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Physics World

From the horse's mouth

Published Nov 1, 2014• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

When writing about quantum physics for a general audience, most authors still focus on the events and ideas of the 1920s and 1930s, when the likes of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg brought forth a new physics base of ideas about uncertainty and wave–particle duality.
DOI
10.1088/2058-7058/27/11/44

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Pure curiosity has been the driving force behind many groundbreaking experiments in physics. This is no better illustrated than in quantum mechanics, initially the physics of the extremely small. Since its beginnings in the 1920s and 1930s, researchers have wanted to observe the counterintuitive properties of quantum mechanics directly in the laboratory. However, because experimental technology was not sufficiently developed at the time, people like Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger relied instead on "gedankenexperiments" (thought experiments) to investigate the quantum physics of individual particles, mainly electrons and photons.
Quantum physics joined the mainstream in the 1920s and 1930s with the general acceptance of the theories of Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr (1885-1962), Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961), Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976), Paul Dirac (1902-1984), and many other established physicists. Quantum computing is based on quantum physics, with all of its special behaviors and unusual limits. Therefore, quantum computing deals with the behaviors of atomic and subatomic particles. These behaviors are irreducibly random and the measurement of particle characteristics simultaneously, such as position and momentum, to an arbitrary precision is impossible. That is, physical phenomena of small particles do not agree often with our classical intuition. The unusual behavior results from features of quantum mechanics called superposition and interference. In the early 1980s, Richard Feynman (1918-1988) noted that there seemed to be fundamental difficulties in simulating quantum mechanical systems on digital computers, and further suggested that having computers based on the principles of quantum mechanics would overcome those difficulties. Devices that perform quantum information processing are known as quantum computers.