’Mustafa Gouda writes: Quantum Computer … The Coming Flood ‘1-2
Prof. Dr: Mostafa Gouda
Former President of the British University in Cairo
In May 2023, American Professor Michio Kaku published a book titled ‘Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything’. The book is about the next great technological breakthrough that is expected to solve many of humanity’s problems such as global warming, hunger, and intractable diseases, solve many of the intractable mysteries of science as predicted by the author, and promote the advancement of artificial intelligence.
The author explained that this computer will overturn all aspects of our daily lives, and will revolutionise industry, agriculture and medicine, along with the changes that will occur in the design and manufacture of means of transport to be more efficient and safe, and that these computers will break all the codes of complex chemical processes that will enable us to create new drugs, produce cheap fertilisers, unleash a green revolution and manufacture super batteries that make full use of solar energy, and that whoever is ahead in these computers will be able to dominate the future of mankind.
Quantum mechanics is the possible way to build such a computer.
It is the branch of physics that deals with the world of atoms and particles smaller than an atom within matter, and has its own laws that were developed in the first half of the 20th century, which differ from classical physics.
Quantum mechanics was the creator of the atomic bomb and many other peaceful and military applications.
The second reason was the emergence of some complex issues in ordinary computers, such as the switching and memory modules of computers known as transistors, which are now approaching the size of an atom, thus requiring new computing operations that currently available computers cannot perform, whether they are conventional computers or supercomputers.
A quantum computer shares many of the key features of a regular computer: bits, registers, logic gates, and algorithms.
In comparison, a quantum computer has quantum bits or qubits. While a bit can store zero or one in a regular computer, a quantum bit can store zero, one, zero and one, zero and one together, or an infinite number of values in between, and it can store multiple values at the same time.
This can be understood through the quantum physics concept of superposition, where quantum bits use superposition to represent multiple states (multiple numeric values) simultaneously in a similar way.
Quantum bits have some peculiar quantum properties that mean that a connected set of them can provide much more processing power than the same number of binary bits.
One of these properties is known as superposition and the other is known as entanglement.
The idea of entanglement is as old as quantum mechanics itself.
In 1937, Erwin Schrödinger, one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, published that the most important difference between classical physics and quantum mechanics is the process of entanglement.
Albert Einstein didn’t like this view and labelled it ‘spooky’ or, as we say in Egypt, ‘goblin work’.
Schrödinger explained that the cause of entanglement represents a departure from classical physics and can be explained by modern quantum information theory. In his explanation, he concluded that when two physical systems are entangled, their shared catalogue of information can be better determined, and explained that the cause of entanglement represents a radical departure from classical physics.
In 2022, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three scientists for their research into the phenomenon of entanglement, which is the basis of quantum computing and information transfer.
Traditional computers can store numbers in memory and can process those stored numbers with simple arithmetic operations such as addition and subtraction as well as more complex operations by linking these simple operations in a chain called an algorithm.
These simple operations are done using switches called transistors for switches that are used to switch lights on and off.
A transistor can be on or off.
If it is on, we can use the transistor to store the number (1), and if it is off, it stores the number (0).
Long strings of ones and zeros can be used to store any number or letter and so on.
The problem with traditional transistor-based computers is that the more information that needs to be stored, the more zeros and transistors are required to do the job.
Since most traditional computers can only do one thing at a time, the more complex the problem to be solved, the more steps that need to be taken, and the longer it takes to solve it.
In addition, there are also so-called hard problems that require capabilities beyond those currently available in conventional computers.
To summarise, quantum computing means storing and processing information using individual atoms, electrons or photons.
However, doing so is not easy, because designing such a computer requires superhuman efforts and material and human resources that can only be afforded by wealthy countries interested in scientific research that will turn the economic and military world upside down in a way that humanity has never known before.
Who knows, a quantum computer club similar to the club of countries producing atomic weapons may be formed in a few years, and certainly no one else will be allowed to conduct research or manufacture it, as in the manufacture of atomic bombs. The time to think about the future is now. In the words of Richard Feynman: ‘If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.’
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