In our technology-enriched lives, we are constantly inventing out gadgets and computers to use. But sometimes, our tremendous computing power is simply not enough. However, an amazing new invention has been theorized and is actually being prototyped by companies such as IBM. This will revolutionize computing as we know it. It will be billions of times faster than any modern computer we have today. The whole idea relies on the principle of a superposition.
A superposition is the principle that photons, particles of light, can inexplicably change paths at any time, randomly. It is theorized that this could be adapted to work with bits, the tiny 1s and 0s that control modern computers, so that a single bit is actually an infinite number of them, layered on top of each other. (This is called a qubit.) This means that the infinite superpositions of a computer script could each do a different part of an equation, but since they are still one script, they can recombine and produce an answer billions of times faster than a conventional computer.
I don’t really get it either, but quantum physicists and the guys at IBM do, and they are tirelessly working towards this technological “holy grail”. They are much farther along than you might think. They have already created a crude, rudimentary version of a quantum computer, but is has been kept hidden from the public spotlight. However, we can only dream about what may be coming our way!
By Dylan Sloan, Edited by Jonathan Yim
http://www.zmescience.com/research/ibm-quantum-computer-28022012/
Quantum Computing