A couple of interesting developments. First, there’s a quantum computing gate on a chip:
After recent success in using quantum computing for superconducting qubits, researchers from Delft have formed the first Controlled-NOT quantum gate. ‘A team has demonstrated a key ingredient of such a computer by using one superconducting loop to control the information stored on a second. Combined with other recent advances, the result may pave the way for devices of double the size in the next year or two–closer to what other quantum computing candidates have achieved, says physicist Hans Mooij of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Unlike today’s computers, which process information in the form of 0s and 1s, a quantum computer would achieve new levels of power by turning bits into fuzzy quantum things called qubits (pronounced cue-bits) that are 0 and 1 simultaneously. In theory, quantum computers would allow hackers to crack today’s toughest coded messages and researchers to better simulate molecules for designing new drugs and materials.
The special genius of a quantum computer is that it can check all possible answers to a problem and provide more or less instantaneous results. And speaking of instantaneous, here’s another major quantum development:
Researchers Suggest Quantum Dots as Media for Teleportation
According to recent research, tiny clusters of atoms known as quantum dots may be excellent media for quantum teleportation, a physics phenomenon in which information – in the form of a quantum state, a very specific mathematical “signature†of an atom – can be transmitted almost instantaneously to a distant location without having to physically travel through space. Teleportation is one facet of quantum information science, a developing field that could have a major impact on computing and communications.
The quantum world is a very weird place. The rules we use in our macro world simply don’t apply there; and the rules that do apply there don’t make a lot of sense to us. Things like this:
When it comes to quantum weirdness, people tend to fall into a couple of camps. The first camp is to point out that at our level of existence, the weirdness goes away so we shouldn’t worry about it. The other is to try to map quantum weirdness to existing ideas about spirituality. (The video clip above is from a movie that does the latter.) However, the two stories above suggest that maybe quantum weirdness is something that we’re going to have to grapple with up here in the macro world — not as spiritual phenomena but as part of the technology that takes us to a future very different from the world we live in now.