Floating above the world of computing—and the investors who love it—flies the notion that quantum physics will soon change everything. Quantum computers will design us new drugs, new batteries, and more. And then they’ll break standard encryption protocols, leaking our credit card data before we can buy any of these wonders.
You can’t swing a simultaneously dead and alive cat without hitting another claim that we are this close to harnessing the magical quantum computing bit—the qubit—that physicist Richard Feynman first challenged computer scientists to deliver nearly 45 years ago.
The problem is that the physics needed for his “machine of a different kind” that takes advantage of quantum physics’ tantalizing weirdness requires really hard physics. Whether Microsoft or Amazon or anyone else gushing in press releases has achieved this, however, remains nebulous.
For now, it seems, your encrypted data is safe(ish). “Seems like it’s always five years away,” as one financial industry observer told the Wall Street Journal in February, speaking of the technology—or 20 years, according to Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.
Or maybe it will never arrive. Today’s quantum computing investors are essentially backing competing physics experiments in a derby to create Feynman’s machine. While they’ve made progress, no clear winner has emerged. That’s despite claims of moves into practical use and demonstrations of small quantum computers outperforming ordinary ones in special cases.
The fundamental problem remains, however, that making robust “qubits” at the heart of a quantum computer—as opposed to the simpler “bits” processed by your laptop one—is hard-to-do physics.
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