Book Review: “Quantum Supremacy” by Michio Kaku (tl;dr DO NOT BUY)
I couldn’t resist sharing this book review. I recommend you read all of it, but if you can’t be bothered, here is a taster:
“So I can now state with confidence: beating out a crowded field, this is the worst book about quantum computing, for some definition of the word “about,” that I’ve ever encountered.”
Ouch!
Read the rest here:
When I was a teenager, I enjoyed reading Hyperspace, an early popularization of string theory by the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. I’m sure I’d have plenty of criticisms if I reread it today, but at the time, I liked it a lot. In the decades since, Kaku has widened his ambit to, well, pretty much […]
Book Review: “Quantum Supremacy” by Michio Kaku (tl;dr DO NOT BUY)
In the Dark 
May 30, 2023 at 4:35 pm
The question to ask Kaku is: Did you write this book yourself?
There will never be a clearer technical basic textbook than David Mermin’s “Quantum Computer Science”.
June 6, 2023 at 12:24 pm
In contrast, the book “Quantum Bullshit” by Chris Ferrie has just been reviewed – by Philip Moriarty – in the June Physics World. (I’m old and patient enough to wait for PW to arrive by post, and this month it did.) The book looks promising. I wrote a long essay – never published – called “Pathological Industries of the Quantum” in 1990, and Ferrie’s book sounds like a lengthier update with a fair amount of bad language, which may be amusing, tedious or offensive depending on your viewpoint. (Mine is somewhere between amusing and tedious, depending on the amount.) I’ve ordered it; it seems to be an exposition of quantum theory for non-experts plus a skewering of the (non-existent) intersection of quantum physics with what was formerly called the New Age movement. In 1990 the worst example of that were the books of Danah Zohar.
Basic quantum theory has two novel features: it predicts some things only probabilistically, not deterministically; and its predictive formalism contains mathematical entities which do not correspond 1:1 with any observable. These features raise questions of interpretation which never enter classical physics, and engage the physicist’s philosophical worldview. (Quantum field theory is a great achievement but does not resolve the issue.) That’s where the wiggle room for bullshit comes in.