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Comment by PaulRobinson

I think everything we don't have a model for is surprisingly strange. Gravity only seems "normal" because we've been teaching a reasonable model for it for hundreds of years - Aristotle thought things fell to the ground because that was "their nature", but thought it quite weird. X-Rays seem bonkers unless you've grown up with them, and there is something deeply unnerving about genetics, quantum and even GenAI until you've spent some time pulling apart the innards and building an explainable model that makes sense to you. And even then it can catch you out. More ways to explain the models help normalise it all - what's now taught at 9th grade used to be advanced post-doc research, in almost every field. And so it goes on.

2D superconductors don't make much sense because, as the article says, theory is behind experimentation here. That's also why there is both incredible excitement, but also a worry that none of this is going to stack up to anything more than a bubble. My old Uni (Manchester) doubled down hard on the work of Geim and Novoselov by building a dedicated "Graphene Institute", after they got the Nobel Prize, but even 15 years after that award most people are still trying to figure out what does it all actually mean really? Not just in terms of the theory of physics, but how useful is this stuff, in real world usage?

It'll settle down in due course. The model will become apparent, we'll be able to explain it through a series of bouncing back between theory and experiment, as ever, and then it won't seem so strange any more.

I'm not sure that'll ever be true of quantum computing for me, but then I am getting a bit older now...

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