QUANTUM COMPUTERS MADE LUCID
Daniel A. Lidar · Chemical & Engineering News · 2003
THE QUEST TO GET SOMETHING out of nothing dates back at least to the alchemists. In " Shortcut Through Time: The Path to the Quantum Computer," his remarkably lucid new book about quantum computers, George Johnson describes what may be the ultimate free lunch, spawned by our harnessing of the laws of nature at the quantum level. Potentially bigger than the transition from the abacus to integrated semiconductor circuits, quantum computers may one day revolutionize computation. The key to their success, as aptly put by Johnson, is that "performing a quantum computation is a matter of jumping on the wagon and going along for the ride." The wagon is the mysterious and wonderful world of quantum mechanics, at a level of sophistication no higher than as taught in an advanced undergraduate course. The ride is a rather wild one, through the rugged and vast expanses of abstract Hilbert space, traversing superpositions and quantum entanglement. But ...