Physics, Philosophy and Quantum technology

Qasim Mahmood
December 2020

1 Introduction
It is quite natural to categorize the sciences. We are all well familiar with
them. There are many: chemistry, physics, biology, etc. They each even have
exotic branches such as aerodynamics, fluid mechanics, and so on, but we do
know that there are some connections between them. For instance, most of the
molecules that we study in chemistry make up living organisms. Similarly, the
atoms and electrons we study in physics make up the said molecules. Hence the
size of the constituents studied in each science gives rise to a natural hierarchy.
This is what’s called in philosophy, the reductionist perspective. This provides
us with one such way of fitting them all together, and indeed this is the view
held by most physicists.

With Mathematics being the ”mother of all sciences” and like its children,
blessed with many branches; we would also like to have a hierarchy for it. There
is a notion of fundamentalness here as well. For instance, logic, the basis of
proofs, would be considered more fundamental than say, Fourier analysis, some-
thing electrical engineers are particularly fond of. We could also order them in
terms of their abstraction. Maintaining the spirit of appreciating the intimate
connection between mathematics and the sciences, our combined framework for
viewing them would look like this.

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 Now, let’s come to something that has been a big step for human civilization:
computers. The power of computation is demonstrated by their use in modeling
the stability of buildings, guiding rovers to other planets,etc. The underlying
theory of how it works is termed, rather creatively, ”computability theory”. It is
a branch of math developed by Alan Turing in the 1930s. The main idea in this
theory is that of a Turing machine, a hypothetical construct based on classical
physics, which is taken as the fundamental unit that performs computation.
The ability of computers to simulate physical systems is particularly notable.
In fact, when we replace the Turing machine in computability theory with its
quantum counterpart, we get the quantum theory of computation. This comes
with an added feature, i.e., the principle of computational universality. This
states that the laws of physics allow for a machine — a universal quantum com-
puter — that can simulate all of physics. One consequence of this would be that
since every branch of science is based on physics, all of science is encompassed
within it! So we might as well throw away the previous framework and replace

it with

Now, there are several problems with this view. Both the classical and quan-
tum theory of computation are independent of the underlying machinery. They
don’t care which material we use or tell us in quantitative terms what we need,
in order to construct universal computers. In this sense, they are more ab-
stract and less physical, for it is the job of physics to explain hardware. Hence
there must be something to physics beyond the quantum theory of computation.

David Deutsch proposes that it could be superseded by quantum constructor

theory, which is the theory of what physical objects can be constructed, using
what resources. Here the resources are not abstract, but physical like number
of atoms, energy required, etc. The second problem is that not everything can
be understood being various aspects of the quantum theory of computation.
There are exceptions such as the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which describes
the irreversibility of the arrow of time, the universe gets more and more chaotic
over time. This in conflict with quantum theory in which everything is reversible.
Another constraint is that the notion of distance is absent in the theory , so for
instance, it can’t tell that no hardware exists that allows us to communicate
faster than light. These reasons are more than enough to emphasize the need
for a better theory.

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 So we know that there are huge gaps in our understanding, and fundamental
mismatches between our best theories and the reality they are supposed to
explain. We know that if we are at the end of some era then it’s only because
we are at the beginning of a new one which offers the prospect not only of some
quite fundamental discovery but of new kinds of fundamental discovery.