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Logician Bruno Marchal ended an email like this Sep
2002
"PS I have found a way to explain with
knot theory what "logic" is,
as a branch of math, by comparing propositions with knots, proofs with continuous deformation, and semantics with knot's invariants. As I said before one of the difficulty for writing a paper is the misunderstanding between logicians and physicist ..." I recalled that when I read the
following in the article
"Dancing the quantum dream" from
New Scientist 24th of January 2004:
"performing measurements on a braided system of quantum particles can be
equivalent to performing the computation that a particular knot encodes."
Then I came to the part where the article
says:
"Freedman and Kitaev (who is now also at Microsoft Research), together with
Michael Larson and Zhenghan Wang, both at Indiana University in Bloomington,
have now shown how to build a "topological quantum computer" using technology
that is available today (www.arxiv.org/quant-ph/0101025).
It seems to be the one machine that could get useful quantum computers off the
drawing board."
And now I wonder: Is this the beginning of math as an empirical
science?
Lennart |
