Quantum Computers – Quantum God

If the experiment was meant to silence the critics, it didn’t. Four years ago, an upstart tech company created a stir when it claimed to have built a quantum computer—a thing that, in principle, could solve problems ordinary computers can’t.

This is the lead in from a Science Magazine article called Controversial Computer is at least a Little Quantum Mechanical. (sorry, but the article is no longer available.)  If you haven't read it yet, you can get a little feel for what quantum mechanics is and how it relates to what's talked about on this site by reading quantum immortality, which I wrote a few months ago.

Basically, the article on quantum computers is about whether this company called D-Wave Research has accomplished it's goal of creating a quantum computer. What easily gets lost is what this is really about. What isn't even brought up is the potential impact of this.

First - what gets easily lost:

Physicists have been trying to develop quantum computers for more than a decade. An ordinary computer deals with bits that encode a 0 or a 1. As first conceived, a quantum computer would use subatomic particles or other quantum objects as “qubits” that could encoded 0, 1, or, thanks to the weird rules of quantum mechanics, both 0 and 1 at the same time. What's more, a string of qubits in that strange state could encode every possible combination of 1 and 0 values at the same time. As a result, a quantum computer could process myriad inputs at once and crack problems that would overwhelm a conventional computer. However, that approach to quantum computing, called the “gate model,” presents many unresolved practical problems, as scientists must maintain and manipulate the delicate quantum state of many qubits. <bold added for emphasis>

The whole design of computers in the past has been about changing electrical (or mechanical before that) states to perform calculations It was either on or off - open or closed - one or zero. And to do anything at all required a continuous change of these states until all of the calculations were finished. With computers as fast as they are today - many things seem pretty much instantaneous. At least the things most people do. In the business world, many still takes hours or days. In the arena of scientific research, that easily goes to weeks, months, and even more.
These folks are talking about a computer that can be every possible combination of these on / off states at one time! That's just amazing.

Next - what's not even brought up:

The reason people starting trying to build something like a computer was to do things faster than we can do them ourselves. The very first was a tabulating machine built by Herman Hollerith to process data for the U. S. Census in 1890. The previous census took 7 years to count - and they wanted something faster.
Did this machine do anything truly new? No. It just counted faster.

And not much has really changed as far as that goes.
Computers still haven't done anything really "new". They haven't invented anything. They do some amazing things, to be sure. Things that we couldn't do without taking a whole lot more time. And they bring a degree of accuracy to mechanical operations that is difficult to match for a human. But still - they don't do anything other than what their human "creators" tell them to do - which means we have to know how to do these things first.

And, they don't have all of our characteristics - for instance they have no conscience - they don't know right from wrong - they feel no pain and they can't "think" (in spite of what 2001 A Space Odyssey may like to portray).

So - where does this go?

Does the previous description sound a little familiar? People "create" computers that can do some of the things that we can do.

^{Ge 1:27} So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

That's from Genesis 1:26-27.

God creates us in His image.
We "create" computers to do some of the things that we can do, but faster.
We "create" quantum computers to do things even faster.
Quantum computers can encode every possible combination of 1 and 0 values at the same time.
We can believe that this is possible with quantum computers.

But - can we believe this is possible with God?

There's always this question about whether God is all knowing - or all controlling.
When God said the words below to Jeremiah -