The Impossability of What Just Happened

Quantum mechanics is, despite years of Sheldon and Leonard on the Big Bang Theory, not easy to wrap one's head around. Traditional thought tends to be a yes or no equation. The idea behind quantum states is not that hard to understand, but almost impossible to imagine.

Take the smallest thing we can logically think of / observe - the electron. When we think of a molecule, we know they are made up of atoms. When we think of atoms we know they are made up of protons, neutrons and electrons.

AND, we know that the protons and neutrons are stuck in the middle, orbited by electrons. But do we really "know" that? Turns out, no.

Electrons are sooooo impossibly minuscule that to use light or a microscope (by the by a super-super-super microscope is an "electron microscope") to view an electron, the very act of seeing it, changes it's path. So we "know" it's orbiting somewhere, but we can't observe it without changing it.

So when computers use smaller and smaller items to simulated On/Off states they use something, it used to be switches, then lights, then electrical charges,, etc.

By "Quantum Computers" don't use a state of On/Off. In a quantum computer a switch and can on/off simultaneously. It (ultimately, but not now) allows a computer to be over 10 billion times (or maybe 10 million, I nether understand nor does it matter for our purposes) faster than a traditional computer.

The idea of quantum mechanics was postulated less than 100 years ago as a fanciful idea. An idea that IBM and Google have turned into computers now. And one that Google just made work.

Amazing.