Turns out the reality cat was dead and not alive.
A physics team led by Microsoft has withdrawn a high-profile 2018 paper that the company touched on as a major breakthrough in the creation of a practical quantum computer.
The paper was retrieved from a laboratory by Microsoft physics head Leo Kouwenhoven at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. He claimed to have found evidence of Majorana grains, which were theoretically long but not definitively discovered.
Accessible unions are at the heart of Microsoft’s approach to ocean-based computing hardware, which is lagging behind others such as IBM and Google.
But other physicists had questioned what was found after receiving more complete data from Delft’s team. Sergey Frolov, of the University of Pittsburgh, and Vincent Mourik, of the University of New South Wales, Australia, said data that cast doubt on Majorana’s claim appeared to have been withheld.
Now the authors published a withdrawal note in the prestigious journal Nature, which published the paper earlier, admitting that the blowers were right.
Data was corrected “unnecessarily,” he says. The note also states that a repeat of the error test that put down all the original data caused the Majorana to see a mirage.
“We are sorry for the community for not being scientific enough in our original manuscript,” the researchers wrote.
Frolov and Mourik ‘s concerns also sparked an investigation at Delft, which released a report Monday from four physicists who were not involved in the project. He concludes that the researchers did not intend to deceive but were “caught in the moment of happiness,” and selected data that meet their own expectations for a major discovery. .
The report summarizes breaking the norms of the scientific method with a quote from physicist Nobel laureate Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you cannot deceive yourself – and you are the easiest person to deceive . “
The Delft lab released raw data from its 2018 test on Monday. Frolov and Mourik say he should also release full data from his Majorana hunting project going back to 2010 to study others.