← Back to context

Comment by jgrahamc

3 days ago

Quantum was one of those words that sounded really cool (back then). Just look at TV shows like Quantum Leap (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Leap_(2022_TV_series)) or Sinclair's QL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_QL)

10 comments

jgrahamc

Reply
ajb  3 days ago

Amusingly this is true of an older discovery that now seems very commonplace: vibration, around the time that scientists understood the simple harmonic oscillator, and the fact that the same mathematics applies to lots of things from sounds to pendulums. So to make their nonsense sound sciencey, spiritualists started talking about vibrations as well.

Not sure if there are any older examples.

  • inanutshellus  3 days ago

    Great analogy. They'd be using "Quantum" the same way one might've also used, say, "Turing Computer Services". THey want the legitimacy of sounding elite and beyond-the-cutting-edge while presumably being expert at merely replacing bad RAM and defragging harddisks.

    Early 2000's version was simply putting ".com" or ".net" in your company name so you sounded enticing to investors, or when everyone added "crypto" and to their company names.

    Of similar vein I expect current generation "Artificial Intelligence" will likely be renamed and thought of as quaint or audacious, like the renaming of "Modern" furniture aesthetic to "Mid-Century Modern".