Ouch! That’s a good point, and particularly painful because that’s my field (computing, not quantum exotic-ness).

I do know that the relevant people had to work hard to prevent measurement effects from collapsing the quantum superpositions too early. This was to develop the, ah, basic logic circuits of a quantum computer.

However intended measurements of the quantum circuits would in fact be a macro effect. How could it not be? I’m not sure that this addresses your point exactly though. The ‘magic’ of a quantum computer is in those quantum superpositions. No one, operationally speaking, wants to measure the superposition space itself. They want a definite, finite output. In traditional computing terms, 0 or 1.

I’m way out on the edge of my knowledge of the matter here. Cue up the critiques! 3… 2… 1…

http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/noam-chomsky-on-where-artificial-intelligence-went-wrong/261637/?single_page=true

“The motivation for the interview was in part that Chomsky is rarely asked about scientific topics nowadays. Journalists are too occupied with getting his views on U.S. foreign policy, the Middle East, the Obama administration and other standard topics. ”

A good overview, and an interesting interview.

There is a link to videos of the interview immediately before the first question.

Chomsky makes a couple of picayune errors or lapses in rigour especially early on, but it’s likely worth the effort of not being distracted by those when reading the first time. He raises some interesting points about scientific enterprise and things akin to the correspondence principle that likely will seem familiar to some of the physicists here.

For example, the answer after “So it shifted to engineering…” is a little provocative.

There is no reason not to think that the behaviour of even a complicated eukaryotic cell could not be as fully determined as an artificial machine of the same mass. This will require some new tools — theoretical, observational and computational — however. Some will be borrowed from field theories familiar to people here (some biological applications of things like the Nernst-Planck equation come to mind) but inside a cell viscosity totally dominates inertia and thermal noise is nontrivial.

Inside the cell is neat. Exact models of organelles and simple archaeans cannot be too far off.

http://www.arcfn.com/2011/07/cells-are-very-fast-and-crowded-places.html

Is not the quantum computing endeavor an attempt to achieve just that?

This is news to me. My understanding is that they were delivered in a course labeled as the intro course for undergraduate physics majors, but that the aimed them at (i.e., intended them for) his colleagues and perhaps advanced graduate students. Of course, this was about a half century ago, and what with better prep and the Flynn effect, perhaps nowadays they are appropriate for UG majors.