To be honest I never liked Qiskit. It seems to add an unnecessary layer of complexity where you have to learn both Python and a particular Python library just to be able to code for quantum computers. If you're trying to learn quantum computing, it seems like an unnecessary layer of complexity and confusion. I find something like OpenQASM 2.0 to be more intuitive for learning because it's just an assembly language designed from the ground-up for quantum computers. You don't have that middle-man for learning because you just directly write the names of instructions and the qubits they apply to.
It would be like if you were trying to learn a fairly new CPU architecture, like RISC-V or Loongson64, and rather than writing in an assembly language that directly represents the instructions the CPU can do, you instead learned it by importing a Python library where you have to call functions from the library for each instruction. That's just kind of weird bro, not gonna lie. I don't really see why Qiskit has caught on so much as the most popular way of learning quantum computing.
If you specifically want to integrate programming for quantum computers into a programming language like Python, to me it makes more sense rather than making a function for every instruction, instead do what OpenCL does for GPU programming. GPUs like CPUs also operate off of a set of instructions, so you can represent it as an assembly language. OpenCL lets you just load these instructions into the GPU and then tell it to run it. You can also write out the GPU code in C code represented as a string and tell the library at runtime to compile it to the instruction set for the GPU and load it into the GPU.
This way is actually faster because you don't need to parse Python code for every instruction for your coprocessor. You just load all the instructions onto the coprocessor at once and tell it to go. I suspect that Qiskit might not even be long-term viable if quantum computers ever "take off" because controlling it through Python will just add unnecessary overhead.
Not surprising as much of online conservatism these days is just gooning. They're all porn addicts who cry about the wokes taking away their softcore porn from their video games.
It is ultimately a philosophical choice not demanded by the mathematics to actually interpret reality as oscillating waves. Erwin Schrodinger for example argued against the notion that particles really "spread out" as waves and instead argued that the particle just kind of hops from interaction to interaction without having meaningful existence in between interaction. If you go this route, then the wave function doesn't "describe" anything, but rather predicts where particles would hop to during an interaction.
The reason Schrodinger argued in favor of this is because he said treating particles as actually spreading out as waves contradicts with the fact we only measure particles, so you need an additional postulate that says these waves suddenly collapse back into particles the moment you try to measure them, and he did not see why "measurement" should play a fundamental role in the theory. This is sometimes called the "measurement problem" and Heisenberg's formulation and interpretation does not have this problem.
If you mean, can you get rid of the wave function entirely, the answer is also yes. When quantum mechanics was first formulated, it was formulated using Heisenberg's matrix mechanics, which make all the same predictions but does not use the wave function. The wave function is a result of a particular mathematical formalism. There is another formulation of quantum mechanics called the path integral formulation, and yet another called the ensemble in state space formulation.
The probability of finding an electron or any other particle at one point or another can be imagined as a diffuse cloud, denser where the probability of seeing the particle is stronger. Sometimes it is useful to visualize this cloud as if it were a real thing. For instance, the cloud that represents an electron around its nucleus indicates where it is more likely that the electron appears if we look at it. Perhaps you encountered them at school: these are the atomic ‘orbitals’.
This cloud is described by a mathematical object called wave function.The Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger has written an equation describing its evolution in time. Quantum mechanics is often mistakenly identified with this equation. Schrödinger had hopes that the ‘wave’ could be used to explain the oddities of quantum theory: from those of the sea to electromagnetic ones, waves are something we understand well. Even today, some physicists try to understand quantum mechanics by thinking that reality is the Schrödinger wave.
But Heisenberg and Dirac understood at once that this would not do. To view Schrödinger’s wave as something real is to give it too much weight – it doesn’t help us to understand the theory; on the contrary, it leads to greater confusion. Except for special cases, the Schrödinger wave is not in physical space, and this divests it of all its intuitive character. But the main reason why Schrödinger’s wave is a bad image of reality is the fact that, when a particle collides with something else, it is always at a point: it is never spread out in space like a wave. If we conceive an electron as a wave, we get in trouble explaining how this wave instantly concentrates to a point at each collision.
