future progress in modern biology and
medicine faces some astronomical hurdles
but first it's all sit back relax and
have a sip of coffee now the active
ingredient in coffee that keeps us
chugging along keeps us awake is
caffeine
now caffeine is a moderately sized
molecule made up of a number of
different atoms it's more complex than
water but simpler than say DNA or
proteins well let's say we wanted to
fully describe just this caffeine
molecule for example to understand its
internal energies its structure and
interactions to get a sense of how these
atoms are working together to make
caffeine what it is and how it
stimulates us well just the complexity
involved with this caffeine molecule is
beyond the capability of being simulated
by any computer today and in fact beyond
any computer ever possibly made with
current technology why well even you're
free to take a computer chip
start packing in more and more
transistors and make this computer chip
really really big and equal to the
number of atoms that make up our planet
that wouldn't be enough even if you kept
going and made this equal into the
number of atoms that make up our solar
system that wouldn't be enough and if
even you kept on going made this
computer chip equal in size the number
of atoms that make up our entire Milky
Way galaxy you'd still fall short just
simulating that caffeine molecule now
think about that your average cup of joe
beyond galaxia computing scope
so then what does that say about more
complicated and complex molecules and
compounds ones that are actually
important for biological science and for
battling diseases molecules like DNA or
viruses proteins and enzymes as great as
our computers are today there is a wall
there's a fundamental limitation of our
ability to simulate and understand the
detailed structures interactions of
these important and crucial biologically
relevant molecules and compounds simply
because they're too big
there's too many total number of atoms
and electrons that make them up for our
computers today to handle now the
implications of this limitation are huge
right now we're in a world where we
always hear about ideas like person
specific drugs or universal cures for
aggressive cancers or stopping viral
epidemics or trying to figure out the
origins behind life itself now current
progress in all of these fields hinges
upon trial and error and as great as
some of the computational abilities of
bioinformatics and sequencing the genome
have been for these applications
conventional computers just won't cut it
so what we need is a leap forward we
need processors beyond anything we've
seen before
we need a computing paradigm shift
equivalent to taking us from the horse
and buggy all the way out to warp drive
on the Starship Enterprise and this is
it this is a quantum processor one of
the cores of the quantum computing
systems that my team is building and
this will drive the next generation of
computing now my whole entire life I've
wanted to understand how things work to
make connections between physics and the
real world now we all know how important
for describing things around us like how
things fall how the planets move or how
we light up in power our homes but I
never thought that something as esoteric
and weird as quantum mechanics could be
used to reveal how we as living beings
work and that inside this very package
are tiny circuits that obey the laws of
quantum mechanics and have the potential
to unlock real chemistry and real
biology now the reason for this
connection is actually quite profound
and we have the throw it back to 1982
when Nobel prize-winning physicist
Richard Feynman issued forth this
revolutionary challenge to paraphrase
Fineman he basically said you know if
we're going to try and simulate these
naturally occurring molecules well it'd
be silly to do that with these computers
that just aren't built for that
challenge it's a wrong type of logic
instead we should use a different set of
objects which we have control over and
which follow those same exact laws of
quantum mechanics now there's that
connection and I've been searching for
and that's how I want to apply physics
to our real world now it's interesting
at the end of this quote that phiman
says it doesn't look so easy and that
certainly proven true over the last 20
plus years because you see computing
with quantum mechanics means dealing
with information that is exquisitely
delicate and fragile with our regular
computers we process information as bits
as zeros and ones it's just like setting
a bunch of switches on and off and we
set them they say where we want but in
quantum computing information isn't just
binary it can be 0 it could be 1 or it
can be in a superposition of 0 and 1 the
same time now I know that sounds weird
but welcome to the wacky world of
quantum computing so now we have all
these additional options for the
information it could be 0 could be 1 it
could be anywhere in between on the
surface of this sphere
and we refer to this unit of information
as a quantum bit or qubit the challenge
is that qubits are fickle little beasts
way trickier to simply set and forget
the way we do with those switches in our
regular computers keep trying to
preserve one of these funky
superposition states in a qubit is a bit
like trying to balance an egg at the end
of a needle now you certainly can do it
but any little disturbance from noise
from heat from vibrations and you've
suddenly got yourself a sunny-side up so
what this all means is that there are
three critical challenges for making
real physical quantum computing systems
first we actually have to have qubits
that we can set the positions for second
once we've got them set preserving them
keeping them right where we want and
third bringing together many of these
qubits all interconnected so that we can
start to process and calculate some of
those difficult molecules and in fine
bins day this Holy Trinity of
controllability preservation and
scalability was simply impossible and
yet I am standing in front of you here
today because over these years the
impossible is finally starting to become
possible every year more and more
quantum computing teams throughout the
world are making gigantic strides
towards five instream for example in my
lab we are building real physical qubits
well actually they're superconducting
qubits which just means that they're
made out of materials that need to be
really really cold in order to work the
great thing about these qubits is that
they run on simple electrical signals
giving us controllability and second by
being really really cold that's how we
get preservation but now when I say cold
I mean really really cold I mean like -
459 degrees Fahrenheit or minus 273 for
the Celsius speaking world but that's
colder than outer space itself and now
we have to make our qubits precisely
this cold to protect and preserve those
delicate superposition state
they give quantum computing its power
now 15 years ago was the first
demonstration of this type of technology
the time the world was stunned and it
held quantum information for just a
nanosecond now today we are building
qubits that lasts for over 100,000 times
longer and we test them in these
refrigeration systems that can
essentially run for as long as we want
those white cylinders our fridges which
hold the qubits that we build so now
with all this progress in
controllability and preservation we turn
our attention to scalability early this
year we demonstrated this four qubit
processor and it's actually the one that
is in my pocket here but the great thing
about this for qubit device is that the
four qubits which are the four squares
of the middle are arranged in a way that
is scalable towards even larger numbers
of qubits this is a building block and
we've already taken the first step
beyond and are looking at this eight
cubed device right now as I speak so now
already at this eight qubit processor
level we can start to do some simple
chemistry like looking at the bonding
properties of a molecule like hydrogen
h2 but then what about those more
complicated molecules that we talked
about like caffeine or proteins and
things like that well not quite yet but
this is an important milestone to mark
because with a little more elbow grease
a heck of a lot more caffeine to clear
just a few more engineering hurdles soon
we will put together networks of 20 to
100 cubits in a processor and when that
happens then we can take on some of
these problems that surpass the
capabilities of our current computers
the focus shifts from can we build this
darn thing to how do we use it
and to me this is the most exciting part
about quantum computing this is where we
can take the discourse beyond physics
and engage with fields like chemistry
like biology with groups of people
working on the most challenging and
difficult problems in human health in
the natural environment and just as
conventional computers had
revolutionized our world before us so
will quantum computers when we bring
together this powerful mind share and
reignite our collective scientific
imagination thank you