My Old Friend, Nick Herbert in The New Yorker

The World-Changing Race to Develop the Quantum Computer Such a device could help address climate change and food scarcity, or break the Internet. Will the U.S. or China get there first?

But Clauser had also demonstrated that entangled particles were more than just a thought experiment. They were real, and they were even stranger than Einstein had thought. Their weirdness attracted the attention of the physicist Nick Herbert, a Stanford Ph.D. and LSD enthusiast whose research interests included mental telepathy and communication with the afterlife. Clauser showed Herbert his experiment, and Herbert proposed a machine that would use entanglement to communicate faster than the speed of light, enabling the user to send messages backward through time. Herbert’s blueprint for a time machine was ultimately deemed unfeasible, but it forced physicists to start taking entanglement seriously. “Herbert’s erroneous paper was a spark that generated immense progress,” the physicist Asher Pe

res recalled, in 2003.

Read the entire article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/12/19/the-world-changing-race-to-develop-the-quantum-computer