Palmer: Banish Irrationals to End Quantum Weirdness — SkimNews
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- Tim Palmer at the University of Oxford proposed Rational Quantum Mechanics (RaQM), which bans any arrow in Hilbert space whose length squared would be an irrational number, declaring "Nature abhors a continuum"
- RaQM dissolves entanglement's "spooky action at a distance" and Schrödinger's cat paradox by making counterfactual measurements—those a particle never actually undergoes—mathematically impossible to perform
- RaQM caps qubit information capacity at 2^400, a limit more than 10 billion quadrillion quadrillion times larger than the estimated number of atoms in the universe, requiring more than 400 perfectly error-proof qubits for any meaningful quantum computation
- Shor's algorithm, the quantum recipe for factoring large numbers that motivates the industry's hunt for "Q-Day" decryption power, would fail under RaQM's finite-state constraints
- Howard Wiseman at Griffith University said the impact on physics would "pale against... the biggest revolution since quantum mechanics itself"
- Palmer argues RaQM reproduces every existing quantum-mechanics experimental result because the sieve against irrationals is fine enough to masquerade as standard theory
Why it matters: If Palmer's framework holds, quantum computers cannot run Shor's algorithm—the encryption-breaking target that has justified billions in industry and government investment and driven the global scramble for "Q-Day" defenses. The proposal is testable in the near term: RaQM predicts a hard ceiling on qubit information capacity, and experiments confirming the restriction would redirect a multi-decade, multi-billion-dollar R&D effort while rewriting the textbook interpretation of quantum mechanics.
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