Katia Riddle

Billions of dollars both from our government and from China's government, as well as tech companies.

Google, for example, continues to tout breakthroughs that they've made something called quantum supremacy or quantum advantage.

They have been bragging a lot about this new quantum computing chip they have called Willow, which they say is an indicator of real progress in the field.

Right.

So 2025 Physics Nobel was awarded jointly to John Clark, Michel Devoret, and John Martinez for their work, proving a concept called quantum mechanical tunneling.

So it's a fundamental concept of quantum that particles can tunnel their way through barriers that by the conventional rules of physics, they shouldn't be able to penetrate.

The work happened a few decades ago, but many people now credit it with laying the foundation for advancements in quantum that have happened since then.

Yeah.

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.