Schrödinger’s wave is not a useful representation of reality: it is an aid to calculation which permits us to predict with some degree of precision where the electron will reappear. The reality of the electron is not a wave: it is how it manifests itself in interactions, like the man who appeared in the pools of lamplight while the young Heisenberg wandered pensively in the Copenhagen night.
--- Carlo Rovelli, "Reality is Not what it Seems"
Of course, you might say that this is still not "macroscopically similar to ours" because in our classical world we do not need to treat objects as if they only exist in the moment of interaction. There is always a tradeoff in quantum mechanics. It's not a classical theory. There will always be some differences, so it really depends upon what differences you find the most intuitive/acceptable. If you find the oscillating wave picture to be too bizarre then you can think of them just as particles, with the tradeoff that they only exist relative to what they are interacting with in the moment.
the closest thing i guess would be his hyperloop white paper lol
I don't really understand why reddit pretty much succeeded in killing off all other forums. People love the format of reddit so much that even after killing off all the supporting apps it hasn't really done much at all to cause people to go back to traditional forums. I've personally always found reddit far worse than a traditional forum because of the like system. This place has it as well, although I'm not sure how it compares to reddit's in terms of algorithm.
Traditional forums did not have it. You just saw posts sequentially. There was also no character limit. This meant on traditional forums everyone's position was not only presented equally but you could also go into as much detail as you wanted. If the topic is complex you could write basically an essay if you wanted, which in reddit you have to break up into multiple posts. Reddit's like system also tends to facilitate echo chambers because popular opinions show up first while unpopular opinions show up last and can even be hidden, and it encourages people to misrepresent you and not act in good faith because they're looking for an "own" to farm likes rather than a real discussion.
Sure, there might be sometimes when a person's opinion is so out there and disingenuous you don't even want to take it seriously and have a real discussion, but I've never once in my entire history of using reddit had a decent conversation with someone. Even things as benign as like /r/nintendo, I say I enjoyed a game and I got a bunch of people shitting on me calling me a bad person for liking a particular game. No matter how benign and non-serious the topic is, people always find ways to turn it into an attack to "own" you to farm upvotes.
Complex numbers are just a way of representing an additional degree of freedom in an equation. You have to represent complex numbers not on a number line but on the complex plane, so each complex number is associated with two numbers. That means if you create a function that requires two inputs and two outputs, you could "compress" that function into a single input and output by using complex numbers.
Complex numbers are used all throughout classical mechanics. Waves are two-dimensional objects because they both have an amplitude and a wavelength. Classical wave dynamics thus very often use complex numbers because you can capture the properties of waves more concisely. An example of this is the Fourier transform. If you look up the function, it looks very scary, it has an integral and Euler's number raised to the negative power of the imaginary number multiplied by pi. However, if you've worked with complex numbers a lot, you'd immediately recognize that raising Euler's number to pi times the imaginary number is just how you represent rotations on the complex plane.
Despite how scary the Fourier transform looks, literally all it is actually doing is wrapping a wave around a circle. 3Blue1Brown has a good video on his channel of how to visualize the Fourier transform. The Fourier transform, again, isn't inherently anything quantum mechanical, we use it all the time in classical mechanics, for example, if you ever used an old dial-up model and wondered why it made those weird noises, it was encoding data as sound wave by representing them as different harmonic waves that it would then add together, producing that sound. The Fourier transform could then be used by the modem at the other end to break the sound back apart into those harmonic waves and then decode it back into data.
In quantum mechanics, properties of systems always have an additional kind of "orientation" to them. When particles interact, if their orientations are aligned, the outcome of the interaction is deterministic. If they are misaligned, then it introduces randomness. For example, an electron's spin state can either be up or down. However, its spin state also has a particular orientation to it, so you can only measure it "correctly" by having the orientation of the measuring device aligned with the electron. If they are misaligned, you introduce randomness. These orientations often are associated with physical rotations, for example, with the electron spins state, you measure it with something known as a Stern-Gerlach apparatus, and to measure the electron on a different orientation you have to physically rotate the whole apparatus.
Because the probability of measuring certain things directly relates to the relative orientation between your measuring device and the particle, it would be nice if we had a way to represent both the relative orientation and the probability at the same time. And, of course, you guessed it, we do. It turns out you can achieve this simply by representing your probability amplitudes (the % chance of something occurring) as complex numbers. This means in quantum mechanics, for example, an event can have a -70.7i% chance of occurring.
