Exploring Quantum Computing and Qubits

This is what they look like. There are two of them.

These are from our lab in Burnaby in British Columbia.

From the outside, they look like giant black monoliths.

Big metal boxes, about 10 feet on a side, 12 feet tall.

And they are powered, they have a fridge inside them,

a refrigerator that cools these chips to almost absolute zero.

Just a wisp, a fraction of a degree above absolute zero.

Hundreds of times colder than interstellar space.

Amongst the coldest and most isolated and extreme conditions that humans

have ever been able to engineer.

These fridges, interestingly enough,

which are called pulse tube dilution refrigerators,

have a thing called a pulse tube,

which emits a sound roughly once per second,

which sounds eerily like a heartbeat.

So if you have the opportunity to stand next to one of these machines,

it is an awe inspiring thing, at least for me.

It feels like an altar to an alien god.

They really are impressive machines.

At the heart of this big box is a tiny chip about the size of your thumbnail.

And on this chip resides all of the wonder and magic that makes this thing go.

In quantum mechanics,

there's this concept that a thing can exist in two states,

which are mutually exclusive at the same time, quote unquote.

And I'm using those words because the English language was

developed before we had concepts to describe what these things actually are doing.

Imagine that there really are parallel universes out there.

And now imagine you have two that are exactly identical in every respect,

all the way out to the horizon, as far as we can see,

down to the last little atomic detail of every single thing,

with only one difference.

And that's the value of a little thing called a qubit on this chip.

It's a contraction of quantum bit.

And that qubit is very much like a bit or a transistor in a conventional computer.

It has two distinct physical states, which we call 0 and 1 for bit.

In a conventional computer, these are mutually exclusive.

That device is either one or the other and never anything else.

In a quantum computer, that device can be in

this strange situation where these two parallel universes have a nexus,

a point in space where they overlap.

And when you increase the number of these devices,

you, every time you add one of these qubits, you double the

number of these 500 of these bits,

you have something like 2 to the 500th power of these guys

living in that chip.

So the way I think about it is that the shadows of these parallel worlds

overlap with ours.

And if we're smart enough,

we can dive into them and grab their resources and pull them back into

ours to make an effect in our world.

Now, this may sound very odd to you and bizarre.

And in fact, I am using language that a normal theoretical

physicist probably wouldn't use.

But this is what I'm telling you

is absolutely correct and in line with the way that these things actually work.

The doubling of the number

of these qubits on the chip has happened once a year for the past.