Abstract
We are witnesses nowadays in physics to an intense effort to built a quantum computer. In this essay, I point out that the failure of this enterprize could be in fact more intellectually exciting than its success. I conjecture that, despite the fact that we do not know any law of nature that would prevent us from building such a machine, it might not be possible, after all, to scale up the few qubits that have been realized so far. If this turns out to be the case, the consequences could be truly amazing: it would mean that quantum mechanics is indeed an incomplete description of reality, as Einstein thought, and it would also imply that certain types of computation - and the knowledge derived from it - are fundamentally inaccessible.
Gheorghe Sorin Paraoanu