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aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

Premature announcement? Article at Wired [wired.com] says Microsoft is retracting Quantum computing claim.

A Microsoft-led team of physicists has retracted a high-profile 2018 paper that the company touted as a key breakthrough in the creation of a practical quantum computer [wired.com], a device that promises vast new computing power by tapping quantum mechanics.

The retracted paper came from a lab headed by Microsoft physicist Leo Kouwenhoven at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. It claimed to have found evidence of Majorana particles, long-theorized but never conclusively detected. The elusive entities are at the heart of Microsoft’s approach to quantum computing hardware, which lags behind that of others such as IBM and Google.

WIRED reported last month [wired.com] that other physicists had questioned the discovery after receiving fuller data from the Delft team. Sergey Frolov, from the University of Pittsburgh, and Vincent Mourik, at University of New South Wales, in Australia, said it appeared that data that cast doubt on the Majorana claim was withheld.

Cherrypicking through the windows? Say it ain't so, Bill!

Monday, the original authors published a retraction note [nature.com] in the prestigious journal Nature, which published the earlier paper, admitting the whistleblowers were right. Data was “unnecessarily corrected,” it says. The note also says that repeating the experiment revealed a miscalibration error that skewed all the original data, making the Majorana sighting a mirage. “We apologize to the community for insufficient scientific rigor in our original manuscript,” the researchers wrote.

Frolov and Mourik’s concerns also triggered an investigation at Delft, which Monday released a report from four physicists not involved in the project. It concludes that the researchers did not intend to mislead but were “caught up in the excitement of the moment,” and selected data that fit their own hopes for a major discovery. The report sums up that breach of the norms of the scientific method with a quote from physics Nobel laureate Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”

So, Dr. Feynman, you think your physics are pretty good, eh?

Original Submission