They've developed a nice proof on the "bounds" of how quickly a quantum system can evolve.
I think the quote by the coauthor summarizes it best: "'How fast can a quantum system evolve in time?' Establishing general and tight quantum speed limits is crucial to assess how fast quantum technologies can ultimately be, and can accordingly guide in the design of more efficient protocols operating at or close to the ultimate bounds."
This is a theoretical quantum physics paper... even experimental quantum physicists struggle to understand what they mean most of the time. So don't expect to much clarity from the paper, but if you want to look here it is: http://journals.aps.org/prx/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevX.6.021031
Like many stuff in theoretical physics - hey, most of the physical model is rather unlikely. They not even have a proper arrow of time in the standard model nor can they predict the spectral gap with certainty along a long list of problems.
But you know, changing paradigms is a slow process and physicists have been shown to be the slowest to accept new things, especially multidisciplinary theories/findings:
because the only thing that can save us is better physical understanding.
Think about it: we have 2, 3 major problems. We need massive amounts of clean energy, something with 95% availability and not with batteries. If someone brings up a really good reflow battery, I might change my opinion on this.
Anyways, we need energy to clean up the mess. Second problem would be a technology to evacuate and I mean a life supporting planet, not mars. Every colony on mars will die when earth collapses.
The technological level required to survive in a purely hostile environment is enormous. Image the production line to create something like a oxygen generator from scratch.
Me may even need to build a sun shield to artificially reduce the sun impact on arctic and other critical zones. You can't build a sun shield with chemical propulsion, you have the sunwind as constant acceleration which you have counter.
Don't get me wrong, we have social problems as well, starting from money to distribution of power. But those can't be solved if the earth is in ruins.
There are solutions to all of those problems, at least the physical ones. I stumbled upon another physical model over a year ago and the philosopher in me said, that the basic assumptions sound very logical and sound. I want to understand this model and spent quite some time trying to understand the model from the ground up. I checked references and tried to interpret newer findings under the perspective the new model provides. For me it sounded reasonable but I frequently asked physicists, my old profs, popular ones, ones with other "crazy" ideas, ...
The feedback is very, very sparse. The arguments are very often not even remotely logical sound and I found in my attempts to openly talk about that model 2 types of 'scientists'. The ones that openly try to understand new ideas from the ground up and those that are so convinced of their model, that they consciously or subconsciously (confirmation bias) ignore counterfactual measurements and logical reasoning. I stopped talking with later ones as they are a wast of time.
If your model fails to explain one experimental observed phenomena, it may be wonderful to predict certain effects, but you can never use it to argument against something, because it can't be the real implementation.
I go with the author of the theory that the whole strangeness of our standard model resulted from 2 assumptions that are not even well grounded. The late Einstein was right as in so many things.
Some Quantum Physics research has started yielding results that I think would show up if you were using wholly wrong abstractions/tools/techniques to understand something.
And yet we keep measuring what our models predict to extremely high levels of precision. We know there is something missing (gravity not playing nicely with quantum theory being the most obvious example), but it has worked remarkably well whether you like it or not.
I think this is an example of a work that simply can't survive the transition into layman-speak. I'm not even saying the article was bad per se, because I'm not convinced there's a way to make it much better.
It breaks down to "the shortest distance between two points depends on the terrain". It can translate to layman's terms very well... unless you insist on retaining terms of art like manifold in the "simplified" version. While there's nothing at all wrong with using appropriate terminology, there's also nothing at all wrong with starting with familiar models as approximations and working from there up to a more formal description either.
'It breaks down to "the shortest distance between two points depends on the terrain"'
Other than the trifling details that "shortest", "distance", "points", and "terrain" have little relationship to what most people would consider the normal meaning of the term, and that you also left out the fact that the terrain can be "chosen" somehow which is even less connected to what most people expect, yeah, sure.
I understood enough of what the article is trying to get at to be pretty convinced it just can't get there with the level of terminology it wants to use. There's limits on what concepts you can get to with any given degree of sophistication in terminology.
I think the quote by the coauthor summarizes it best: "'How fast can a quantum system evolve in time?' Establishing general and tight quantum speed limits is crucial to assess how fast quantum technologies can ultimately be, and can accordingly guide in the design of more efficient protocols operating at or close to the ultimate bounds."
This is a theoretical quantum physics paper... even experimental quantum physicists struggle to understand what they mean most of the time. So don't expect to much clarity from the paper, but if you want to look here it is: http://journals.aps.org/prx/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevX.6.021031