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Book: Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything Author: Dr. Michio Kaku Published: 2023, Doubleday ISBN: 978-0385548366

Science Fiction, But From a Physicist

After sixteen chapters of quantum computing theory, applications, and potential, Kaku does something different. He writes a short story. Chapter 17 is a fictional day in the life of a quantum computer engineer in January 2050. It reads like a science fiction screenplay. Honestly, it’s a bold move for a physics book.

Book: Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything Author: Dr. Michio Kaku Published: 2023, Doubleday ISBN: 978-0385548366

The Chapter Where Kaku Simulates Everything

Chapter 16 is the most ambitious in the entire book. Kaku says quantum computers will help us understand the universe itself. Not bits of it. The whole thing. From asteroids to black holes to the Theory of Everything that Einstein spent his last thirty years chasing.

Book: Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything Author: Michio Kaku ISBN: 978-0385548366

Every twenty years, physicists claim that fusion power is just another twenty years in the future. This joke has been going around for decades and it’s still accurate. Chapter 15 takes on nuclear fusion, why it’s so hard, and whether quantum computers could finally break the cycle of delays.

As someone who works with complex systems every day, I appreciate the engineering honesty in this chapter. The physics of fusion is solved. The engineering is what keeps failing us.

Book: Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything Author: Michio Kaku ISBN: 978-0385548366

Chapter 14 opens with Kaku visiting a university in Reykjavik, Iceland. He tours their ice core research lab, basically a giant freezer room with long metal rods containing ice samples drilled from deep underground. Some of this ice fell as snow thousands of years ago. Inside the ice, there are microscopic air bubbles, snapshots of the ancient atmosphere. Scientists measure CO2 levels from those bubbles and calculate temperature using the ratio of heavy water molecules to normal ones.

Book: Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything Author: Dr. Michio Kaku Published: 2023, Doubleday ISBN: 978-0385548366

The Oldest Question

Kaku opens Chapter 13 with a trip through history. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Garden of Eden, Emperor Qin Shi Huang sending his entire fleet to find the Fountain of Youth. He tells a great story from Greek mythology about Eos, who asked Zeus to make her lover immortal but forgot to ask for eternal youth too. The poor guy just got older and more miserable forever.