Why quantum computing needs a two-part series
Krishna explains why his Nature cover paper on quantum computing hardware requires two episodes rather than one. Episode 54 covers the theoretical foundations: what a qubit is, what a quantum algorithm is, and the countercultural origins of the field in the 1960s through 1980s, when researchers worked on quantum computing in their spare time with no formal research program. Episode 55 will cover the competing hardware approaches and the paper itself.
- The hardware landscape the second episode will cover includes trapped ions, neutral atoms, superconducting qubits, spin-based systems, and Majorana modes from Microsoft, the last of which Krishna says he is skeptical about.
- Krishna notes the quantum computing industry has grown from a niche academic curiosity to what he estimates is now a trillion-dollar-scale field, with some university physics departments devoting half their faculty to it.
- A stated goal of the two-part series is to dismantle hype, contrasting the scientific reality with how the word quantum is used in Marvel films as a catch-all for time travel, teleportation, and memory erasure.
Transcript
This chapter, from the episode video's captions · 777 words
4:31that paper and put it into context a single episode is going to leave me unsatisfied and more importantly it's going to leave our audience unsatisfied because um we have spoiled our audience with the history of the thing and then the contextualizing of the thing and then what the paper is and putting it in context with the broad broader, you know, world and blah blah blah. >> There's a lot >> that goes on in the quantum computing world, right? It's a it's a whole new paradigm of computing. So, you can imagine there's a theoretical side, there's a software side, and there's a hardware side. >> The paper that I'm co-author on is mostly a hardware paper. M >> but in order to really understand why
5:13it's such a big deal and why it's on the cover of nature I think you know we need to put it into the context of this larger quantum computing ecosystem I mean there's so many competing technologies that are out there's trapped ions there's neutral atoms there's superconducting cubits there's spins that's the one that um we're going to talk about there's um myano modes there from Microsoft. I don't know why that's on there to be honest, but um we'll get into that a little bit later. So, there's all these storylines and to really appreciate it, you need a lot of context. First, you need the context about what quantum computing is in general and why people
5:55should care. >> I hear about quantum, you know, there's Marvel movies that use the word quantum. Yeah. >> Uh it was one of the worst Marvel movies. I think the Ant-Man one. Quantum something. Literally one of the worst. Um it's used as this rhetorical device for a lot of different ideas that are totally unrelated >> Yeah. >> to the actual Yeah. >> uh scientific study. And so I I think this was going to be really interesting. You know, I see the quantum supremacy stuff from Google. All these headlines all the time. >> I don't know how to parse. >> I didn't even know that there were different types, >> right? >> I thought it was just all the same quantum. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> And so this is I think is going to be interesting in helping to really distill
6:36down like what are we actually talking about? Exactly. Yeah. And so that's what today's episode is about. We're going to talk about the history of the field from a theory perspective. The next episode that's going to happen next week is when we're going to go into the hardware modalities and talk about how to actually build a working scalable quantum computer. So the the paper is actually going to be next episode. This episode is the theoretical foundations and the setup for why we would even want to build something like this. If it's so hard, there better be a good reason for why we're building it. Right? So, the questions that we're going to answer here are things like what is a cubit?
7:17What is a quantum algorithm? Right? And I want to contrast today's multi-billion dollar technologies. I think now it's like in the trillions to be honest. >> Um, >> against the humble beginnings of this field, it's like countercultural beginnings in the 1960s, '7s, and ' 80s. We're going to focus a lot on some of the human stories behind it. Um, because at the time people were thinking about quantum computing in their spare time. There was no research program when this thing started about quantum computing. Now there's like entire half of a department of physics that will just be doing quantum computing at certain universities. Right? So from humble
7:58beginnings to where we are now, it's a it's a it's an incredible story. I want to give our audience a sense of why everyone is so obsessed with building one. And um I want to dismantle the hype is another big thing that I want to do here because we we hear a lot of hype about quantum as you mentioned. It's in every Marvel movie whenever they need some gimmick. uh to like time travel or like teleport, >> multiverse, what? Like everything has a quantum nexus. >> Yeah. Like erase memories that the the new Spider-Man movie, I haven't watched it yet. I I want to, but there's probably some quantum quantum nonsense in there. Um so if you're not careful, you can get it wrong, right? The hype is
8:40definitely real and it's definitely there. There's a common phrase that's
From How Quantum Computing Actually Works (Part 1)
Part I of our quantum computing deep dive traces the field from Bell and Feynman to Deutsch and Shor—and explains what quantum computers actually do differently from classical machines.