Stranger Than Fiction

On November 27, 2006, I posted this which said, among other things,

In September of 2015, Google and Apple announce the first shipping quantum computer, the Imagine . . . 

Then later in the presentation,

In April of 2019, Google and Apple announce the EyeMagine, a new version of the Imagine that utilizes a display that is projected onto the user’s retina, eliminating the need for an external display. The EyeMagine is the size of a deck of cards and wirelessly transmits data to the retinal projector mounted on eyeglass frames. The image size is controlled by the user, but can simulate up to a 56 inch display. Most users typically use it as a heads-up display supplement to “real reality”, providing a variety of information about whatever environment they are interacting with.

Last week the New York Times posted this,

That’s because later this year, Google is expected to start selling eyeglasses that will project information, entertainment and, this being a Google product, advertisements onto the lenses. The glasses are not being designed to be worn constantly — although Google engineers expect some users will wear them a lot — but will be more like smartphones, used when needed, with the lenses serving as a kind of see-through computer monitor.

And this week Wired reports,

On Tuesday, IBM revealed that physicists at its Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York have made significant advances in the creation of “superconducting qubits,” one of several research fields that could eventually lead to a quantum computer that’s exponentially more powerful than today’s classical computers.

According to Matthias Steffen — who oversees Big Blue’s experimental quantum computing group — he and his team have improved the performance of superconducting qubits by a factor of two to four. “What this means is that we can really start thinking about much larger systems,” he tells Wired, “putting several of these quantum bits together and performing much larger error correction.”

David DiVincenzo — a professor at the Jülich Research Center‘s Institute of Quantum Information in western Germany and a former colleague if Steffen — agrees that IBM’s new research is more than just a milestone. “These metrics have now — for the first time — attained the levels necessary to begin scaling up quantum computation to greater complexity,” he says. “I think that we will soon see whole quantum computing modules, rather than just two- or three-qubit experiments.”

Huh. As I said in that post,

I think this is a case of where the truth will end up being stranger than fiction.

Of course, I also had Google purchasing a controlling stake in Apple in 2013, which is clearly silly. Now that Apple has almost $100 billion in cash and a $500 billion market cap, perhaps they should consider buying Google . . .(Mr. Cook, feel free to call me for advice).

Picture several years from now combining the current versions of the eyeMAGINE, Google Goggles, Siri, Wolfram Alpha and quantum computing. We better get started writing the school policies to ban these things, 'cuz we sure wouldn't want our students to have these capabilities . . .

Yep, stranger than fiction.

What's Impossible in Your Classroom?

So, the Did You Know? factoid of the day from this story:

No one is galaxy-hopping, or even beaming people around, but for the first time, information has been teleported between two separate atoms across a distance of a meter — about a yard.

. . . "Our system has the potential to form the basis for a large-scale 'quantum repeater' that can network quantum memories over vast distances," Monroe said. "Moreover, our methods can be used in conjunction with quantum bit operations to create a key component needed for quantum computation."

. . . What distinguishes this outcome as teleportation, rather than any other form of communication, is that no information pertaining to the original memory actually passes between ion A and ion B. Instead, the information disappears when ion A is measured and reappears when the microwave pulse is applied to ion B.

A major step forward toward quantum computing, which powers some of the "living in exponential times" theme. And real, live teleportation of information from one object to another over a distance of about a meter. What's next, a biracial President of the United States?

So, if all these "impossible" things are happening in our world today, not to mention the impossible things that can happen if we perfect quantum computing and teleportation, what's impossible in your classroom?

Maybe, just maybe, you can find a way to do the impossible. Shouldn't you start trying?