Question: Why are you interested in quantum physics?

Oliver Brown answered on 16 Mar 2015:

I’ll try to expand a bit on my answer from the live chat here!

Quantum physics is completely fundamental to our understanding of the world — it’s the science of small things, and it’s helped us build computers, and mobile phones, and lasers, and it’s changed the way we think about computing and information.

You see in classical computing, like the kind I’m doing right now by typing this, everything is stored as ‘bits’ which can be 1, or 0. In quantum computing, a quantum bit (qubit) can be 1 AND 0. This has opened up a whole new world in terms of how we can store information, communicate, or solve problems. There are algorithms (predictably called quantum algorithms) which can solve mathematical problems in ways that simply aren’t possible with classical physics, and classical bits. We also believe that this might be why some natural computers, like brains, are so much more powerful than the ones we can make.

That’s what interests me most about quantum physics 😀 Of course, everyone has their own interests!