Ask HN: Is quantum computing worth the struggle?

I am a phd student in quantum computing(QC), and recently I am a little depressed. Over the past few years I have heard a lot of inspiring news about the development of our field, which is exactly the reason that I chose to persue a doctoral degree in this filed.

But as I got closer to the frontline, I found more frustrating facts. The qubits are fragile, hard to maintain even for a single day, and the number are limited by all kinds of factors. The cost is huge, the devices are sensitive enough to feel the draft of room temperature. Not to mention there are few useful applications discovered for quantum algorithms. The beautiful visions seem to become a bubble, and it could burst at any time.

That makes me feel lost about the future: whether I should stick on this field? If not, where can I go? The most familiar things to me is quantum mechanics, and it's useless for almost every other fields.

Desperate...

2 points | by alexyan0431 2 hours ago

4 comments

  • turtleyacht 1 hour ago
    You get to be the person who creates the PDP-11, the Unix, the B (or C) language: fundamental contributions that the majority take for granted, to build our dreams on.

    It's ground-level with lots of unknowns. There's not going to be a lot of answers. It's the frontier. There's not a single book or body of knowledge that promises expertise or certification in the applied sense.

    Exotic materials, probabilistic effects, cutting-edge research. Isn't that exciting? You get to refine your weaknesses, accept published contributions, and make the same.

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  • __patchbit__ 1 hour ago
    Xaira_Thera is looking to hire an AI scientist in the biology space.

    Wet warm room temperature quantum computing is believed possible and they are looking for evidence of it in photosynthesis. And, the AI says in summary, skyrmion memory in the quasiparticle space is a career in reach to wide spread application.

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  • manfromchina1 1 hour ago
    How far along are you? You could finish your phd, then get a two year diploma in mechatronics, electrical eng, instrumentation. All near future proof and apparently pay well enough. You could even cert up in NDT, IRATA, ROV and that sort of thing. With your phd you'd get your foot in the door pretty easily.
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    • alexyan0431 1 hour ago
      I'm not very familiar with the employment environment at my place, but according to my senior the environment seems to get worse these years. I hope when I graduate I can still find a job with my phd degree. Thank you for your advice!
  • fragmede 1 hour ago
    We want to know how drugs will work in the human brain, to heal Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Autism. Classical computing can't run the simulations necessary to model that, and we're not going to be like the Nazis and run unethical science experiments on unwilling human subjects, so we need quantum computing to be able to model on a computer how things will interact in order to help people. That qbits are sensitive to temperature changes… have you seen how sensitive to dust that integrated circuits are?
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    • alexyan0431 1 hour ago
      I agree that the applications for drugs design and material simulations would be the near future for QC, but unfortunately my professor seems not to focus on them. That's another source of my anxiety: when other groups are considering Fault tolerant frameworks, we are still at the most physical layer, and left behind by routes like neural atoms. So that may be more likely a personal trouble lol.

      As for the sensitivity of qubits, they're much more sensitive than integrated circuits and it's far more expensive to keep a suitable environment for the former. And there are natural limits for decoherence.

      Thank you for your insightful comment!