Wake up to quantum coffee

摘要

Imagine that you could be in many places at once. You might send one self to work, another out to run errands, and a third to the library for an afternoon of serious study. You could even commit murder and get away with it. This is just a spot of good clean fun for us, but in the strange world of quantum mechanics parallel existence is quite common. Electrons do it all the time. And 12 years ago, physicists realised that quantum coexistence could be put to good use—to build a generation of ultrafast computers. A quantum computer could split into millions of identical copies, unleashing immense parallel computing power that would make a tortoise of even the fastest of today's supercomputers.