link: Physicists Need to Be More Careful with How They Name Things - Scientific American

Physicists Need to Be More Careful with How They Name Things
The popular term “quantum supremacy,” which refers to quantum computers outperforming classical ones, is uncomfortably reminiscent of “white supremacy”

By Ian Durham, Daniel Garisto, Karoline Wiesner on February 20, 2021

In 2012, the quantum physicist John Preskill wrote, “We hope to hasten the day when well controlled quantum systems can perform tasks surpassing what can be done in the classical world.” Less than a decade later, two quantum computing systems have met that mark: Google’s Sycamore, and the University of Science and Technology of China’s Jiǔzhāng. Both solved narrowly designed problems that are, so far as we know, impossible for classical computers to solve quickly. How quickly? How “impossible”? To solve a problem that took Jiǔzhāng 200 seconds, even the fastest supercomputers are estimated to take at least two billion years.

Describing what then may have seemed a far-off goal, Preskill gave it a name: “quantum supremacy.” In a blog post at the time, he explained “I’m not completely happy with this term, and would be glad if readers could suggest something better.”

We’re not happy with it either, and we believe that the physics community should be more careful with its language, for both social and scientific reasons. Even in the abstruse realms of matter and energy, language matters because physics is done by people.

The word supremacy—having “more power, authority or status than anyone else”—is closely linked to “white supremacy.” This isn’t supposition; it’s fact. The Corpus of Contemporary American English finds “white supremacy” is 15 times more frequent than the next most commonly used two-word phrase, “judicial supremacy.” Though English is the global lingua franca of science, it is notable that the USTC team avoided “quantum supremacy” because in Chinese, the character meaning “supremacy” also has uncomfortable, negative connotations. The problem is not confined merely to English.....