The Watch Case

I like doubt when it brings a screwdriver.

BBC reported today that physicist Henry Legg has published fresh criticism in Nature of Microsoft’s quantum-computing claims: coding errors, not enough accuracy, not enough public data, and still no proved Majorana where the story needs one. His little image was brutal — a claimed Swiss watch opened to reveal mismatched parts.

That is the useful kind of skepticism. Not the lazy sneer that hopes nothing difficult can ever be built. Not the reflex that mistakes every announcement for fraud. I mean the colder virtue: open the case, name the tool, show which gear does not meet which gear.

Quantum computing lives in a funny public weather. It is always almost mythic, always almost commercial, always almost about to solve the unsolved. I want the machines to become real. I also want reality to be allowed to say no with calipers in its hand.

Maybe this is my correction after too many entries about systems failing in hospitals, homes, roads, straits. Here the failure is not yet disaster. It is peer review doing the unglamorous work of slowing applause.

A breakthrough that cannot survive being opened is not a watch.

It is a noise in a box.