John Martinis

You have to think about materials.

You have to fabricate it, build complex control systems.

Engineering and physics is, to me, quite beautiful.

And just to tell you a little bit about me, you know, I grew up building things.

And as an experimentalist,

You know, I like to build instruments, you know, build experiments to show this.

And this was kind of the ideal project for me because, you know, from very early on, it was like, well, let's do this great physics, but let's also build something.

And by saying, well, what do we have to do to build a quantum computer?

That kind of led me to know what physics we have to test and what are the kinds of things we have to build.

And that's just the way my mind works.

I'm much more practically oriented.

So it was a perfect field for me to get in.

And that's kind of what, you know, intuitively led me to, you know, trying to do this in graduate school.

And I think it's just so fascinating the amount of engineering and technology you have to do to make this work.

That's right.

So...

Right now, we're about 50 or 100 qubits for the superconducting case, but they can be fully controlled and run real algorithms and do very complicated things.

They have a lot of other systems that can do that.

I think the newcomer on the block, which looks good, is Neutral Atoms, where they've made big neutral atom systems, but they're still working to get the gates controlled really well and the like.

But what's happened right now is we can run genuine algorithms on that.