special relativity and time dilation effects, except possibly as technobabble in a sci-fi show on the same level as tachyon-reversal-fields and the like? How many of those same people are completely reliant on GPS to find their way to a shopping mall or keep track of their car keys?

There are lots of very practical problems that are of extreme interest to lots of people that are way too computationally complex for classic computers to (likely) ever be able so solve in useful time frames. Some (not all) of these problems are well matched to the capabilities of quantum computers if they can be made to really work.

For instance, many companies and other large organizations need to solve large routing problems, such as the best was to schedule and route trains, planes, packages, or whatever. These are essentially variants of the Traveling Salesman Problem which grows way too large too fast for classic computers to even find a solution, let alone the optimal solution. So we have force the actual problem we are trying to solve into more-constrained versions for which current computers can find acceptable solutions (with 'acceptable' have a large degree of grudginess involved) in useful timeframes. Improvements in lots of ways -- faster service, lower cost, less pollution -- can be had if we could apply quantum computing to solve the actual problem in a reasonable time.

Then there's the whole lots-of-encryption-gets-broken-right-away aspect of it if they ever get quantum computers to work. I imagine you would find it very impactful on you personally if the encryption you rely on, namely RSA, for all of your online financial transactions -- or that the institutions that hold your funds rely on in their transactions -- fall prey to broken encryption because they thought quantum computing was no more useful than knowing the distance to the brightest star. I know I would.

 

There is a lot more than just new knowledge that is quite important. And all of those hings that quantum computing is supposed to be able to do so rapidly are the sort of thing that I never ever had to do in my long engineering career. Really!!!And most other folks will have even less use for those capabilities. It is probably about as useful as knowing the distance to the brightest star. Already the computers of five years ago are able to provide an answer faster than I can key in the question.

Hi,

Well there are other fields like medicine and chemistry that need faster calculations because they have to do a lot of combinatorial work.

One thing that comes to mind right off is the game of chess. Right now, grandmasters study the games of other grandmasters so they can learn the defects in their opening repertoire. This might consist of 10 to 20 moves or so. If a quantum computer could calculate the best move for every opening that is possible, that would kind of kill the game for human use. In theory, every game is a theoretical draw (not proven exactly yet I don't think) but if that came to be the same in practice, there would be no more grandmaster games. There might not be any real limit to the dept of a brute search either, which would draw every game, or prove that one or more openings could always win, or would always lose. That would bang it down to almost the same level as tic tac toe, just more to remember at game time and grandmasters are good at that

Hopefully the good things to come out of it would be cures for cancer, diabetes, and old age. Everyone could live forever and overpopulate the earth (ha ha). But then we could develop faster than light travel (or an equivalent) and then overpopulate other planets too (ha ha).

I'd be hoping that we could somehow show that inertia is due to an internal function not external. That would mean that mass has it's roots in inertia rather than inertia having it's roots in mass. That's another subject though I won't press on with that even though that would really change everything we know and can do about motion of any kind. It could be entirely wrong too though.