A FORMER De La Salle pupil has become a leading critic of scientific claims made by global technology giant Microsoft about its quantum computing capabilities.
Lecturer and computer scientist at the University of St Andrews, Henry Legg, has become a key voice in an impassioned academic debate, after Microsoft Quantum claimed to have made “a new state of matter”.
Microsoft is an important developer of quantum computing: an emerging field of computer science that uses the principles of quantum mechanics to perform computations.
Having been a critic of the company’s work over the last few years, Dr Legg said he had made Microsoft Quantum aware of issues in its research before they made their “scientific breakthrough” public earlier this year.
The US tech giant announced in February that it had made the world’s first quantum chip, Majorana 1, which is “capable of solving meaningful, industrial-scale problems in years, not decades.”
Dr Legg meanwhile undertook analyses of Microsoft’s work, which he said showed that the firm’s software they used was “full of bugs”, and their claims were therefore “fundamentally flawed and wrong”.
His other analyses showed that their announcement had a “central claim that was inconsistent with the actual underlying data”.
Since the firm published their “discovery”, Dr Legg has since filed ‘comments’ – the scientific world’s way of saying that no data supported the claims – to the American Physical Society and Nature, where they are under review.
The JEP spoke to Dr Legg about why he has taken action against the firm, which features heavily on his social media and in international scientific platforms.
The Jersey-born physicist, who left the island to study physics and mathematics at St Andrews, said his actions were rooted in the belief that “we do science correctly”.
“I have been repeatedly telling [Microsoft] of issues with their research for years,” he said. “However, the latest claim makes some of their previous issues look minor, it is so detached from reality and evidence that it needs to be challenged publicly.”
“Both of these issues show their claim to the world’s media to have produced a topological qubit is just not true,” he added.
Dr Legg explained that corporate interest is “dictating what gets into the literature”, at odds with “proper science”.
He said: “It’s really important to me that we do science correctly. Ultimately if we allow such things to go uncontested, it reduces the public’s confidence in science and evidence based claims.”
If his concerns are not adequately addressed by Microsoft, Dr Legg said he could seek the firm to make an official retraction or ask scientific journals to publish an “Expression of Concern”.
Dr Legg said: “I believe the concerns are serious enough to warrant significant action, and the scientific community, outside of Microsoft, has been broadly supportive since I started raising them publicly.
He added:”My focus is on ensuring that the scientific record reflects reality, and on pushing back against the erosion of scientific standards when a big tech company treats the scientific literature as a tool for generating press releases, rather than for reporting genuine discoveries based on rigorous validation.”
