this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2026
146 points (96.8% liked)

Science Memes

19865 readers
2091 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

So I joust found this brilliant scientific paper called "Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an 8-bit Home Computer, an Abacus, and a Dog" which mocks quantum computer researchers for optimising factorisation of prime numbers in a way, so that it is as easy as possible to calculate them with a quantum computer. While you may not understand the technical or mathematical explanations they include a lot of jokes and its very funny to read. One of the jokes is,that they call quantum computers a "physics experiment", which is the explanation behind this joke.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] SmoothOperator@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

So a supercomputer is a physics experiment? A lithography machine for producing microchips is a physics experiment?

I guess a fair threshold would be "when it can be run and maintained by engineers rather than scientists". In which case, many quantum computers are indeed physics experiments.