[thomasjames]

Cultural overtones aside, this reminds me of how qualifiers that describe the comparative or absolute superiority of some technology or process are inherently fragile and do not always age well. Things with words like "very", "ultra" or "extremely" in their name are sort of hopelessly bound up in their own time period. There are many papers (mostly from the 90s) that refer to ULSI instead of VLSI, in the mistaken belief that we had now moved beyond the adverb "very" to qualify large scale integration to another era that could only be described as "ultra" large scale integration. Moore's law made these updates seem kind of silly and it seems like we all just stuck on VLSI.

[edanm]

Interesting. Although to be fair, in this particular case, the qualifier does make sense, exaclty because it is a one-time event. It means "the first time we build a Quantum Computer that is capable of doing something a classical computer isn't capable of, thereby proving it really is Quantum, thereby proving Quantum Computation can really happen in our universe". It really is a one-time event to prove a specific hypothesis.