[klickverbot]

> I think this is a pretty small point to get hung up on. The rest of her article is perfectly reasonable.

The above isn't the only place that betrays her lack of understanding, though.

For instance, she confidently writes "Ion traps are used for example by IonQ and Honeywell. They must “only” be cooled to a few Kelvin above absolute zero," but this is just wrong; trapped-ion qubits do not, a priori, require cryogenic cooling. Yes, lowering the temperature can be useful for incidental reasons, as it improves the vacuum quality and reduces some technical excess noise sources, but this is simply an engineering choice. Many of the high-profile results in trapped-ion quantum information processing were in fact achieved in room-temperature systems. And even if one does opt for cryogenic cooling, the ~tens of Kelvin regime of interest here is incomparably easier to reach than the tens of milli-Kelvin required for superconducting qubits and other solid-state spin platforms (where those elaborate dilution refrigerator "chandeliers" are actually required to keep the qubits intact). In fact, in ratiometric terms, the temperatures of interest are actually closer to room temperature than to that millikelvin regime!

Like many physicists, I'd naturally be inclined to agree with Sabine Hossenfelder as far as her distaste of marketing hype is concerned, but in making authoritative-sounding statements without having the knowledge to back them up, and misrepresenting what one would hope she knows are the actual scientific facts in the service of a punchy script, she is hardly doing any better than those private-sector hype evangelists she ridicules. Beware of Gell-Mann Amnesia…