Head of house? It’s not that the name given to the House Master at residential colleges within elite Ivy League schools had anything to do with southern plantations or slaves, but the word. That word. It was the same word, even if it came from Oxford Dons rather than Jefferson Davis.

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

Those words were written by Lewis Carroll, which was a pseudonym for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Guess what his day job was? Exactly, an Oxford Don. Coincidence?

Did the word “master” cause any student of any color or persuasion to suffer anxiety or depression? Did they ball up and blubber in the corner because the adult in the room was given the title House Master? Or did they hear a word that was the same word as a word they knew was supposed to offend them in another context, do the math, and conclude that the word had to go.

So what if no tear was shed; they could exert their power to force an otherwise benign word to disappear from the lexicon, because who would be the one person awful enough to stand up and say the word used by slaveowners is just a word. And with that, House Master became Head of House (or, at MIT, it was toss-up between “big cheese” and “Dumbledore”).

But surely more analytical minds wouldn’t succumb to the broken synapses that pervade the social sciences, right?

We take issue with the use of ‘supremacy’ when referring to quantum computers that can out-calculate even the fastest supercomputers (F. Arute et al. Nature 574, 505–510; 2019). We consider it irresponsible to override the historical context of this descriptor, which risks sustaining divisions in race, gender and class. We call for the community to use ‘quantum advantage’ instead.

The community claims that quantum supremacy is a technical term with a specified meaning. However, any technical justification for this descriptor could get swamped as it enters the public arena after the intense media coverage of the past few months.

In our view, ‘supremacy’ has overtones of violence, neocolonialism and racism through its association with ‘white supremacy’. Inherently violent language has crept into other branches of science as well — in human and robotic spaceflight, for example, terms such as ‘conquest’, ‘colonization’ and ‘settlement’ evoke the terra nullius arguments of settler colonialism and must be contextualized against ongoing issues of neocolonialism.

Instead, quantum computing should be an open arena and an inspiration for a new generation of scientists.

Quantum computing has a big cheese of its own, and it’s called Quantum Supremacy. You know why? It’s not because it’s a white computer, or one that spreads smallpox around to the indigenous computers, or even catcalls girl computers.

Here we report the use of a processor with programmable superconducting qubits to create quantum states on 53 qubits, corresponding to a computational state-space of dimension 2⁵³ (about 10¹⁶). Measurements from repeated experiments sample the resulting probability distribution, which we verify using classical simulations. Our Sycamore processor takes about 200 seconds to sample one instance of a quantum circuit a million times—our benchmarks currently indicate that the equivalent task for a state-of-the-art classical supercomputer would take approximately 10,000 years. This dramatic increase in speed compared to all known classical algorithms is an experimental realization of quantum supremacy for this specific computational task, heralding a much-anticipated computing paradigm.

It’s because it’s supreme. It may be true that the word “supremacy” is associated with the word “white” to create a phrase the evokes horror, but then, if the word “supremacy” is now off the table, is the word “white” as well? And what of the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause? Should that be renamed too?

At least with the word “master,” it’s the same word as used by slaveowners, even if derived from an entirely different source and having no connection beyond those in the heads of the Avengers of the Lexicon. But “supremacy” is nothing more than one of two common words strung together to characterize a racist cohort.

As the post-mortem of the Army-Navy football game reminded us that the most ubiquitous hand signal in society has now been deemed verboten because a 4chan meme caught the unduly passionate unawares, is that to be the fate of any word the righteous deem unacceptable? Who is to be master?

*Tuesday Talk rules apply.