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Quantum World

The culmination of a century of work has led to the beginning of a new era; quantum computers.

What is a quantum computer? Always a good question to start with, unless you’ve recently taken some advanced physics classes.

As a species, we have always been enamored by numbers.

Obsessed with the universal language.  Anywhere from research on the ever-expanding Pi to the fibonacci sequence, we have found solace in the magic of these numbers, so much so that the more we grow as a society the more quantified we become.  Everything we do is quantifiable, jobs, shopping habits, the routes we drive every day, sports, and even our diets.  There is just something about numerics that entices the human spirit, allowing us to soar to great heights and find untold riches in every field.
It is our fascination with numbers that has pushed us further into the depths of our universe to discover theories that we cannot even perceive with the human eye.  These numbers have gone as far as to drive us to understand a world so small that it’s mere fabrication is only now becoming a real possibility.  These quantum particles have been estimated to be as small as 10-15 nanometres wide.

We all know about Einstein’s famous theory of general relativity and the special theory of relativity (we’ve at least heard the words before).  What many don’t know is that these theories have ushered us into a new age of how we understand the universe around us. With this special theory of relativity (how bigger masses warp the space-time field to create gravity) Einstein had postulated that there were other massless particles, known as photons, that were light and could be affected by gravity.  This led to an amazing train of thought that still continues today with the likes of string theory and even to the point that we have discovered the elusive higgs-boson particle (the God particle).
Delving further into the quest of mapping out our quantum world, the question had always been waiting to be asked, “Once the quantum world is confirmed, what is it that we will do with it?”   We have been waiting a long time to have the ability to ask this question, longer than you may realize (you can always Google Planck’s constant or God particle to get an accurate depiction on how long it’s been).  Finally, the time is here that we can start thinking of practical applications of the quantum world, even if for the moment it is limited.  The best practice I can recommend is to start thinking of what part of your business process could be changed by having it take seconds instead of hours?  For example: our Denver web design concepts would change entirely, allowing us to add tons of interactions all onto one page that could create an experience for someone so great that they could see the greatness in any company that we work with.  The culmination of a century of work has led to the beginning of a new era; quantum computers.

The Basic Breakdown

What is a quantum computer?  Always a good question to start with, unless you’ve recently taken some advanced physics classes.

The basic idea of a quantum computer starts with how a regular computer works currently.  In today’s most modern computers, information is stored as binary (1’s and 0’s) which act as switches to turn access to this information on and off, controlling the flow of information at a certain pace limiting the amount of processing that can be done at any single moment so as not to overload your computer.  Within a quantum computer the process becomes somewhat different based on two key principles in quantum physics, quantum entanglement and superposition.

Superposition

Every atom is composed of three main particles that make up its composition: protons, neutrons and electrons.  As we all know, electrons sit on the outside of the atom, revolving incredibly fast around the outside to create a shell of sorts for the atom (hence how we have solid matter).  As we see it, the electron would be a single particle moving so fast around the atom that you cannot see it at any one time, giving it the appearance of being a shell.  According to superposition since an electron moves so fast then it will technically “exist” in all places at once simultaneously, meaning, that when we encode information into this electron cloud, our previous version of binary changes to something else entirely called a Qubit which can have those 1’s and 0’s be open at the same time.  This increases the processing speed of information by an incredible amount, giving way to a whole realm of new possibilities.

Quantum Entanglement

Quantum entanglement is how the information is related between all those 1’s and 0’s that are existing at the same time.  We are able to align qubits together via this process, as one qubit is a 1 another would be a 0 allowing them to work together and with information.  They would then change to the other number to be able to work with another qubit.

The overall picture is that instead of being constrained to being a 1 or 0 all the time, a qubit has the ability to switch between the two to work with as many other qubits as possible to work at an unprecedented speed.  To give you an idea, your regular household computer works in giga-flops-per-second, where as, a 30 qubit quantum computer would work at about 10 teraflops-per-second (1 teraflop contains 1000 gigaflops in it).  Instead of having to process one computation at a time a quantum computer would be able to process many advanced equations at the same time and at lightning speed.

How does this affect me?

With the advent of quantum computers, everything about our internet-based world will change.  Right now, we see a trend in modern search queries moving towards a mobile first design.  Imagine how fast pages are going to load once websites are processed by a quantum computer.  No longer will 3 seconds be a long wait time, instead, 3 nanoseconds will become a standard (not a fact yet, just a prediction).  For someone like Tag Team Design, Denver web design would change entirely.  The front-end and back-end of web development would need to be molded to fit the new processing power, allowing for far more content to be added.  Web design would allow for incredible amounts of interactions to keep people on any given site.  This changes how your website would be able to draw people in.  360 VR would have the incredible potential to generate at an incredible rate and have a fluid design to any website (or whatever interaction feature you would want).  This means for your business that the possibilities are endless and would allow you to gauge potential clients in an unprecedented manner.

So what does this mean for the modern world?  What is the practical applications of this technology?  Unfortunately, that’s a very tough question to answer being that there is a ton of different things that could come of this.  Some possibilities we won’t even be able to imagine yet because of how new this technology is.  There are some practical ideas revolving around where this technology could have an immediate effect though.

Online Security

If you’ve read about quantum computers before then you may be aware that a big problem with the incredible processing power that they offer is that they would be able to crack current encryption codes with no problem.  Being that the current models of computers have to work one step at a time to process encryptions meant that it would take a long time to decipher codes but with a quantum computer it would take them no time at all since they could process tons of information all at once.  Luckily, a solution is being worked on currently called quantum key distribution.  The idea behind key distribution is that each message is encrypted and requires a specific key to decrypt it so if a message is intercepted then it cannot be deciphered, making it user specific.  Although this idea is still not all the way there yet, it still shows great promise in creating a more secure environment for online transactions.

A.I.

Although artificial intelligence is still new and not really a working idea quite yet, the invention of quantum computers gives great promise to how machines would be able to learn information.  Say instead of trying to go through one piece of information at a time, they would be able to process multiple stimuli within an environment at the same time.  This would allow to learn similar to our human brains.

Pharmaceuticals

The amount of information that goes into drug development currently is nearly unfathomable.  Imagine trying to figure out how chains of chemical compounds fit together and then fit with DNA, which is pretty big in itself.  This leads to development of drugs to be fairly time-consuming.  A quantum computer could potentially cut the amount of time it would take to figure out how a chemicals would react with individual DNA strands, breaking down the development time of drugs to a fraction of what it used to be before.

This is only to name a few ideas.  Realistically, anything that requires the processing of numbers could be changed in every field in the world.  Instead of trying to solve complex problems one step at a time, we could throw them into a quantum processor to work on all steps at the same time (more or less).  Either way, the power of a quantum computer would process information so fast that our exponential growth that we have seen in technology over the past 30 to 40 years would grow even further and increase at a rate that we couldn’t imagine not even 10 years ago.

As a Denver web design company, we are here to embrace this new trend when it is available.  Countless industries will be completely changed once this technology is available to us.  Get ahead of it now and start seeing the possibilities within your realm.

The future looks bright with the development of this technology and only time will tell where it will take us.  One thing we know is that when these finally hit the market we’ll be stepping into a whole new world that we have never seen before.  The possibilities are scary and exciting, yet unavoidable so the best course of action is to embrace our new found power.