Dancing with Qubits - Second Edition

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Why Quantum Computing

Nature isn’t classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical.

Richard Feynman 84

In his 1982 paper “Simulating Physics with Computers,” Richard Feynman, 1965 Nobel Laureate in Physics, said he wanted to “talk about the possibility that there is to be an exact simulation, that the computer will do exactly the same as nature.” He then made the statement above, asserting that nature doesn’t especially make itself amenable to computation via classical binary computers.

In this chapter, we begin to explore how quantum computing differs from classical computing. Classical computing drives smartphones, laptops, Internet servers, mainframes, high-performance computers, ...