General Public

Quantum refers to the rules of Nature at tiny scales. Most of the things of a size smaller than your average molecule behave according to the laws of Quantum Mechanics, these are the laws of the micro-world that forms everything we can see, feel and touch.

It might sound rather obvious, but we exist in a given location at a given time. Time, as we know, flows forward incessantly, like a waterfall. Because of this, the world is a sensible place, there is cause and effect, things move and interact. You might take a flight from Barcelona now and arrive in San Francisco in about 12 hours (if you are lucky). Your flight would follow an itinerary, a trajectory, which is nothing but the representation of your location at different times. The plane would also travel at a certain velocity, would accelerate, and would be subject to forces and stresses. All of the above, of course, assuming that you indeed exist in a given location at a given time. But what if that was not the case? Well, the world would be a very different place. The very basics of how we understand the world would crumble, the notion of trajectories, velocities or forces would, in a way, lose their meaning if things did not exist in a given location at a given time.

Luckily for us, we don’t have to deal which such nonsense… or do we? What if certain microscopic objects could co-exist in several states at once? What if these objects were the light and atoms that form everything we know in Nature? What if we could not only understand these weird behaviours, but also harness their power and turn them into something useful? This is, actually, part of my (and other people’s) job(s).

Some of this stuff is fascinating, some of it has to do with a very deep understanding of Nature, some of it is beautiful Science, some of it has the potential to change the world for the better, some of it might feel threatening, and a lot of it is unknown and, therefore, exciting.

See the video below on a potential application of quantum computers.