While that sounds weird at first, you quickly realize that the only reason we represent it this way is because it directly connects the relative orientation between the systems interacting and the probabilities of certain outcomes. You see, you can convert quantum probabilities to classical just by computing the distance from 0% on the complex plane and squaring it, which in the case of -70.7i% would give you 50%, which tells you this just means it is basically a fair coin flip. However, you can also compute from this number the relative orientation of the two measuring devices, which in this case you would find it to be rotated 90 degrees. Hence, because both values can be computed from the same number, if you rotate the measuring device it must necessarily alter the probabilities of different outcomes.
You technically don't need to ever use complex numbers. You could, for example, take the Schrodinger equation and just break it up into two separate equations for the real and imaginary part, and have them both act on real numbers. Indeed, if you actually build a quantum computer simulator in a classical computer, most programming languages don't include complex numbers, so all your algorithms have to break the complex numbers into two real numbers. It's just when you are writing down these equations, they can get very messy this way. Complex numbers are just far more concise to represent additional degrees of freedom without needing additional equations/functions.
Well, what is boring and non-boring I guess is in the eye of the beholder. What I moreso was referring to is what is difficult to wrap your head around.
The nondeterminism is kind of unavoidable as long as you don't want to change the mathematics of the theory itself, but I also don't really consider nondeterminism to be that unintuitive or difficult to "understand." I mean, throughout most of human history, it wasn't that common for humans to actually believe in determinism in the Laplacian sense of being able to make absolute prediction to the future based on complete knowledge of the past, that was largely popularized with the rise of Newtonian mechanics, and even by the 19th century you had even a lot of materialist philosophers calling it into question on grounds of logical consistency. Personally, I think the strong desire to maintain Laplacian determinism is really a physicist thing. They work with Newtonian mechanics first and it becomes so intuitive some don't want to let it go when it comes to quantum mechanics. But I doubt if you went and talked to the average person, most probably wouldn't be that strongly adherent to Laplacian determinism.
The kinds of views I was talking about are more things like people who try to interpret the state vector as literally representing a physical wave spreading out in space that collapses like a house of cards when you perturb it, or try to envision a literal multiverse where everything is just a big "universal wave function." A lot of these bizarre views are not only unintuitive but literally impossible to visualize, and they run into a lot of problems in logical consistency and there have been mountains papers and books published on the subject trying to work out all the conceptual issues. If you are a person just learning QM and the philosophical interpretation around it bothers you, if you listen to people who talk about these weird things, you will need to read through dozens of books and maybe even hundreds of papers just to get a general idea of what is going on, and even then most of these interpretations still have not resolved their mountain of conceptual issues.
To me this really bothered me when I got into quantum computing for the first time. I wanted to not just learn the math but have some sort of intuition of what is actually going on. I then went down a rabbit hole of reading tons and tons and tons of books and academic papers to try and find some way to make the math make sense on a philosophical level. Most of the mainstream views you see in the popular media just overcomplicate things for no reason because the person wants to make QM sound more mystical than it actually is. What I ultimately came to realize is that most of this confusion is just self-imposed in the sense that they are based on assumptions which are not actually demanded by the mathematics and entirely optional (such as interpreting a list of probability amplitudes a literal entity in a physical space) and thus most can be stripped away.
You can't strip away every aspect of QM that makes it unique, because it clearly does differ from classical mechanics, but by dong this you do really hone down on what actually makes QM unique and what is genuinely an unavoidable consequence of the mathematics. And what you get down to is just interference effects, which arise from the fact that probability amplitudes are complex-valued, thus can cancel each other out, which can't occur in classical probability theory. Nondeterminism and context-dependence then follow from this as a necessity for the theory to be logically consistent, but both of those are fairly easy to have an intuition for.
Never said anything about Nazis, I just responded to what you said, as well as put it in the context of the main thrust of the platform which their current party ran on and they voted for. No one accused you of being a "boogieman," you are just suffering from a victim complex desperately trying to invent conspiracies that never happened to paint yourself as some poor martyr. Just stop saying ridiculous things worthy of mockery. Not that hard. Be normal.
ngl I blame physicists who communicate to the public for this
Notice how you always see a lot of nonsense mysticism around quantum mechanics like "quantum healing" but you never see anything along the lines of like "general relativity healing" or "inflation theory healing."
