Personal Learning

Here’s a new one to me. Qubits. As in “Quantum Bits”, or the building blocks of a new era of computing. The short version is that IBM (and others) are trying to harness quantum behavior by building computers from qubits, and these computers would be like nothing we’ve ever seen.

Obviously, you can tell I am a geek by how fascinated I am by this topic. Quantum Physics blew my mind (and kicked my butt) in engineering school, but I think this stuff is amazing. For those of you not in tune with quantum theory, I’ll do my best to catch you up a bit.

Quantum behavior was theorized by Einstein and his buddies back in the 1920s and has largely been proven in the years since then. It describes wacky behavior like, “two entangled particles will always be a matching pair such that changing one instantly results in a change in the other, regardless of the distance between them.” (If this makes you think of the teleportation from Star Trek, your mind is on the right track.) With that appreciation of quantum physics, consider that other aspects of quantum behavior make it possible for a qubit to exist in a nearly infinite number of possible states at the same time (the bits in classical computers exist in one of two possible states).

So if these folks can really build computing devices out of qubits, they’ll be able to calculate things we can only dream of today. People are theorizing things like: simulating protein folding to cure diseases (you know, AIDS, cancer, etc.) in weeks instead of years, making weather predictable years in advance, and continually screening our bodies for disease. Whoa.

So there’s my nugget for the day. Qubits. Now we both know what a qubit is and why we might care. Here’s the Engadget article that turned me on to this.