Katia Riddle

What have you done for me lately?

Quantum.

Once you get past the question of what it actually is, the next logical question, when will it actually pay off?

We hear that quantum science and engineering can one day help.

do things like cure diseases, or design new materials, or optimize things like traffic or supply chains, or use cases that we can't even fathom right now.

I talked to a lot of scientists for this story about this question, and even the ones who are working on the front lines of this field are really managing expectations, both theirs and ours, on that question.

Right.

Quantum is the physics of the smallest things, electrons, photons, other subatomic particles.

The wild part is they don't follow the same rules as the stuff that we can see.

Their behavior is weird, but it's consistently weird.

I have not seen it, but now I want to.

One of the concepts you hear a lot is superposition.

That means a particle that can be in multiple potential states at once.

You've heard of Schrodinger's cat, dead and alive.

Like the universe hasn't decided if the cat is dead or alive until the box containing the cat is open.

It's a cloud of probabilities.

Right.

And this is a concept that's been around for a while, almost as long as the whole field that was established 100 years ago around the time of Niels Bohr and Einstein.

Yeah.

So what I've been talking about is quantum physics.