The coming of quantum computers

We may be entering an era when no secrets will be safe

The US National Security Agency is of the opinion that a new kind of computer, a quantum computer, is coming — and that, when this happens, everything sent securely over the internet, from bank transactions to commercial and state secrets, may no longer be safe.  According to the spy agency, anything sent securely in the past, and stored in a foreign agency, will suddenly become readable.

Quantum computers are not just faster computers.  A silicon computer works on a basic unit of information denoted as a 1 or a 0.  A quantum computer, on the other hand, exploits the strange properties of the atomic world to do something far stranger.  Its unit of information, the qubit, can be both 1 and 0 at the same time.  With some qubits you can produce as many permutations as there are atoms in the universe.

The good news, however, is that quantum computers will give us the wherewithal to easily model the microscopic and atomic world, potentially revolutionising drug development, chemical engineering and materials science.