Thursday, September 28, 2006
Quantum leap
Brain prosthetics. Telepathy. Punctual flights. A futurist's vision of where quantum computers will take us.
Science fiction, right? Sure - just like satellites, moon shots, and the original microprocessor once were. To scientists on the quantum computing frontier, this scenario is conservative.
"The age of computing has not even begun," says Stan Williams, a research scientist at Hewlett-Packard. "What we have today are tiny toys not much better than an abacus. The challenge is to approach the fundamental laws of physics as closely as we can."