I agree that when it comes to efficient quantum simulation, the basic physical ideas and mathematical axioms have been around for several decades in more-or-less their present form … it is mainly the theorems and the working simulation codes that are becoming cumulatively more general and more accurate.

That this progress will continue seems likely to me. Postmodern considerations enter when we ask (to adapt von Neumann’s phrasing) “can we foresee the character, the caliber, and the duration” of this progress?

There will not be a second edition of Nielsen and Chuang.

Matt, IMHO that process is well underway. For example, the postmodern literary idea that “randomness improves poetry” finds its cognate image in the lead sentence of Plenio and Virmani’s recent QIT preprint: “We consider the possibility of adding noise to a quantum circuit to make it efficiently simulatable classically.”

Although that sentence could have been written in the early 1970s (e.g., by Choi or Kraus), or even written in the mid 1950s (e.g., by Stinespring), it is only in our present decade that this fundamental “postmodern” principle of quantum simulation has been widely embraced.

It is not mentioned, for example, even in Nielsen and Chuang’s magisterial text of 2000 … if there is ever a Second Edition, this topic IMHO deserves a chapter.

… my own (cherished) favorite would be the musical works of Charles Ives …

… whose life story (as an artist) is almost as inspirational as his music.