Agreed! It’s pretty alien. I’ve seen brilliant single author work, but nothing that uses “I” unless it’s a blog post. The formal papers are always the singular “we”. Feels very communal that way!
Nice to include the giants we stand on as implied coauthors.
Not being an academic, my (silent) reaction to singular "we" in academic writing is usually, "We? Do you have a mouse in your pocket? Or do you think you're royalty?" It's nice to hear of your more charitable interpretation.
There are, notably, two different if frequently confused “academic we” conventions, distinguished by their clusivity[1]: the inclusive “academic we” in constructions such as “thus we see that ...” refers to the author(s) and the reader (or the lecturer and the listener) collectively and is completely reasonable; the exclusive “academic we” referring only to the single author themselves, is indeed a somewhat stupid version of the “royal we” and is prohibited by some journals (though also required by others).
Yeah, it's the exclusive version that bugs me: "We tested the samples to failure on an INTRON tester under quasistatic conditions." It's nice to hear some journals prohibit it.
What’s the plan for dealing with cosmic rays? I worry about when your beautiful angstrom-precision qubit networks encounter a relativistic proton or muon.
At near surface level ( 80m above ground in clear dry air ) 42 litres of doped Sodium Iodide scintillation crystal will experience ~ one to two thousand gamma events a second .. most of relatively low energy (and ground sourced).
The fall off from low orbit to surface is substantial in both event numbers and energy level.
The higher energy cosmic sourced events at surface level are down in the hundred or less a second (IIRC).
If there's a plan it'd likely include having 9x redundancy hardware surrounded by water deep in a former salt mine .. that'd take cosmic ray events way down and provide a (best of three) x (tell me three times) "just in case" statistical sharpening.
None of that is needed. You're talking about surface events per square meter (roughly) and we're talking about a device with total dimensions smaller than a single TSMC 2nm transistor. The cross section is so small that the chance of it being hit over the lifetime of the product is ignorable. There are way bigger operational risks to worry about.
At an irrelevant scale. The cross sectional area of these devices will be 18 - 20 orders of magnitude smaller.
> Always a possibility under consideration...
We're talking about the cross section of a macro-scale (visible with the naked eye) chip vs. a cluster of a few dozen atoms. Certainly you can understand the difference of scale? Cosmic ray induced bit flips are extremely infrequent events at the datacenter scale.
What's the frequency at which a single, specific transistor will be struck? Not that a bit flip occurs somewhere in a large datacenter, but the chance of just a specific transistor being hit. Now reduce that 100-fold. That's the base rate we're talking about.
The liklihood of a particular structure being hit is very, very small. Negligible over the operational lifetime of the device.
In the long-term vision of scaled-up nanotechnology, there will of course have to be redundancy and mechanisms for disabling, removing, and recycling (or incinerating) mechanisms destroyed by cosmic rays.
As far as I understand it, smaller scale XFEL devices still suffer from poor aim, even though now these machines have been miniaturized to basement scales. They don’t need to be significant fractions of a kilometer anymore. This aim issue will probably be solved in the next few years. It’s an exciting time to be in X ray science, particularly anything ultrafast.
I haven’t used it for my research, but it’s an incredible local probe of electric and magnetic fields in materials. There’s no other technique that I’m aware of that smuggles information about the chemical structure of a single coordination sphere into such clean, distinct emissions. The brief excited state of the isotope after the first emission event and before the second is sensitive to practically everything. It all shows up in the deconvoluted spectra.
Shame nearly all the isotopes that work for this are not ones that are super interesting for modern quantum materials. Perhaps that will change out of necessity.
Nice to include the giants we stand on as implied coauthors.