John Martinis

So you hit upon upon the key idea here, maybe by accident, but it's very important.

Quantum mechanics was developed for the theory of small things, you know, electrons, atoms, you know, things, things that are that are the fundamental constituents of it, but very small.

And, you know, if you take an atom, it's made from electron and the nucleus.

You know, classically, they attract each other and they would just, you know, combine together.

And then atoms basically would have no size.

Why do atoms have size?

OK, that you know, that that was one of the strange things.

And it's because this atom is kind of not a point particle.

I used to say to my kids that the electrons were fuzzy.

OK, and quantum mechanically, it has some wave function and extended.

You can think of the electrons being all around the nucleus at the same time.

So it's a very strange behavior, but of small things.

And of course, very important as how atoms work and how we describe nature.

And you develop a mathematical theory for doing this that takes you until your third year in university to really know enough math to understand that.

But basically, these are forming waves, waves of the electron.

So you have kind of a wave and electron around the nucleus describing what the electrons are.

And these are kind of like standing waves.

You know, it's like hitting the string, you know, different length strings, different tangent strings form different notes.

These vibrations of the electrons around the atom can vibrate at different frequencies.

That's right.