Quantum Computers: The Future of Bits and Bytes
Quantum computers. I bet you when you heard that your mind just shut down. There’s a joke that quantum physicists just throw the word “quantum” in front of everything to coin new terms. But when you get down to the nitty gritty details, quantum physics is just the study of subatomic particles, that is particles that are smaller than an atom. Usually, photons and electrons.
The Original Ancient Computers
Today’s computers:
It fits in my hand?! 📱
IBM’s Q System One
Superposition, Schrödinger’s Cat, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Wave-Particle Duality
Erwin Schrödinger came up with a novel idea that something can be and cannot be both at the same time. To showcase this theory, he created an experiment where he put his cat in a box and in that box, he also placed a contraption where there was a 50/50 chance that it would kill his cat. Now until he opened the box, Schrödinger said that his cat was both alive and dead at the same time! 😲 You can imagine that his cat was not happy about this.
How is this related to computers and programming you might ask? Currently, computer processors are basically made up of transistors, and whether these transistors have a current flowing through them or not, they are a 0 or 1, false or true.
Transistors can only either be a 1 or be a 0, not both. This makes sense in our world of common sense. In computer science, a 0 or 1 is simply known as a bit.
Fun fact: 8 bits make up a byte, which is one character. This is the smallest unit of memory in many computers. This is what we commonly refer to in the amount of memory our phones can hold in GB or gigabytes.
In the world of quantum computing however, a bit is called a quantum bit, or a qubit. A qubit can be both a 0 and 1 at the same time, much like how Schrödinger’s cat is considered to be both alive and dead at the same time. This concept is called superposition in the world of quantum physics, or Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Quantum physics namely is the study of particles that are smaller than atoms, usually photons and electrons. In classical physics, photons travel in waves and electrons act like particles. In the quantum realm however, things can get groovy. Photons act like particles and electrons act like waves. This is known as wave-particle duality.
Wave Function Collapse
To determine the value of a qubit, we’d have to measure its spin. However, this can get tricky because once a quantum particle is observed, its spin changes. This is called wave function collapse. A qubit is both a 0 and 1 at the same time, until it is observed. This makes encryption and cyber security experts wow, because that means quantum encryption is essentially unbreakable (at least as far as we know now).
Entanglement
One last interesting property of quantum particles is that they can be entangled. If you split a photon in two by shooting it through a certain type of non-linear crystal called barium borate, those two photons become entangled. Thus, measuring the spin of one entangled photon, you immediately know that the other entangled photon is of the opposite spin, either up or down. Albert Einstein called this “spooky action at a distance”. No matter how apart they are, even if they’re on opposite sides of the planet (test proven), they’ll still be entangled.
When I find Schrödinger, it will be he who is both alive and dead at the same time…