The difference is that often it is the physicists themselves who choose to communicate to the public who paint quantum mechanics in a mystical light. Indeed, this is not even something unique to the physicists who communicate to the public, you can sometimes even run into it in peer-reviewed publications painting QM as a theory that somehow puts conscious observers front and center and questions the existence of objective reality, or whatever rubbish philosophy people try to imbue onto some linear algebra.
The ones who communicate to the public just are often worse because they don't tell you QM as it really is, they usually tell you some personal theory they have. For example, rather than just describing how QM works, one of these science communicators might tell you their personal theory about how there's a grand multiverse, or that "consciousness" plays some sort of role, and that explains why QM works. They do not just present the theory, but their own personal speculation as an underlying explanation for it.
Because physicists themselves promote all this mysticism around a bunch of linear algebra, you end up with mystics and charlatans who realize that they can take advantage of this by talking about mystical nonsense like "quantum healing." Sure, it might be nonsensical rubbish, but the person who hears about "quantum healing" also heard a real PhD physicist tell them about multiverses and "consciousness," so they think there must be something to it as well. It gives the mysticism an air of legitimacy.
We like to kid ourselves that the mysticism is just promoted by your Deepak Chopra types or laymen who have no idea what they're talking about. But if you actually look at what a real academic philosophy department publishes, there is mysticism all throughout academic philosophy. These philosophers have also had a big impact on physicists, who often adopt these mystical attitudes they learn from the philosophy department into their own discussion, and sometimes even into their own publications.
If you actually talk to the laymen who are deeply enthralled by those quantum mystic pseudoscience charlatans, they usually can point you to multiple real academics who back their beliefs, people with legitimate credentials. This is a problem nobody seems to address and it annoys the hell out of me. Everyone paints either the charlatans or the laymen as the bad guy here, but nobody wants to talk about the elephant in the room which is the rampant mysticism in academia.
I literally argued with a PhD physicist the other day who was going around preaching to people that quantum mechanics proves that there is no physical reality and we all live inside of a "cosmic consciousness." I did not get very far with him because he just insulted me and pointed to academic philosophers who agreed with him and said I'm stupid for even questioning his claims, and then wouldn't address my criticisms.
"The worst parts" is literally the Republican party's major platform that they put front and center and is literally what they campaigned on? What on earth are you on about?
What's there to even "debate"? You can't change the mind of an extremist dogmatist. You cannot begin the discussion with wild claims about we aren't ever allowed to question any decision a private enterprise ever makes then honestly be like, "I just want a serious discussion 🥲." No, you don't, you come here to just preach your religious ideology, and you're upset some people don't mindlessly accept it without question.
This is a rather reductive view of quantum cryptography.
Correct = reductive?
The two most common applications of it I hear about is the development of encryption algorithms resistant to being broken on quantum computers
First, I was talking about quantum encryption, not quantum cryptography, which is a bit more broad. Second, we already have cryptographic algorithms that run on classical computers that are not crackable by quantum computers, known as lattice-based cryptography which are way more practical than anything quantum cryptography could offer.
the way, say, Shur’s algorithm is known to break RSA
Shor's algorithm. Yes, it breaks asymmetrical ciphers like RSA, but we have developed alternatives already it cannot break, like Kyber.
and techniques like quantum key distribution
Classical key exchange algorithms prevent someone from reading your key if they intercept the data packets between you. QKD is entirely impractical because it does not achieve this. Rather than preventing someone from reading your key if they intercept the data packets, it merely allows you to detect if someone is intercepting the data packets. You see, in regular cryptography, you want people to be able to intercept your data. It's necessary for something like the internet to work, because packets of data have to be passed around the whole world, and it would suck if your packets got lost simply because someone read them in transit, which is why QKD is awful. If a single person reads the data packet in transit then they would effectively deny service to the recipient.
Both of these are real problems that don’t become meaningless just because one-time pads exist - you need to somehow securely distribute the keys for one-time-pad encryption.
