Cure cancer or detect the fission of 2 black holes millions of light years away, is complicated and important, YES; but sometimes we forget those are not the couple few of humankind's interests that can be worked over by science. Besides of discovering un-thought parts of the Universe, sometimes we take a step further, and decide to invent them. In that small step from discovery to invention is the walk of sciences and technology, because sciences is also interested in your PC crashing or your internet shopping payment transaction working smoothly.
Right in the middle of discovery and invention there's something that literally changed our lives, computers; a branch of sciences that is attempting to metabolize one of the most heated arguments of the previous century: what happens when the laws of physics as we know them, do not serve for our purpose, because we're reaching into the quantum kingdom?
Fasten your seat belts and place your seats in vertical position. Because on my 100 subscribers milestone, I'll talk about quantum computers.
A classic computer (yes, the dreaded moment to call computers "classic", thus tagging us as "old" arrived... Time passe,s my friend), to work, transports and manipulates bits (things that are in two states, 0 or 1). A bit is, for example, the amount of information you receive as feedback from certain questions like "did you brush your teeth?", "Do you want to marry me?" (I wrote the whole article just to place this question in the middle... Take that into consideration woman).
In a quantum computer, instead, we try to exploit certain laws that govern the behavior of elemental particles atoms and molecules. The laws (classic) that we see everyday in our scale are quite different from that behavior (quantum) in smaller stuff. Then if you lived in an atomic environment stuff like this would happen:
- In quantum, particles and atoms can be at several places (different stages/states) at the same time. From there the famous Schrodinger's cat experiment, in which the poor animal can be dead or alive. This is called superposition principle, and it's very important since it allows to prepare elements that can be in the state of one and zero at the same time (the qubits, the units of quantum information).
- OK, we already have a cat in the box, and nothing or nobody checked how's he doing. That is the secret, little Padawan. If we open the box and observe the zombie kitty, the superposition is lost, giving place to one of the two possible states (dead or alive). To explain, measuring does not reveal the previous state of the system (superposed): it changes it. This is something! Interpretation of quantum mechanics. The only thing a physicist can do before measuring is calculate the probability it may result one or another state (meh, even a commoner can do that calculation). The outcome when one measures is called "Wave function collapse", or "I've no fucking idea of what's going on but all the experiments result as expected".
- Another crazy effect, evidenced by Einstein and friends (Podolsky and Rosen) to demonstrate that the joke of quantum physics wasn't of their liking, is the quantum entanglement; a couple of particles entangled mean that the state of one can be measured while checking the other one in an arbitrary long distance. This allows another crazy thing, quantum teleportation, of which the record is to transmit the quantum state of a particle 143 kilometers away. The experiment was done at the Canary Islands, Tenerife and La Palma, Something that also demonstrated how far is a physicist able to go just to get some really cool paid vacations.
Odd. Anti-intuitive. Quantum. Sexy.
Now, back into our scale, we could mention a lot of thing about how quantum computers were researched, but only for the ease or reading (and writing) I'll only name Richard Feynman in 1959. Named "plenty of room at the bottom" (google it at youtube as " Richard Feynman "Tiny Machines" ", almost an hour and a half, I warned you). In this lecture, Dick does not only proposes to miniaturize computers and use the quantum properties of atoms, he also settles the bases of nanotechnology.
But, it was in 1994 that the things got serious. That year Peter Shor described the first quantum algorithm of prime decomposition/integer factorization that returns a result in reasonable time (unlike classic ones, that'd take millions of years). This is very important, since the security of several informatic processes rely on this problem to be hard to solve. Basically, a good and hypothetical quantum computer could hack into ANY encryption we know. But, do not despair Politic Class! until today, the largest Quantum computer has only 14 qubits, we need thousands of qubits to outperform a classic computer.
Everything is theoretical and nice, but, why don't we have a Quantum computer yet?
Several companies (and a continent) are attempting to develop quantum computers (like IBM, Google or Microsoft). A particular Canadian company, D-Wave Systems, claimed to have made a 28 qubits one in 2007, 128 qubits in 2008, and today one that surpasses the 1000. But, it may be a hoax since nobody was able to prove that the D-wave chips really work on quantum info to solve algorithms.
To show us that this is no small talk, in 2013 Edward Snowden kicked and unveiled a couple of classified NSA documents, unveiling some secret spy projects. One is "Penetrating Hard Targets", a project that is not a simple happy title to seduction strategies, it consists in the development of a quantum computer with not-so-happy intentions... As breaking into US citizen's privacy. On the "good" side, a computer like such could be used to fold proteins and develop medicine as never before, design meta-materials (something I've to write about)... Yet, the US prefers to use it to check if you watched too much porn at home or downloaded an MP3 off Youtube.
We are trying to surpass the frontiers of knowledge. Science is digging into unexplored landscapes (the black area of the map in Age of Empires), and we do not know what will be found. The nice thing about science is that it allow us to build things that were never built before (standing on the shoulders of giants), so... If eventually we find out that we will never have a quantum computer, at least we'll know why. Learning something new about the Universe. Perhaps, a new theory will come after that, even better than quantum. Leading into more and better discoveries and inventions. May the force (and funding) be with us.
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