Recently a couple of people have commented that like a suddenly appearing quantum particle, I seem to have come into the quantum computing field from nowhere.

It is true that I have never trained as a quantum physicist and that in the last few decades, I have never built a computer — beyond the days of studying to be a computer engineer (BSE in Computer Engineering, Case Institute of Technology, CWRU). But I could have answered tongue-in-cheek in keeping with the current conceptions of quantum physics: “Yes, I have entangled with the knowledge of Schrodinger, Bohr, and Einstein.” Or, “This knowledge which is all superposed incarnates whenever I begin to measure the possibilities of what is possible with quantum computation.” Or, “ I am a part of the universal wave-function and since all that possibility belongs to this wave it is part of me.” Or, as elaborated in the clever movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, “I merged with the quantum physicist version of myself in some other world created as an outcome of statistical inevitability.”

Instead, I want to emphasize that my path into quantum computing has been through Systems Thinking. I grappled with the nature of reality by immersing myself in mystical poetry and self-directed multi-disciplinary study and arrived at a unique way to perceive systems. This thinking was encapsulated in a three-volume series on fractals that culminated in the book “The Fractal Organization” (which on a happy side note also recently got included in a Forbes Executive Library), which even though was written based on visible macro-organizations, became instrumental in perceiving possibilities in micro-organizations of the nature of cells, atoms, and quantum particles. Learn more here.

The point is that given that no single point of view — regardless of how many physicists subscribe to it — can claim to have grasped the nature of reality, for us to get anywhere in the quantum computational field that by definition deals with the mysterious at the border of invisibility and therefore has to do with the nature of reality, will require diverse and even surprising curricula vitae.

The talk "The Dawn of Flame-Beings" was delivered at Cultural Integration Fellowship in San Francisco on February 12, 2023. It is based on the book by the same name, and I reference it here as it begins to integrate concepts from cosmology, mythology, biology, chemistry, quantum physics, amongst other areas, that in my opinion are all necessary to continue to push the boundaries and advance - even academically - any independent discipline or field.