One-time pad encryption is awful as I already explained, it would cut the entire internet bandwidth in half because if you wanted to transmit 10 gigabytes of data you would also need to transmit 10 gigabyte key. QKD is also awful for the fact that it would be unscalable to an "internet" because of how easy it is to deny service. It also doesn't even guarantee you can detect someone snooping your packets because it is susceptible to a man-in-the-middle attack. Sure, the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange is also susceptible to a man-in-the-middle attack, but we solve this using public key infrastructure. You cannot have public key infrastructure for quantum cryptography.
The only proposed quantum digital signature algorithms are unscalable because they rely on Holevo's theorem, which basically says there is a limited amount of information about the quantum state of a qubit you can gather from a single measurement, thus creating a sort of one-way function that can be used for digital signatures. The issue with this is that Holevo's theorem also says you can acquire more information if you have more copies of the same qubit, i.e. it means every time you distribute a copy of the public key, you increase the probability someone could guess it. Public keys would have to be consumable which would entirely prevent you from scaling it to any significantly large network.
That’s why one-time pads aren’t used everywhere, (“it would cut the whole internet bandwidth in half overnight” would not have been a sufficient reason - that’d be a tiny price to pay for unbreakable encryption, if it actually worked).
You are living in fairy tale lala land. Come back down to reality. If you offer someone an algorithm that is impossible to break in a trillion, trillion years, and another algorithm that is in principle impossible to break, but the former algorithm is twice as efficient, then every company on the entirety of planet earth will choose the former. No enterprise on earth is going to double their expenses for something entirely imaginary that could never be observed in practice. You are really stuck in delulu town if you unironically think the reason one-time pads aren't used practically is due to lack of secure key distribution.
Even prior to the discovery of Shor's algorithm, we were issuing DHKE which, at the time, was believed to be pretty much an unbreakable way to share keys. Yet, even in this time before people knew DHKE could be potentially broken by quantum computers, nobody used DHKE to exchange keys for one-time pads. DHKE is always used to exchange keys for symmetrical ciphers like AES. AES256 is not breakable by quantum computers in practice as even a quantum computer would require trillions of years to break it. There is zero reason to use a one-time pad when something like AES exists. It's the industry standard for a reason and I bet you my entire life savings we are not going to abandon it for one-time pads ever.
Many conservatives I know are fully in support of legal immigration
Then why do they oppose it? That's a contradiction. They oppose asylum seekers which is legal immigration. They oppose and make up fake news controversies about legal Haitian immigrants saying they are "eating the dogs." The actively want to make it harder to come into the country legally. Even for illegal immigrants, if we create a path to citizenship they would be legal, but they don't want that, they want to kick them out. The legal status of them thus does not matter to them, it's not their primary concern, they just want to get the immigrants out.
You need to explain to me how opposing legal immigration = supporting legal immigration. Resolve that contradiction for me.
The left enjoys telling business that if they can’t afford to pay a living wage for their lowest paid jobs then they don’t deserve to be in business, while at the same time decrying the cost increases to food and janitorial if those industries had to pay non-migrant workers enough to do those jobs.
There is only a "contradiction" because you are an extremist dogmatist who insists we should all fall on our knees and worship the free market like it's a god. Whatever the market says goes! Humans be damned! How dare you question the glory of the market??
No, there is no contradiction here because we can pay people a living wage and bring down price gouging. Your issue is because of the fact you are an extremist dogmatist who treats free markets like a religion where it is blasphemy to question anything private corporations do, you act like price gouging is just a fact of nature, like a natural disaster, something that can't be helped because it's just the will of all mighty market which we cannot question.
Again, no, some of us aren't religious zealots for free markets. We recognize that we can demand workers have higher pay and companies stop price gouging at the same time and there is no contradiction here. You can't wrap your brain around this because you think private corporations are equivalent to deities which we are not allowed to question, so if workers are paid higher and the corporations choose to offset this by raising prices, oh well, there's nothing we can do, you can't question the decisions of the great mighty oligarchs, whom we must fall to our knees and worship!
Yes we can. Grow a fucking spine you cuckhold.
“Americans don’t want these jobs for that pay” pushing wages down using illegal immigrant labor.
