Quantum Computing: Theoretical versus Practical Possibility

Abstract: An intense effort is being made today to build a quantum computer. Instead of presenting what has been achieved, I invoke here analogies from the history of science in an attempt to glimpse what the future might hold. Quantum computing is possible in principle - there are no known laws of Nature that prevent it - yet scaling up the few qubits demonstrated so far has proven to be exceedingly difficult. While this could be regarded merely as a technological or practical impediment, I argue that this difficulty might be a symptom of new laws of physics waiting to be discovered. I also introduce a distinction between "strong" and "weak" emergentist positions. The former assumes that a critical value of a parameter exists (one that is most likely related to the complexity of the states involved) at which the quantum-mechanical description breaks down, in other words, that quantum mechanics will turn out to be an incomplete description of reality. The latter assumes that quantum mechanics will remain as a universally valid theory, but that the classical resources required to build a real quantum computer scale up with the number of qubits, which hints that a limiting principle is at work.