Scott_Aaronson2 comments on Science Doesn't Trust Your Rationality - Less Wrong

19 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 May 2008 02:13AM

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Comment author: Scott_Aaronson2 14 May 2008 10:41:24AM 4 points [-]

Incidentally, it looks to me like you should be able to test macroscopic decoherence. Eventually. You just need nanotechnological precision, very low temperatures, and perhaps a clear area of interstellar (intergalactic?) space.

Short of that, building a scalable quantum computer would be another (possibly easier!) way to experiment with macroscopic coherence. The difference is that with quantum computing, you wouldn't even try to isolate a quantum system perfectly from its environment. Instead you'd use really clever error-correction to encode quantum information in nonlocal degrees of freedom, in such a way that it can survive the decoherence of (say) any 1% of the qubits.