Aren't conservatives the ones who say "guns don't kill people, people kill people?" Yet somehow this agency disappears when it comes to wages being lowered. Wages are lowered on their own, again, like a natural disaster, the free market is just something we cannot question and we have to accept whatever it throws at us. No, people lower wages. It is an active decision by private enterprises, the people who run them have human agency which you continue to pretend does not exist because you are a complete dogmatist who wants people to bow before them like gods. It is those people, human beings with agency who push down wages. Wages don't just magically go down on their own whenever your country has immigration.
In my view the "weirdness" of quantum mechanics is just people arbitrarily anthropomorphizing relativity for no reason. By "relativity" I do not mean specifically Einstein's relativity, but relativity in general, any theory which requires you specifying a reference frame in order to describe other systems.
What the material sciences have shown us is that reality is very relative. You cannot describe anything without specifying a reference frame, a coordinate system. If we had a universe with only two objects, you could never actually describe such a universe as genuinely containing two objects, because you have to pick one of those objects as the reference frame, and then from that frame of reference you could only describe another object. So you would have a universe that could be described in two different ways, but both ways would only contain one object, just a different one. To actually include two objects in your picture, you would need at least three, to pick a "third-person" reference frame to describe the other two.
Most people have trouble grappling with this. They think in a very Newtonian way and think there should be an absolute, almost cosmic perspective, that is entirely independent of perspective. But that's just not how reality works. All our scientific models require you to first begin with some sort of chosen reference frame in which the rest of reality will be described from.
If two objects interact, as I said before, you can only include two objects in the picture from the reference frame of a third object. If you want to deal with those objects in themselves, you have to pick one of them as the reference frame to describe the other, and at that point you will only be working with a description of one object. Since you no longer have two, you don't have an "interaction" any more. Rather, we might say that from that context, the other system's properties are "realized."
For example, you might say the reason I "see" is because light interacts with my eyeballs. Yet, I do not see my own eyeball, from my own perspective it is not actually in the picture. The only thing in the picture is the light, i.e. what I am seeing, and I just describe what I see as is, as it has been realized in front of me. To say something is "interacting" you ultimately need three systems, but the simplest unit in which we can describe reality is with two systems, but doing so requires you adopting the reference frame of one of those two systems, and thus your description will no longer be of systems interacting but the realization of the properties of just one of those systems.
The issue, however, is people love to anthropomorphize relativity. They insist that this relative nature of the theory is what they call "observer-dependence" assigning it to some property of conscious observers. Sometimes it is also referred to as "subjectivity," or even the "first-person point of view," all implying it has some relevance to humans or conscious beings themselves. Quantum mechanics is a theory that only makes predictions as to the properties of systems that will be realized under a particular frame of reference, i.e. in a particular context. But people's obsession with anthropomorphizing relativity causes them to instead say quantum mechanics is an observer-dependent theory that only predicts what properties of systems will be observed.
They then think it somehow is in contradiction with philosophical realism because of this supposed "observer-dependence," but they entirely made up the observer-dependence. Quantum mechanics is a contextual theory. There is context-dependence but no "observer-dependence," no subject-dependence, no fundamental role for measuring devices, or anything like that. If you just accept quantum mechanics is a contextual theory from the get-go, then you never actually have to introduce cats that are simulateously alive and dead, "spooky action at a distance," some fundamental role for conscious observers or a measuring device, a multiverse, or any of that. It's really not even that "weird" if you can get over the mental hurdle of trying to think of it in a Newtonian way and just embrace the contextual nature of the theory.
The physicist Francois-Igor Pris has a lot of good books on this topic but sadly very little in English. I've asked him if he plans to ever translate any to English and he told me he does have plans, but it's not happened yet to my knowledge.
You see this in the article, for example:
If you were to only teach someone the classical laws of physics that we thought governed the universe as recently as the end of the 19th century, they would be utterly astounded by the implications of quantum mechanics. There is no such thing as a “true reality” that’s independent of the observer
This gives idealist vibes, as if quantum mechanics is not describing "true reality" but something inherent to the conscious observer. But it is describing reality, just not independent of context, because reality is contextual. The fact that there is no non-contextual reality, a reality you can describe without specifying a frame of reference, does not mean there is no reality. There is a reality, it is just one that is contextual in nature.
