[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-14#/media/File%3ARadioc...

You can play around with "quantum programming" through (e.g.) some of IBM's offerings and there has been work on quantum programming languages like q# from Microsoft but its unclear (to me) how useful these are.

My understanding is that they pretty convincingly showed that the thing they built acts as a qubit. This means that if its not doing what they think its doing (the "topological" / Majorana stuff) then they accidentally made a qubit which works some other way. That isn't outside the realm of possibility but it is fairly unlikely.

He was used to working on completely different levels of abstraction, so when faced with concrete numbers he could easily make a mistake that a school-child (or hacker news commenter) could spot.

On the other hand it's actually not completely necessary to have a superpolynomial quantum advantage in order to have some quantum advantage. A quantum computer running in quadratic time is still (probably) more useful than a classical computer running in O(n^100) time, even though they're both technically polynomial. An example of this is classical algorithms for simulating quantum circuits with bounded error whose runtime is like n^(1/eps) where eps is the error. If you pick eps=0.01 you've got a technically polynomial runtime classical algorithm but it's runtime is gonna be n^100, which is likely very large.

Its been well understood since at least 1993

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.71...

As far as your routing/switching qualms go I think they are mostly addressed by entanglement swapping? Person A and person B can each make an entangled pair and send me half, and I can (locally) do stuff which leads to the halves they keep at home becoming entangled. Then they can use teleportation or whatever to do whatever they want between themselves without me knowing anything about it.

The two theorems apply to logical systems which prove facts about the natural numbers. While this is an incredibly broad class of things, it doesn't include physical theories like quantum mechanics.

We know (for example) silver atoms have mass, and that massive objects exert gravity (which we understand as warping of space-time according to GR).

We know that we can put silver atoms in quantum superpositions of being in different positions (for example in a sequential Stern-Gerlach type experiment).

We have (essentially) absolutely no theoretical understanding of what is going on to space-time when a thing with mass is in such a superposition. Quantum mechanics does not successfully model gravity, and general relativity contains no superpositions, so the situation is completely beyond our theoretical understanding. This isn't a theoretical consideration, this is something real that you can do in an undergrad physics lab experiment pretty easily.

Now the problem is that the models we have developed so far to deal with this situation turned out to be (wildly) too difficult for us to test. I think it is very far from clear that the Oppenheim & co model falls into this category - imo its completely reasonable for them to be spending theoretical effort working out what is needed to test their model.

The Nobel prize fields and criteria are a bit random, they're essentially just whatever Alfred Nobel wrote in his will.

Physics as a discipline hasn't really stalled at all. Fundamental physics arguably has, because no one really has any idea how to get close to making experimental tests that would distinguish the competing ideas. But even in fundamental physics there are cool developments like the stuff from Jonathan Oppenheim and collaborators in the last couple of years.

That said "physics" != "fundamental physics" and physics of composite systems ranging from correlated electron systems, and condensed matter through to galaxies and cosmology is very far from dead.