Google on Monday announced Willow, its latest and greatest quantum computing chip. Google’s claims about this chip regarding speed and reliability were news in themselves, but what really caught the tech industry’s attention was an even wilder claim in the blog post about the chip.

Hartmut Neven, founder of Google Quantum AI, wrote in his blog post that this chip is so incredibly fast that it must have borrowed computing power from other universes.

Ergo, the chip’s performance suggests that parallel universes exist and “we live in a multiverse.”

Here is the passage:

Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astounding: it performed a calculation in less than five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1,025, or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it down, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This staggering number exceeds the time scales known in physics and far exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the idea that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, consistent with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.

That drop-the-mic moment about the nature of reality was met with skepticism Some, but surprisingly others on the Internet who claim to understand these things argued that Nevan’s conclusions were more than plausible. While the multiverse is a subject of science fiction, it is also an area being seriously explored by the founders of quantum physics.

However, the skeptics point out that the performance claims are based on the benchmark that Google itself created a few years ago to measure quantum performance. That alone doesn’t prove that parallel versions of you aren’t running around in other universes – just where the underlying scale came from.

Unlike classical digital computers, which base their calculations on whether a bit is 0 or 1 (on or off), quantum computers are based on incredibly small qubits. These can be on/off, or both (anywhere in between), and they can also utilize quantum entanglement – ​​a mysterious connection at the smallest levels of the universe between two or more particles whose states are linked together, regardless of the distance that separates them .

Quantum computers use this quantum mechanics to calculate highly complex problems that cannot currently be solved with classical computers.

The problem is: the more qubits used in the computer, the more error-prone they are. So it’s not yet clear whether quantum computers will ever be reliable enough and powerful enough to live up to their hype. Google’s mission with Willow was to reduce these errors, and Neven says it succeeds.