Quantum Computing and the Second Quantum Revolution

Policy Punchline

Quantum computing is the latest “buzz-word” in the tech industry – with over $450 million of private funding investments made between 2017 and 2018 – but what are quantum computers and how will they spark the quantum revolution? Do they truly live up to the “hype” or are the challenges facing them not resolvable in the near future? In this episode, Tiger and aspiring physicist Harsh Babla interview Prof. Steven Girvin to learn about his cutting-edge research in the field, his perspective on Google’s recent quantum supremacy claim, venture capital investments in the field, national security concerns raised by quantum computers, the philosophical implications behind quantum computing, and more. This might not be your one-stop shop for understanding quantum physics, but it should provide you with the appropriate technical and theoretical background to understand many of the current debates. Steven Girvin is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Yale University. He’s a theoretical physicist known for his founding role in developing Circuit QED – an architecture now used by Google, IBM, Rigetti, and many other companies to build quantum computers. Prof. Girvin is a strong advocate for the “Second Quantum Revolution.” He explains to us that the first quantum revolution, in the early 1900s, gave us a unique understanding of the world, explaining the strange behavior of atoms and molecules. This kicked off a spree of innovation, revolutionizing information processing with the transistor, atomic clock, and laser. The past couple of decades have established a new technological era. While first suggested in the early 1980s, quantum computers are finally being physically realized and made commercially available. These devices use the laws of quantum mechanics to solve problems that would otherwise take classical computers exponentially longer to work out. As such, they’ve emerged as a natural paradigm to accelerate breakthroughs in drug development to save lives, innovative materials for renewable energy generation, financial strategies to live comfortably in retirement, cryptography techniques to ensure provably secure communication, and machine learning methods to supercharge hardware. While quantum computers might seem like the panacea for many society’s challenges, most quantum computers today aren’t always able to return correct answers for even the most modest calculations. Prof. Girvin explains that this is because current quantum systems are plagued by several pervasive physical constraints: a significant susceptibility to environmental errors, an inability to control multiple qubits simultaneously, a lack of robust error correction schemes, to mention a few. These constraints gradually scramble the information stored in the quantum bits (qubits), limiting the qubits’ lifetimes to only a few microseconds. Prof. Girvin is very hopeful for the industry to overcome these hurdles, but he’s worried that there’s currently a tremendous shortage of engineers and experts in the field. He believes the education system is overdue for important changes, to get young minds excited about working on quantum computing, without necessarily pursuing a Ph.D. in Physics. The perhaps slightly technical conversation with Prof. Girvin covers a wide range of topics, from quantum mechanics to education and investing in technologies with far-reaching international consequences. But our curiosity certainly does not stop there, and we end the interview with a short but deep discussion on philosophy. Mathematician Alan Turing was famous for publishing philosophy journals and debating with Wittgenstein. It seems that there’s much overlap between the scientifically and metaphysically unanswerable questions, so we ask Prof. Girvin how science has helped him reason through philosophical questions.