Andrew Houck

Entanglement doesn't let information travel instantaneously.

And yet, there is some instantaneous linkage between particles.

In principle, yes, you could have that over arbitrarily large distances.

And that's one of the key pieces for building interesting quantum technologies.

The others are called superposition.

This is the idea that an object can be more than one thing at the same time.

For a computer, we store information as zeros or ones, but a quantum computer could store information as zero and ones at the same time, and that allows you to explore a much larger space in your algorithms.

When you observe a system, you only ever get one outcome.

So if I ask just the right question, then the system, which could have been sort of in a superposition of everything that ever could happen, suddenly becomes only a subset of those things.

And that allows you to sort of search for patterns in data, periods where something repeats over and over again.

These kinds of things are often the things we're looking for when we run some kind of algorithm.

It's also important for error correction.

In quantum computing, information is very fragile and you can get these very small analog errors that are very hard to correct.

But you can ask the question, did an error occur?

And as a result, you get the answer either yes or no.

And if you get a yes, it makes the error much worse, but also something that we can fix.

That's right.

So a stranger's cat can be both alive and dead at the same time.

But when you look at the cat, you only ever see a cat that's alive or dead.

But until you look, it can be both.