Comment by nyrikki

> What precisely is meant by simulating the laws of physics?

IIRC That is in reference to the work around the Church–Turing–Deutsch principle which just classic physics.

Basically Turing machines only have access to the computable reals, which is a zero measure set, thus cannot simulate, but only approximate Newtonian physics. The claim is that quantum computers have access to all the reals, and thus could possibly simulate those real valued functions.

IMHO, "simulating the laws of physics" is an example of a common way of avoiding a very common and challenging issue of getting people to accept that we do not have access to almost all of the reals from algorithms, books, pens, papers, computers, etc...