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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.

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

Chapter 12 is where Kaku connects two big threads from the rest of the book: artificial intelligence and quantum computing. The most interesting part is not the AI history lesson though. It is how both technologies come together to tackle protein folding and brain diseases that we still cannot cure.

AI: From Hype to AI Winter and Back

Kaku starts with the 1956 Dartmouth Conference, where scientists predicted they could crack artificial intelligence in one summer. Many summers later, we are still working on it.

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

Chapter 11 is where Kaku moves from quantum physics into biology. He covers cancer detection, immunotherapy, CRISPR gene editing, and a fascinating paradox about why elephants almost never get cancer. The quantum computing angle is still there, but this chapter is really about biology and what we now understand about cancer at the genetic level.

Twelve posts later, here is what stayed with me.

Switzerland was not always peaceful

Biggest surprise of the whole book. When people think of Switzerland, they think calm, stability, neutrality. The actual history is full of wars, religious conflicts, civil wars, and political crises. The Old Confederacy nearly collapsed multiple times. Catholics fought Protestants. Urban cantons clashed with rural ones. Napoleon invaded and reshuffled everything. The Sonderbund War of 1847 was a real civil war.