> If the paper's authors had chosen to release their circuit, they would certainly have been recognized for the important progress they made in the science of quantum computing. Other researchers would have gone on to build on their work, and the entire scientific community would be richer for it.
... and the world could well have been unsafer. There is pretty strong reason not to release insights which could be used as an attack on public key cryptography. We already know the fix anyway, post quantum cryptography algorithms.
Sometimes scientific curiosity has to step back when it comes to potentially dangerous research. Scott Aaronson recently [1] compared this case to when scientists stopped publishing on nuclear fission research because the possibility of developing an atomic bomb became concrete:
> When I got an early heads-up about these results—especially the Google team’s choice to “publish” via a zero-knowledge proof—I thought of Frisch and Peierls, calculating how much U-235 was needed for a chain reaction in 1940, but not publishing it, even though the latest results on nuclear fission had been openly published just the year prior.
They are not doing Science, they are just bragging.
Oh please, the government could easily force them to hand over their research. This is not a serious argument.
Would it be really so straightforward for the government to do that?
i doubt they don't have access already
Plenty of people doubt evolution.
Doubt without evidence is just noise.