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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

The Man Who Saved Half of Humanity

Chapter 8 opens with a bold claim. Half of the people alive today exist because of one man. Fritz Haber, a German chemist, figured out how to make artificial fertilizer from thin air. Literally. Most people have never heard of him.

Before Haber, the world was on a collision course with Malthus’s prediction from 1798. Population grows exponentially, food supply does not. Eventually you run out of food, and then comes famine, riots, and war. Simple math, ugly consequences.

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

Chapter 7 is about something we all take for granted. Plants. Green stuff everywhere. You walk through a forest, everything is alive and growing, and you don’t think much about it. Kaku makes you stop and consider what is actually happening at the molecular level though. Scientists still don’t fully understand how photosynthesis works. After 3 billion years of it happening on Earth, we still can’t explain the first step properly.

So Switzerland won the Sonderbund War, wrote a constitution, and became a proper federal state. Now what? Now the hard part. Building an actual nation from a bunch of cantons that speak different languages, follow different religions, and mostly just want to be left alone.

Chapter 6 covers 1848 to 1914. Sixty-six years of figuring things out. Honestly, it reads like a really long infrastructure project. Starts with arguments about architecture, moves to budget fights, somebody builds a tunnel, and by the end everyone is tired but the thing works.

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 Goes Full Biology

After five chapters of quantum computing basics, hardware races, and qubit architectures, Kaku shifts gears completely. Chapter 6 is about the origin of life. It actually makes sense in context though, because the argument he builds is that understanding how life started is fundamentally a quantum problem. Quantum computers might be the only tools powerful enough to crack it.

Chapter 5 of my retelling of A Concise History of Switzerland by Clive H. Church and Randolph C. Head (Cambridge University Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0-521-14382-0). Fifty years of chaos, civil wars, and foreign meddling. Somehow, out of all that mess, modern Switzerland was born.

The French Show Up (1798)

In 1798, France invaded Switzerland. Swiss patriots in Basle and Vaud had already started their own revolutions. They planted liberty trees and demanded equal rights for the countryside. The real muscle came from France though. General Brune marched in, took Berne, stripped its treasury, shipped the city’s famous bears to Paris, and that was that.