Professor Michelle Simmons

speaker

76 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 21 Jul

Professor Michelle Simmons’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Science Friction · 03 | Dead and Alive: Plucky country · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

When you are trying to build a quantum computer, essentially what you're trying to do is control nature at its smallest scales.

It's an evolution of technology that allows humans to control the world at that level.

The devices are getting smaller every year, and so how can you make things smaller meant that new technologies had to evolve.

As you go below what we call about 100 nanometers, you get to the point where quantum physics starts to influence how classical transistors work.

The quantum world is more fragile.

It's different, obviously.

So how do you get something that small to compute?

At the beginning in the 70s and 80s, it was seen that that would be a problem, like a barrier to the continuation of computing, classical computing.

People started realising, actually, this is a benefit.

There's a new transformational kind of computing that's going to come along when you can start to do things with smaller physical states rather than the digital ones and zeros that we've been used to in the classical computing world.

And so I came to Australia because it was a land where basically people would take risks, would do things that were ambitious and work in a highly collaborative way.

If you imagine if I wanted to make the best physical system, what would it look like?

And I think this is about as close as you can get.

As soon as I realised the technology had the potential to be commercial, I felt a tremendous responsibility to translate it.

And I realised that I, just by nature, have a very infinite amount of energy.

And so I realised I felt the responsibility and I had the energy to do it.

So the way I describe superposition in my head, I have a visual picture and it literally is very simple.

You have a magnet, it's pointing at the North Pole, that's your one.

Your magnet pointing at the South Pole, that's zero.

If you get that magnet pointing to the equator, it's in essentially a combination of the upstate and a combination of the downstate.

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