Where Do Quantum Computing Play Into Everything?

College Majors Engineering Majors
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<p>It’s pretty hard to find good information about young technologies because asking about how well they will pan out is a tough question to answer. Journal papers written by the guys who know the most about it are very technical and don’t address these questions because of the audience, or dodge these questions because the authors don’t know the answers themselves. </p>

<p>Popular science reporting on these things often gets things wrong and exaggerates the importance of these technologies. For example, when Intel succeeded on making an optical transmitter and receiver pair, tech articles were reporting on ‘a photonic processor’. </p>

<p>All that that system does is take a bunch of digital electrical signals, encodes the information of these electrical signals onto various colors of light, couples the light to an optical fiber, and on the other end of the fiber, decodes the lightwave into the old electrical signals. It’s just a wire. Sure, it is a very good wire in that it can carry a lot of information, but it certainly isn’t anything approaching a microprocessor.</p>

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<p>Also, entanglement (the core of the magnetic ion trap method) isn’t as simple as dinking around with some particles till they get stuck together like magnets or something. The difficulty of entangling a particle with the rest of the ensemble grows exponentially with each additional particle (in that the ensemble stays entangled for a shorter period of time). This makes the process extremely difficult, so there will have to be some new techniques developed or we won’t be seeing QC’s in our lifetimes.</p>

<p>Of course there are many other candidates: Bose-Einstein condensates, optical lattices in crystals, quantum dots, Josephson junction (or something superconducting-like), and lots of others probably that I don’t know about. You can’t really put a date on these things, but I think we’re not as close as some might like to believe, certainly not close enough so that we can do some serious computations that will rival modern supercomputers.</p>