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Quantum gold is the future, and it is closer than you might think.
This week, my partner Haim Suchowski and I had the honor of meeting John Martinis, this year’s Nobel Laureate in Physics, at the Qubit event.
Let me bring my grandfather, Dov (O.B.M.), into the story to help explain what John’s Nobel is about. A hundred years ago, Dov bought two identical gold coins that somehow ended up in my underwear drawer for safekeeping.
Now imagine I toss one of these gold coins in the air and grab it in my fist. Classically, there’s an equal chance of ‘heads’ or ‘tails.’But in the quantum world, both can be true—until you look.
Baffled? You’re in good company. Feynman said, “You can’t understand it, you can only get used to it,” and he was a Nobel Laureate, too.
Even stranger, quantum theory says I can toss both coins through a mysterious “device” that weaves an invisible link between them. After the toss I have one coin in each hand, but the contents of one hand will always match the other. This invisible weaving is called entanglement—one of the foundations of quantum computing.
Sadly, we can’t entangle real gold coins (yet!). One reason is that while they look identical, microscopically they’re still distinguishable—so they don’t behave like true quantum twins.
And that’s the challenge: quantum doesn’t easily scale up to our macroscopic world. This is why John's contribution—discovering macroscopic quantum tunneling—was so transformative. It enabled the creation of the first quantum bits (qubits) and led to the first demonstration of a quantum computer outperforming a classical one, in the experiment led by John and the Google team.
Today, thanks to the ground breaking work by teams in PsiQuantum, Xanadu and others we have other types of qubits: for example, indistinguishable photons traveling through directional couplers can be entangled. And since making those photons is far more expensive than gold coins, you’d better treat them with the best couplers you can find 😉 (@QuantumPulseVen ).
John now continues his work at Qolab, driving toward practical quantum computers that can help solve humanity’s toughest problems. He’s optimistic it’s coming soon.
In a roundtable hosted by Classiq with Israeli quantum company CEOs, Alan Ho shared his perspective on the industry’s progress and the real-world applications already emerging. Also in the round table was Prof. Dorit Aharonov whose pivotal work on fault tolerance is a key enabler to making scalable quantum computers. Dorit emphasized the need to focus on Software not just hardware.
My takeaway:
Quantum computers’ real-world impact is much closer than most people think.
And the Nobel Committee? They should probably give John Martinis two gold medals—he might just find a way to entangle them.
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