simulating molecules using quantum computers

Inspiration

But still, it's a new field. I think we'll all agree. Everyone in this room will agree, quantum computing is a new field. Why am I even talking about it? Well, it's coming online pretty quick. There was a presentation here last year by a guy from IBM. I'm going to a quantum computing meetup tonight actually in London. It's the largest quantum computing meetup group in the world. We've got about 2,000 members. So, it's sort of happening. Two years ago, nothing. A year ago, maybe. Now, one person's logged in, two people have heard of Qiskit. It's exponential.

That was an IBM quantum computer, by the way. That's 50 qubits. It's a most amazing looking thing that we've ever seen. That's because there's nothing quite like it ever built before. The reason it looks like that is these processors, these quantum processes that use the laws of quantum physics have to be kept very cold. They're kept at about 15 millikelvin, which is 100 times colder than deep space. The IBM lab in research in Yorktown, New York State, they have the coldest place in the universe, 100 times colder than anywhere in the universe. So these things can actually work.

Quantum mechanics have been around a while. Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Max Planck, 1905, the black-body radiation problem, the ultraviolet catastrophe, things go to infinity if we use classical laws of physics, that was 1905, we're 2019. It's over 110 years ago now. But we've only just started building these things. It's hard. It's a hard problem. It's an engineering problem. We've known the physics for a little while. Let's say Schrodinger, Heisenberg about 1920. So, we've known the physics about 100 years. They're just hard to build.

It was Richard Feynman at Caltech - everyone said Richard Feynman was really great physicist, Einstein, Newton, Feynman, he's one of the top guys- suggested at Caltech in 1981, nature's quantum mechanical. He just got the Nobel Prize for figuring out the Feynman diagrams in quantum electrodynamics. He basically quantized the electric field, the electromagnetic field, rewrote Maxwell's equations in quantum form. He said, "Nature's quantum mechanical, dammit. To understand nature we need to build a quantum mechanical computer." He's the first guy who said it, 1981, it's only 40 years ago, 38. So, quite relatively new, even conceptually.

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