AlmaBust
New member
- Joined
- Feb 20, 2026
- Messages
- 15
I'm a third-year physics major, and I thought I had a pretty solid handle on things. Classical mechanics? Fine. Electromagnetism? Struggling but surviving. Quantum mechanics? Okay, honestly, it's been kicking my butt, but I was starting to feel like I at least understood the BASICS. You know, wave functions, superposition, entanglement—the greatest hits. 
Then I stumbled across the Blake Johnson IBM research paper 2023 quantum stuff, and now I'm sitting here wondering if I accidentally signed up for the wrong degree. Like, this man is a Distinguished Research Scientist at IBM . DISTINGUISHED. His team is responsible for the hardware AND software components involved in executing quantum programs. He converts quantum programs into the actual signals that control quantum processors . That's not physics—that's WIZARDRY.
I read that he got his PhD from Yale in 2011, worked at Rigetti as Chief Quantum Engineer, was a Senior Scientist at Raytheon BBN, and now he's at IBM leading quantum platform development . And I'm over here celebrating when I successfully calculate the energy eigenvalues of a particle in a box without making an algebra mistake.
The thing that's really messing with me is the gap between what I'm learning in class and what people like Johnson are actually DOING. In my quantum mechanics course, we're still working through problems on paper—wavefunctions, potentials, perturbation theory. It feels like learning to paint by numbers while Blake Johnson is out there painting the Sistine Chapel with qubits.
I tried to read one of the papers from his team, and I got to the second paragraph before my brain just... noped out. There's this part about "boson-qubit mapping" and "gate decomposition specific for IBM quantum devices" . I literally don't know what half those words mean together. Boson I know. Qubit I know. Boson-qubit mapping? That's apparently a whole thing where you map bosonic modes to multiple qubits . For two modes with max two excitations, you need SIX qubits . SIX! For something that sounds so simple!
My roommate (computer science major, insufferable) was like, "Oh yeah, error mitigation and post-selection are huge for achieving high fidelity in quantum simulations" . And I just stared at him like, "I don't even know what fidelity means in this context anymore."
The wildest part is that these guys are simulating QUANTUM GRAVITY on IBM processors. Like, actual Hamiltonians that could test whether gravity is quantum . The paper talks about simulating interactions that would be "beyond experimental reach" in real life because you'd need frequencies above 10^21 Hz . That's not just beyond reach—that's laughably impossible. But they're simulating it on a chip.
Anyway, I'm not dropping out. Probably. But I am definitely going to need to step up my game if I want to ever work at a place like IBM. Anyone else feel like they're light-years behind the people actually doing this stuff? How do you even get from quantum mechanics problem sets to leading quantum platform development at IBM? Asking for a friend. (The friend is me. I'm the friend.)
Then I stumbled across the Blake Johnson IBM research paper 2023 quantum stuff, and now I'm sitting here wondering if I accidentally signed up for the wrong degree. Like, this man is a Distinguished Research Scientist at IBM . DISTINGUISHED. His team is responsible for the hardware AND software components involved in executing quantum programs. He converts quantum programs into the actual signals that control quantum processors . That's not physics—that's WIZARDRY.
I read that he got his PhD from Yale in 2011, worked at Rigetti as Chief Quantum Engineer, was a Senior Scientist at Raytheon BBN, and now he's at IBM leading quantum platform development . And I'm over here celebrating when I successfully calculate the energy eigenvalues of a particle in a box without making an algebra mistake.
The thing that's really messing with me is the gap between what I'm learning in class and what people like Johnson are actually DOING. In my quantum mechanics course, we're still working through problems on paper—wavefunctions, potentials, perturbation theory. It feels like learning to paint by numbers while Blake Johnson is out there painting the Sistine Chapel with qubits.
I tried to read one of the papers from his team, and I got to the second paragraph before my brain just... noped out. There's this part about "boson-qubit mapping" and "gate decomposition specific for IBM quantum devices" . I literally don't know what half those words mean together. Boson I know. Qubit I know. Boson-qubit mapping? That's apparently a whole thing where you map bosonic modes to multiple qubits . For two modes with max two excitations, you need SIX qubits . SIX! For something that sounds so simple!
My roommate (computer science major, insufferable) was like, "Oh yeah, error mitigation and post-selection are huge for achieving high fidelity in quantum simulations" . And I just stared at him like, "I don't even know what fidelity means in this context anymore."
The wildest part is that these guys are simulating QUANTUM GRAVITY on IBM processors. Like, actual Hamiltonians that could test whether gravity is quantum . The paper talks about simulating interactions that would be "beyond experimental reach" in real life because you'd need frequencies above 10^21 Hz . That's not just beyond reach—that's laughably impossible. But they're simulating it on a chip.
Anyway, I'm not dropping out. Probably. But I am definitely going to need to step up my game if I want to ever work at a place like IBM. Anyone else feel like they're light-years behind the people actually doing this stuff? How do you even get from quantum mechanics problem sets to leading quantum platform development at IBM? Asking for a friend. (The friend is me. I'm the friend.)