Heads or Tails, or Both?

An international team this week have reached a new milestone towards quantum computing.
The team consisting of scientists from the UK, Germany, China and Japan have succeeded in creating 10 billion bits of quantum entanglement.

In quantum mechanics, classical scientific ideas go out the window, for example simply observing objects drastically changes their behavior.
When two objects are said to be entangled, they exist such that the quantum state of each are inextricably linked. Put another way, even if entangled objects are separated by great distances, changing/observing on one of the objects immediately defines the state of its entangled partner.

My cat's namesake and, more importantly, one of the foremost developers of quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrodinger is quoted as saying "Entanglement is not one, but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought."



1 "bit" of quantum entanglement is essentially a pair of objects possessing the ability to be either a 1 or a 0 just like in regular computers. When one of the pair is "observed" it becomes either a 1 or 0, with it's partner becoming the opposite. However until the pair is observed it exists in such a state that the pair is both a 1 and a 0.

This additional variation on traditional computing is where quantum computers gain ground and provide far greater processing power.

We are still some way off though. As Richard Feynman said of Quantum mechanics:
"If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize."


http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-billion-bits-entanglement-silicon.html