量子计算机到底有什么用？

Quantum computing promises profound power in cryptography, materials design, telecommunications, and much more. But those dreams won’t become reality overnight—if ever BY ZEEYA MERALI ILLUSTRATION BY OLENA SHMAHALO T HE 21ST-CENTURY FERVOR about building the first industrial-scale quantum computer, pioneering theoretical physicist Peter Zoller says, is akin to the 20th-century obsession with becoming the first to conquer Mount Everest. “When you’re climbing, you look around worrying, ‘Who is number one?’” he says. “When you reach the top, that’s when you ask yourself, ‘Why the hell did we actually do this?’” In 1995 Zoller and Ignacio Cirac, then a postdoctoral researcher in Zoller’s group at the University of Colorado Boulder, proposed the first realistic blue- prints for a quantum computer. …