On the P versus NP Problem and the Myth of Scalable Quantum Computing

The prospect of an up-coming quantum computer revolution is big news these days, with some technologists predicting that a scalable quantum computer is a mere 4 - 5 years away. It has even been claimed -by D-Wave cofounder Eric Ladizinsky- that this prospective revolution will be civilization's next big revolution. I think that quantum computers that are anything more than toys are, not merely difficult to engineer, but mathematically impossible, and based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between classical and quantum physics. An argument to this conclusion is presented here, with reference to the P versus NP problem.