Google Says Its New Quantum Chip Indicates That Multiple Universes Exist

Tucked away in a blog post about Google's quantum computing chip, Willow, Google Quantum AI founder Hartmut Neven wrote that the chip was so 'mind-boggling' fast that it seemed to borrow computational power from other universes. According to Neven, the chip's performance suggests the existence of parallel universes, writing, 'We live in a multiverse.' TechCrunch reports: Here's the passage: 'Willow's performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today's fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it's 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.'

This drop-the-mic moment on the nature of reality was met with skepticism by some, but, surprisingly, others on the internet who profess to understand these things argued that Nevan's conclusions were more than plausible. The multiverse, while stuff of science fiction, is also an area of serious study by the founders of quantum physics. The skeptics, however, point out that the performance claims are based on the benchmark that Google itself created some years ago to measure quantum performance. That alone doesn't prove that parallel versions of you aren't running around in other universes -- just where the underlying measuring stick came from.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.