I am also a bit confused as to the section of the article "Entanglement can be measured, but superpositions cannot." What really makes quantum mechanics distinctly different from a classical probability theory is interference effects. You can observe interference effects even with a single particle (which is a consequence of "superposition"). You can also observe interference effects with multiple particles that are statistically correlated with each other, that's what we call "entanglement." What things like Bell's theorem shows is just interference effects as exhibited by two statistically correlated particles.
All we observe are the interference effects, which are both equally in the single particle and double particle case a consequence of the same thing, that being the fact that systems can exist in probabilistic states that are described by complex numbers. In classical probability theory, the numbers can only be between 0% and 100%, and so they can only accumulate. In quantum probability theory, they can be negative and even imaginary, which allows them to cancel each other out, giving rise to destructive interference.
This simple fact is what both gives rise to interference effects observed in the single particle case, as well as the case of two or more particles. There is not something special to entanglement that we can observe that we can't observe in the single particle case. What we always observe is just the consequence of the way probabilities work in quantum mechanics, and thus ultimately just observe statistical effects that defy basic intuition because quantum probabilities don't work the same as classical, which we are used to.
The distinction the author is making just doesn't make much sense.
But whereas superposition is different effects or particles or quantum states all superimposed atop one another, entanglement is different: it’s a correlation between two or more different parts of the same system
Yes, but it's just that, a correlation. Statistical correlations are part of classical probability theory. On their own, they are not interesting at all. What makes them interesting in quantum mechanics is interference effects. If you ignore the interference effects then nothing is particularly interesting about entanglement, it's just a boring statistical correlation. If you include interference effects and ignore the correlation aspect, then what you're left with that distinguishes it from classical probability theory is interference effects, which is also the same as the single particle case. They are both equally a consequence of "superposition" which is just that we predict the systems probabilistically using complex numbers.
Also, the statement "Schrodinger’s cat can be alive and dead at once" is only true if for some reason you choose to interpret something not yet being determined and thus can only be predicted probabilistically as actually physically existing as a probability distribution, as if the cat is stretched out halfway dead and halfway alive. Schrodinger actually put forward this thought experiment to mock this perspective as an appeal to absurdity, not to encourage people to think this way. It is simpler to just treat it as if it's not yet been determined in that context, and so you have to predict it probabilistically, and that probability distribution is just that, a probability distribution. It is predicting the outcome for when it is realized. It is not describing anything.
Yep. Technically you could in principle use Grover's algorithm to speed up cracking a symmetrical cipher, but the size typically used for the keys is too large so even though it'd technically be faster it still not be possible in practice. Even with asymmetrical ciphers we already have replacements that are quantum safe, although most companies have not implemented them yet.
No, they are not, they are incredibly wealthy millionaires whose campaigns are bought and paid for by billionaires. The Democrat party is actively supporting an ongoing holocaust, an industrial scale genocide and ethnic cleansing of millions of people from their homeland. The idea that these people are all secretly saints who are just too scared to act on it is such a completely ridiculous belief. They do not do moral things because they are not moral. They are not saints. They simply do not represent those values. You elect a party that openly believes X and then claim they don't do Y because they're too scared to do it. No, they don't do Y because they don't represent Y, they represent X. Democrats are by no means in any way "soft-willed." Whenever it comes to something they actually believe in, they are very good at rallying the votes to get it passed, such as when they are passing something in favor of the military industrial complex or the Israel lobby.
Democrats are heartless genocidal freaks, and hardly "spineless" they just don't care. It's a party of billionaires. I have no idea how you can unironically believe this ethos that they're all a bunch of bleeding hearts but are just too scared, quivering in their boots to act but they all mean well... apparently! No, they just never fight for those values you want them to fight for because their party does not represent those values, and pretending they do at this point... I have a bridge to sell you.
Democrats like losing because they only disagree on Republicans on like 2 issues and their funding is great when Republicans are in power.
You are claiming that Trump automatically wins if nobody votes. That's objectively not how US elections work. He still has to get the plurality of votes to win. People who do not cast votes don't automatically support Trump, it just doesn't sway the election at all. Please stick to the facts and not to the fake news. Election misinformation is not cool.