To try distract you from these times of war and disease, let me tell you a joke: \u201cSchrodinger takes his cat to the vet, for a check-up. The vet comes back 10 minutes later and says, \u201cWell, I have good news and bad news\u2026..\u201d If you snickered at this, you know a bit about the Schrodinger Cat paradox, and therefore perhaps a little bit about quantum physics. For those who did not, the paradox explains the seeming contradiction between what we see with our naked eye, and what quantum theory tells what actually is in the microscopic state. The \u2018Copenhagen Interpretation\u2019 of quantum mechanics. states that \u2018a particle exists in all states at once until observed\u2019. Schrodinger\u2019s cat is in a box, and could be alive or dead. However, till the box is opened, you would not be able to know whether its state is. Thus, the vet\u2019s quandary above.<\/p>\n
This principle, among others, powers one of the most exciting and bleeding edge advances in technology: Quantum Computing. I have written about it before in this publication, but to summarise: Our current powerful computers follow the principles of the Turing machine, where information is encoded into bits (1 and 0) and a series of operations (AND, OR, NOT, etc.) make these bits compute. A quantum computer uses qubits or the quantum version of bits; a qubit is not permanently a 0 or a 1, but it can be both at the same time! Only at the end of the computation, or when the box is opened, you can know whether it is a 0 or a 1, but during the computation process its exact state is indeterminate and can contain bits of both! If this went whooshing over your head, console yourself with what Bill Gates said in a 2017 WSJ interview: \u201cI know a lot of physics and a lot of math. But the one place where they put up slides and it is hieroglyphics, it\u2019s quantum.\u201d.<\/p>\n
A quantum computer can exploit these properties of quantum physics to perform certain calculations far more efficiently and faster than any computer or supercomputer, inspiring the likes of Microsoft, IBM and Google to work feverishly on this new form of computing. This is especially urgent because Moore\u2019s Law is flattening, but the problems that need to be solved are becoming more complex: climate change, artificial general intelligence, drug personalization. While this is super exciting, a recent BBC article (https:\/\/bbc.in\/3pA7pIY ) about the \u2018quantum apocalypse\u2019 made me pause.<\/p>\n
A hidden force behind ecommerce, online banking and trading, crypto trading, social networking, messaging, almost everything we do is encryption. Most encryption uses public and private keys, and that in turn uses arcane mathematical calculations using prime numbers. Using a Turing computer to crack this encryption is virtually impossible, it would take thousands of years. However, potentially, a quantum computer would do this in mere seconds. Every minute, huge amounts of encrypted data are harvested without us knowing and stored in vast data banks, waiting for the day that they can be decrypted. Today there is nothing data thieves can do with this treasure trove, \u201c\u2026but once a functioning quantum computer appears that will be able to break that encryption\u2026 it can almost instantly create the ability for whoever\u2019s developed it to clear bank accounts, to completely shut down government defence systems \u2013 Bitcoin wallets will be drained.\u201d says lyas Khan, CEO of Quantinuum. Not only this, but current encryption methods will be useless, halting online banking transactions, ecommerce, social media interactions, everything. . The security of every public blockchain will be under threat from quantum computing power, since it relies on heavy duty cryptography; it was no coincidence that the price of Bitcoin dropped sharply the day Google made its announcement of achieving Quantum Supremacy a year back. This is the Quantum Apocalypse.<\/p>\n
The word is gearing up for this post-quantum world. Google, Microsoft, Intel and IBM are working on solutions, so are specialist startups like Post-Quantum and Quantinuum. The UK government claims that all its top-secret data is already \u2018post-quantum\u2019. The BBC talks of a \u2018beauty parade\u2019 taking place at the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST), \u201cto establish a standardised defence strategy that will protect industry, government, academia and critical national infrastructure against the perils of the quantum apocalypse.\u201d Formidable new cryptographic methods like quantum key distribution are being developed, where even if the message gets intercepted no one can read it, much like the aforementioned Cat<\/p>\n
All of this will not be cheap, nor will it be easy. But we have no choice in the matter \u2013 most of our world runs digitally now, and its wheels need to be kept humming. And, to do that, we will need to think out of the Box.<\/p>\n
Written By<\/p>\n
Jaspreet Bindra<\/p>\n
Founder – Tech Whisperer Ltd., UK | Chief Tech Whisperer – Findability Sciences| ex-CDO Mahindra, Microsoft, TAS | Author – The Tech Whisperer<\/p>\n\n