China Surpasses United States in Quantum Communications Research - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14817420
https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2017/06/19 ... echnology/

The year's most important news story probably never made it into your news feed. Nonetheless it might change your life forever. For the first time, China has demonstrated that it is far ahead of the United States in a critical new technology, namely quantum communications. A Chinese satellite succeeded in transmitting so-called entangled photons to earth stations. That's the high-tech equivalent of sending a message in undeveloped photographic film: If you try to read it, the light will destroy it. The Chinese breakthrough has huge implications for cryptography, and for a host of other applications.

The tortoise just overtook the hare. We haven't woken up from a decades-long nap, and we're at serious risk of losing the race. If we do lose, there will be a name for an American who works for a Chinese: "Employed." This is not a drill. This is the real thing.

Chris Scott wrote Friday in Asia Times:

On Thursday, a team of Chinese scientists released findings from a breakthrough study that makes China the indisputable leader in the field of quantum communication, an achievement that could be of immense strategic importance.

The study, led by Pan Jianwei and published in Science magazine, successfully demonstrated the ability to distribute entangled photons across unprecedented distances, from space to earth, opening the door for the practical application of cutting-edge, ultra-secure communication....

Encryption methods used today are nearly, but not completely, impossible to hack, but with more advanced computing power the forms of encoding that protect information sent online will become more and more vulnerable. Quantum key distribution, however, is unique in that any measurement of the transmission by an eavesdropper disturbs the transmission, thereby alerting the parties sending information.

So much for the mantra, "The Chinese steal technology but don't know how to innovate." Anyone who has seen China's tech boom up close knows how dumb this view is. Books with titles like "The Coming Collapse of China" are now in their dozenth edition, while China is surging ahead in key areas of technology. China now graduates 1.3 million STEM students from its universities each year, vs. 300,000 in the US. How good are they? As Prof. Graham Allison reports in his new book The Thucydides Trap:

According to the most recent Stanford University comparison of students entering college in the fields of engineering and computer science, Chinese high school graduates arrive with a three-year advantage over their American counterparts in critical-thinking skills. In 2015, Tsinghua University passed MIT in the U.S. News & World Report rankings to become the number-one university in the world for engineering. Among the top ten schools of engineering, China and the US each had four.

People aren't ready to admit this yet and the older generations might never admit it en mass, but disregarding parts of China, the east Asian world is already a better place to live than the west. Their next generation is not "less creative" despite performing better on tests. We are living in a paradigm shift, western Europe and America are breaking up into polities that hate each other and the average intelligence is dropping like a stone while east Asia continues to improve in every way.

Regarding quantum communications, it's not just encryption that would make this useful, it also has implications for communications speed and computer processing speed.
#14817421
I really wish Americans hadn't elected a president whose repeatedly tried to gut the budgets of our scientific funding institutions.

Or that they hadn't voted for the politicians who shut down the government and triggered sequestration.

Good for China, not being openly out of their damned minds.
#14817422
mikema63 wrote:I really wish Americans hadn't elected a president whose repeatedly tried to gut the budgets of our scientific funding institutions.

Or that they hadn't voted for the politicians who shut down the government and triggered sequestration.

Good for China, not being openly out of their damned minds.

Because these changing trends are due to one political party you disagree with and nothing else?
#14817423
As someone who was working in a lab when sequestration hit, actually yeah.

That alone did tremendous damage. A lot of projects also got canceled when the government was shut down because their grants didn't pay out and bills came due. Turns out that these long term projects don't just get interrupted, they often end.

What do you think happens when you don't fund science Hong wu? Did you think the Chinese outpaced us because China is just better at quantum math or something?

China is run by engineers who appreciate the value of science and developing new technologies.

Meanwhile we cut every single scientific institution in the US.

Turns out there are concequences to those attitudes.
#14817425
If you say so. I personally consider longer term trends, such as whether you are coddling gender studies majors instead of forcing people to go into useful fields, or what your policies are encouraging the next generation to be like. Per capita, there were enough western white people to compete with China et al. and perhaps even to continue surpassing them but it's clearly not going to happen after the fake refugee crisis etc.
Last edited by Hong Wu on 22 Jun 2017 14:06, edited 1 time in total.
#14817428
Gender studies majors do not hurt American research. Unless your under the impression that everyone has the innate skills and attitude to make it through a science program and do research that simply doesn't compute.

Also, you can't push people into useful fields THAT DONT HAVE FUNDING. How the hell are you going to increase employment in the sciences while cutting spending? One of the first things any scientist will tell you is that if you want to make money don't go into research. You work 80 hour weeks in a super competitive field for a relative pittance.

Telling people to go become scientists without providing funding increases will result in unemployed scientists.
#14817439
A straw man would be if I claimed you wanted to cut funding. What I'm actually saying is that funding has been cut and that the current government has pushed to cut it more.

There is absolutely a long term funding crisis and trying to warp these real tangible forces into your vauge whiney complaints about how you don't like the liberal arts is so far outside the field of any realistic analysis that it makes me think your a liberal arts major.
#14817441
Lol, come on. You guys try to do with this every single subject, turn it into some anti-Republican, pro-communist thing. In many areas the supply of STEM majors is not meeting demand. That means that it is not a funding issue or at most, is not exclusively a funding issue.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/artic ... nd-yes.htm

A comprehensive literature review, in conjunction with employment statistics, newspaper articles, and our own interviews with company recruiters, reveals a significant heterogeneity in the STEM labor market: the academic sector is generally oversupplied, while the government sector and private industry have shortages in specific areas.

