Book excerpt: Quantum computers are hypothetical quantum information processing (QIP) devices that allow one to store, manipulate, and extract information while harnessing quantum physics to solve various computational problems and do so putatively more efficiently than any known classical counterpart (5). Physical objects as they are, QIP devices are subject to the laws of physics. No doubt, the application of these laws is error-free, but noise - be it external influences or hardware imprecisions - can sometimes cause a mismatch between what the QIP device is supposed to do and what it actually does. In recent years the elimination of noise that result from external disturbances or from imperfect gates has become the "holy grail" within the quantum computing community, and a worldwide quest for a large scale, fault-tolerant, and computationally superior QIP device is currently taking place. Whether such machines are possible is an exciting open question, yet the debate on their feasibility has been so far rather ideological in character (45) (66)(110) (162). Remarkably, philosophers of science have been mostly silent about it: common wisdom has it that philosophy should not intervene in what appears to be (and is also presented as) an engineering problem, and besides, the mathematics employed in the theory of fault-tolerant quantum error correction (FTQEC henceforth) is rather daunting. It turns out, however, that behind this technical veil the central issues at the heart of the debate are worthy of philosophical analysis and, moreover, bear strong similarities to the conceptual problems that have been saturating a field quite familiar to philosophers, namely the foundations of statistical mechanics (SM henceforth). Reconstructing the debate on FTQEC with statistical mechanical analogies, this book aims to introduce it to readership outside the quantum computing community, and to take preliminary steps towards making it less ideological and mor