>"he idea sounds like magic, pure and simple. You create a light beam that can make substances vanish, give them properties they shouldn’t possess, or turn them into a perfect mimic of another substance entirely. It’s 21st-century alchemy, in principle capable not just of making lead resemble gold, but of turning ordinary materials into superconductors."

[...]

>"For a quantum mechanical system, the equivalent is to know how its quantum wave function evolves in time, which is determined by a mathematical function called the Hamiltonian. And there’s the rub — in all but the simplest systems, such as a hydrogen atom, the Hamiltonian becomes too complicated for researchers to calculate the dynamics of the wave function exactly."

In the absence of that knowledge — needed to calculate in advance what control pulse you need — the only alternative seemed to be trial and error: trying out some initial control pulse and then iterating it by running the same experiment again and again."

PDS: Take out the word "quantum" above.

Now, think about what we're dealing with as a system of multiple waves, multiple frequencies, except that we can't see them or have any other way of knowing what they are.

A "black box" of multiple waves, at multiple frequencies, in other words.

There's nothing quantum or magical about a system like that.

It's just a system where the input to get the output we want cannot be pre-determined, because we cannot know the exact state of a system at a given instant of time.

(Hey, sounds a lot like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle -- "we cannot measure the position (x) and the momentum (p) of a particle with absolute precision. The more accurately we know one of these values, the less accurately we know the other." I wonder if there's a relationship there?

Intuitively, my mind tells me that anything that science calls a "particle" today -- is really just the instantaneous snapshot of a wave packet of multiple waves at multiple frequencies, and this is why, and that the science of tomorrow -- will completely acknowledge this...).

So if we can't know ahead of time how to modify a system of waves to our liking, we have to experiment, use trial-and-error, and repetition, to have any hope of engineering the output to our liking... as is exactly true with any black box system...

But, getting back to a system of multiple waves, this gets into some other topic/problem areas around this subject...

Such as, how a wave can be used to read the vibration/oscillation/frequency of another wave, how that can be done in a system of many such simultaneously oscillating waves, fourier analysis, and how small can a process like that be scaled to, and what's the maximum frequency of waves that a process like that can be scaled to, etc., etc.

Which actually brings us back to "the collapse of the wave function"... (Could a wave A, given a wave B, collapse wave B's wave function? Then (if that gets solved), could a wave A given a series of waves (a wave system) collapse the wave function of that entire series/system of waves? Questions related to this area include such things as "how do you speed a wave up", "how do you slow a wave down", and things like the phenomenon of how strobe lights at the proper frequency can apparently "slow things" down, even "reverse" them (i.e., rotating fan blades)...)

When science reaches the point where we can read (and subsequently write/modify) any wave, at any frequency, at any distance, in any system of waves (without destructively interfering with all of the others) -- then we'll be at the borderline between a scientific civilization, and a magical one...

Perhaps today's quantum computers are early foray into this future knowledge and the possibilities it might hold...

"Any science sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic"

-Arthur C. Clarke