In the 1940s, the first electronic computers emerged: machines like ENIAC and Colossus that were enormous, power-hungry systems built with vacuum tubes and rudimentary circuits. Yet within just a few decades, computers had spread across the world, eventually becoming so small that systems containing billions of transistors could fit into your pocket in the form of a mobile phone.
From the very beginning of these transformations, scientists had one big question: How far can we keep shrinking these computing systems?
Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors on a chip roughly doubles every two years! Think about that for a moment; Moore’s Law was not merely a prediction. It also came with a warning: there would be a physical limit to how far transistors could be miniaturized. Because once their dimensions reach the atomic scale, quantum mechanics enters the picture; electrons begin to tunnel through barriers, energy levels become unstable, and classical scaling begins to break down.
This may remind you of quantum computers, but there is a subtle point here: quantum mechanics has played a fundamental role in the development of the very classical computers you use today, from the very beginning. Transistors, lasers, and semiconductor physics all rely on quantum effects.
Amid these developments, a controversial lecture by Richard Feynman opened up a new line of research. He argued that if nature itself is quantum mechanical, then to simulate nature efficiently, we should use quantum systems themselves. And that was the spark that set us on the path to where we are today.
In the first episode of Season Four of Radio Psiket, we set out to answer a fundamental question: Is the future of computing really in the hands of quantum computers? And can they deliver on the promise of “Practical Quantum Advantage”?