José Martí, the “quantum supremacy” and a competent socialism

José Martí, the “quantum supremacy” and a competent socialism

By: Luis A. Montero Cabrera: The twentieth century was born with a revolution of scientific knowledge. What was supposed immutable by philosophers, theologians and sorcerers about matter was not. Before it was believed that light was one thing and stones another. The light is impalpable, only detectable with our eyes, and the stones can be touched and weighed, to compare their amounts of mass with respect to the gravity of the earth. Science showed us that mass can behave like light and that light has mass, but much smaller in size than our own human bodies.

One thing is how we see the universe with our senses and from our individualities and another as it really is. We are not its owners, only part of it. We inhabit our own scales of space and time in this great setting. Martí was amazed at the similarities and differences in natural and social processes in 1884 and wrote: "Universe is an admirable word, sum of all philosophy: the one in the diverse, the diverse in the one". [1]

The mathematical reasoning was what allowed us to understand the matter. That science that was born and grown by counting stars and sheep, became our main logical tool. It allows us to think beyond our limited room in the cosmos to understand much of what is not directly within the reach of our senses.

A particular success was with the so-called Quantum Mechanics. It was born without any intention of economic results and thanks to Algebra and Statistics that had developed before and had not created significant material value. Those who developed them did not work for immediate applications, but for the most characteristic and unique of the human race: wisdom. Quantum Mechanics was then used to understand, model and calculate physical phenomena originated in atomic dimensions. It was an extraordinary success because with it it was possible to predict very precisely some magnitudes of those scales that before could only be measured with strange experiments.

Among the cotton tools used in Quantum Mechanics is the “linear combination”. It is the mathematical name of a kind of sum where several independent terms contribute in some way to a resulting value. The weight of each of its contributions in the linear combination is given by certain "coefficients", which multiply such terms of reference [2]. It is as if we are trying to describe the biology of each of us as a sum of terms based on the biology of each of our great-great grandparents. That way, our DNA would be approximately the result of the linear combination of the 16 great-great grandparents that every human being has. The difference between siblings would be given by the way (or the “coefficient”) with which each of these great-great-grandfather DNA participates in the sum. We have the same family tree of DNA as a sister of father and mother. We differentiate ourselves from it because the “coefficients” provided by each of the ancestors do not have to be the same: a Spanish great-great grandmother could influence the sister more and an African great-great grandfather more in her brother.

Most of the recent successes in the applications of Quantum Mechanics are due precisely to the linear combination. The state or form in which a system is at a given time can always be represented in terms of other associated states.

In a very recent news, and apart from the sensationalist tufo that has this term, the consortium of "Google" announced that it has achieved "quantum supremacy." It turns out that they built and operated one of the so-called “quantum computers” with more capacity than their competitor of the “IBM”. They expressed the possible combinations of the active or not, changing states of a system of objects in a very short time compared to what a classical computer would. It is achieved because they work by combining all possible states almost simultaneously. They use the logic of Algebra and Quantum Mechanics intensively.

 
Google claims 'quantum supremacy
 
It is at this point that our needs to “unlock”, as our president usually expresses, socialist forms of production can find a useful reference following the Martian ideology that the universe is unique and also diverse. Socialism and capitalism are in the same universe. They differ essentially by the form of ownership and consequently by the final utility of goodwill. This is the value that workers create and that does not directly go their pockets as wages. In capitalism it is for a few owners and in socialism it is for everyone. The competition with IBM and many other organizations led Google to produce that scientific result in a race without brake for innovation and progress. The competitive and innovative process that drives it is part of the same universe common to capitalism and socialism, where it is the form of ownership and not the management methods that give diversity.

Following patterns of painfully failed socialist attempts, our often "locked" economic system is now oblivious to competition between entities that are all over the people. We thus deprive ourselves of a well-managed engine that could maximize innovation, progress and efficiency in management. Experimenting with the competition could propel us unimpeded thanks to diversity, in this universe that Martí helped us understand. We can do a mental exercise with our daily realities and surely we will come up with many economic and social scenarios where diversity and competition could transform and "unlock" everything. Isn't it revolutionaries to experiment with the competition to change this that must be changed?