Your experience is in the academic sector, correct? There are other sectors.
#14817446
I worked with funding from nemours children's hospital in a non-profit private research institute.

You realize that almost all basic research goes on in academic institutions right? An oversupply represents all the people we don't have the money to fund research projects for.

The private sector generally does different types of scientific projects, applied sciences, that do not develop the underlying scientific knowledge base. It also requires different skills, it is difficult to be trained in applied and basic science and in many fields almost impossible.

What we've sold people on, and what we fund through the government, is basic research and that is where we are falling behind.

This isn't because liberal arts programs are stealing all the future scientists.

But blah blah blah you have to defend Republicans no matter what and apparently it's communism to suggest that they might have caused problems.
#14817449
I'm just going to leave this here ...

"This week, China will start installing the world’s longest quantum-communications network, which includes a 2,000-kilometre link between Beijing and Shanghai. And a study jointly announced this week by the companies Toshiba, BT and ADVA, with the UK National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, reports “encouraging” results from a network field trial, suggesting that quantum communications could be feasible on existing fibre-optic infrastructure."

"China is not alone in its quantum-communication efforts. A team led by Hayford, together with ID Quantique, has started installing a 650-kilometre link between Battelle’s headquarters and its offices in Washington DC. The partnership is also planning a network linking major US cities, which could exceed 10,000 kilometres."


Bottom line: China is doing things one way, and others, including the US, which along with Eurpeans, pioneered the technology and China, through their spy network, largely stole the technology, are doing the same thing just in different mediums.
#14817453
I think we are getting a little off track here. My underlying point, and the point of the article, is that the Chinese are surpassing the west in terms of human quality. Whether more academic funding would have changed whoever gets quantum communications working first is unlikely to mean anything in the long run. I guess Mike missed this point and just wants to focus on who has the medal.

Edit: Before you go there, Google says the United States spends roughly 9x as much money per student as China does.
#14817455
And the goal post moves and Hong wu claims that the topic is not the topic but his vauge I'll defined feelings are!

Most of China outside of the coastal provinces are illiterate peasants. No they aren't magically better people or some other inane nonsense like that.

Human quality is such a vauge concept as to be meaningless.

Glad you gave up on trying to pretend that funding in the US isn't an issue.
#14817465
If you read my post and the article, it's about education and creativity. The quantum communications thing is just one example. Honestly I think that was clear and your failure to grasp that, or even to accept that human quality is a thing is pretty sad. It's fitting though really, the refusal to accept that differences in human quality exist is how this could happen in the first place.
#14817470
If you read my post and the article, it's about education and creativity. The quantum communications thing is just one example.


Chinese scientists are notoriously uncreative. They have a culture built so thoroughly on respect for authority that a lot of their scientific articles are wholesale repetitions of their superiors work and would be viewed as basically plagerism in the US. Many people also complain that Chinese grad students also have to be trained in critical thinking from scratch since disagreeing with someone seen as your better is considered very nearly taboo. Asia in general focuses it's education to wrote learning and basically abandons critical thinking and creativity.

I suppose it was presumptuous of me to assume that you understood the basic dynamics of the scientific community before trying to diagnose it.

American institutions and scientists are very strong in terms of quality and culture, they are also vastly underfunded which is the main problem with american science today.

Honestly I think that was clear and your failure to grasp that, or even to accept that human quality is a thing is pretty sad. It's fitting though really, the refusal to accept that differences in human quality exist is how this could happen in the first place.


This from someone who replied to my comment that not everyone is capable of becoming a scientist with the assertion that everyone is totally capable of being a scientist. You are the one claiming that everyone is equally capable of doing high level creative scientific work and ignores inherent human differences between people and their capabilities.

But then, your position often shifts around to whatever best suits you at any given moment. Cause your feels or whatever.
#14821017
mikema63 wrote:I really wish Americans hadn't elected a president whose repeatedly tried to gut the budgets of our scientific funding institutions.

Or that they hadn't voted for the politicians who shut down the government and triggered sequestration.

Good for China, not being openly out of their damned minds.


True, but we can always steal the technology, no big deal.


mikema63 wrote:
Chinese scientists are notoriously uncreative. They have a culture built so thoroughly on respect for authority that a lot of their scientific articles are wholesale repetitions of their superiors work and would be viewed as basically plagerism in the US. Many people also complain that Chinese grad students also have to be trained in critical thinking from scratch since disagreeing with someone seen as your better is considered very nearly taboo. Asia in general focuses it's education to wrote learning and basically abandons critical thinking and creativity.


Yea, that's been my experience working with Chinese and Koreans in particular (use to often travel to both countries in the past). They are quality engineers, but when it comes to "out of the box thinking" for lack of a better term. They suck... It's cultural for sure. Some of them would get soo surprised when I would just openly disagree with their manager for example. :)

Just look at the behaviors in graduate school to get an idea. Often the international students are more concerned with the mechanics of solving a problem, rather than the underlying concepts.

All of that said, they can improve and change, so it's not all doom and gloom. I also figure, younger generations won't give a fuck about those cultural norms either, and will be more willing to just do whatever the fuck they want.

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