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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29463 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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How about the discovery of graphene or the development of quantum computing? Going back a little further, how about high temperature superconductors (not to be confused with room temperature superconductors)?

Graphene brings us up to 1961, though it's small potatoes compared to nukes. High temperature superconductors came out of industry. Quantum computing also largely came out of industry.

  1. I should have said something more like "techniques for producing of graphene" (early 2000s) than discovery of graphene (1961 as you said).
  2. I don't think you can seriously argue that quantum computing "largely came out of industry." The idea was, in the first place, entirely dreamt up by academics like Richard Feynman, David Deutsch, Umesh Vazirani and others. The first truly convincing application of quantum computers was the factoring algorithm discovered by Peter Shor, another academic. Quantum error correction, which is necessary for quantum computers to work in practice, was also developed by academics. And even experimentalists actually building quantum computers for corporations, like John Martinis, were trained by and worked in academia until fairly recently (Martinis was hired by Google in 2014, but had already worked on quantum computing in academia for years).
  3. You're mostly right about high temperature superconductors, but even there, the discoverers were trained in academia.

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