Google has made an eyebrow-raising claim, saying that its new quantum chip may be tapping into parallel universes to achieve its results.
The search giant recently unveiled a new quantum computer chip, dubbed Willow, which — on a specific benchmark, at least — the company says can outperform any supercomputer in the world.
“Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing,” Google Quantum AI founder Hartmut Neven wrote in a blog post announcing the chip. “It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10²⁵ or 10 septillion years.”
“This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe,” he argued. “It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.”
Deutsch is a physicist who laid out his multiverse hypothesis in a 1997 book called “The Fabric of Reality,” in which he suggested that quantum computers’ calculations take place across multiple universes at the same time.
Put another way, Google is suggesting that its chip is so fast that its computations may have taken place across parallel universes — a bombastic statement that unsurprisingly drew plenty of skepticism online.
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