Quantum technology, explained: A Big Brains live event - University of Chicago News

Podcast UChicago scientists demystify quantum, separate hype from reality, and explore potential applications—from cybersecurity to medical sensors to computers May 28, 2026 Quantum technology is at a pivotal moment. No longer the faraway dream of scientists, the field is rapidly developing across the world, fueled by major investments from governments, industry and universities racing to lead its promising future. But what exactly is quantum technology? And how will it affect our lives today—and in the coming decades?A recent event at the University of Chicago, hosted by Big Brains in partnership with 1440, sought to demystify quantum, separate the hype from reality and explore how it could transform our daily lives. Three renowned scientists—Prof. David Awschalom, Fred Chong and Nadya Mason—discussed how UChicago was leading innovative research, in partnership with its affiliated labs Argonne and Fermilab, as well as other universities across the Midwest. They explained how quantum has the potential to revolutionize our world—from creating unhackable communications to supercharging quantum computers to detecting disease at the cellular level.They discussed the challenges as well as the opportunities, especially for the next generation of quantum engineers and scientists needed to make these dreams a reality. The event also included a Q&A with audience members. Watch video of the full event here.Paul Rand: For decades, quantum science has existed at the edge of what feels possible, powerful and often theoretical, but difficult to explain outside the walls of a physics lab. But now that’s beginning to change. Governments are investing billions. Tech companies are racing to develop new systems and universities are building entirely new quantum programs and many believe this technology could transform computing, communications, and even medicine and national security. So what exactly is quantum technology and why is there so much urgency suddenly all around it? And how close are we actually having a quantum future? We discuss these very questions in a panel discussion on the UChicago campus during a special collaboration between Big Brains and 1440. We heard from three UChicago scientists and engineers that are helping shape this future.

Professor Nadya Mason, Dean of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, David Awschalom, professor of UChicago PME and the director of the Chicago Quantum Exchange and Fred Chong, a professor of computer science.In this conversation, we discuss the enormous scientific possibilities and the very real challenges that are facing the field of quantum today. We also learned why Chicago has emerged as one of the world’s leading hubs for quantum innovation and how it’s helping train the next generation of scientists who will help make these dreams a reality. From the University of Chicago Podcast Network, welcome to Big Brains, where we explore the groundbreaking ideas and the discoveries that are changing our world. On today’s special episode of Big Brains: Quantum Technology Explained. We hope you enjoy this conversation. Bold and curious: These words describe the guests you hear on Big Brains who are shaping the future of research. The University of Chicago is launching a new campaign called Chicago Minds to further advance this kind of groundbreaking work and expand the University’s global impact. Learn more at chicagominds.uchicago.edu. Today’s episode of Big Brains is supported by the Court Theatre, Hyde Park’s Tony Award-winning theater located on the University of Chicago campus. Here, timeless stories speak to today’s world. From Sophocles to Tom Stoppard, Caryl Churchill to Anton Chekhov and August Wilson to Tennessee Williams. When you’re at Court Theatre, you know you’re going to see something bold and provocative, something that will move you and make you think. You know you’re going to get a great theatrical experience unlike anything else, one that only could happen on the South Side of Chicago. Reimagine what classic theater can be. Visit courttheatre.org. Paul Rand: We are here to talk about quantum tech explained. So Nadya, I wonder if you can give us a real straight basic understanding of quantum technology and how it works.Nadya Mason: Well, I’ll start with just quantum physics to start because that’s the basis of quantum technology. Quantum physics refers to the science that governs material at the small scale, the atomic and subatomic scale where classical Newtonian physics just can’t explain behavior. So it refers to a set of principles that include things like all matter has both wave-like and particle-like properties, that energy is not continuous but comes in small discrete packets that we call quanta and that matter can be entangled in a way that you can’t distinguish its components. So these are things that are really hard to visualize. It feels a little bit wild even still to me, many years later after studying it for decades and even its founders. Some of the founders didn’t love the theory because it was so crazy, but it absolutely works and it absolutely governs—because the physics is there. Physics is there and it’s why we have things like computers and lasers.It’s not some wild out there theory that we’re trying to figure out, does it apply to things? It absolutely applies and we use it all the time, every day, all of you do in every technology that you touch. Now I do want to distinguish between quantum, what I call quantum 1.0 and quantum 2.0. Paul Rand: We’re in 2.Nadya Mason: We’re in 2 now. Yeah, of course, right? Because we’re evolving. But quantum 1.0 is using this knowledge of quantum physics, which was the theories were developed over a hundred years ago and that physics is what led to things like the laser and nuclear energy and things like that. But now what’s been discovered in the past few decades is how to use these quantum principles to manipulate information. So it’s bringing the computer age down to the atomic level. So now we can think about how do we use these properties of things like wave properties of matter or entanglement of matter to encode information and develop new technologies like quantum computers.Paul Rand: Okay. Everybody got it?Nadya Mason: Quantum 2.0, that’s all you need to remember.Paul Rand: Remember. Quantum 2.0. David, I wonder if I can build on some of the points that Nadya brought up and really looking at understanding how quantum is affecting our everyday lives. She gave some examples, but I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that. What would we be familiar with and understand?David Awschalom: Well, you mean what we’ll be familiar with now or in a few years from now? Paul Rand: Well, let’s talk about today and then we’ll get into tomorrow.David Awschalom: Well, I think in a way, a lot of us use quantum technologies today when we use GPS. They’re quantum clocks that help us navigate, help us understand how financial transactions happen, how timing happens on the internet. A lot of that is determined by clocks that are driven by quantum processes. So whether we know it or not, we’re using it. I think more likely than not in the next few years, many of us will experience quantum sensing and quantum communication. I’m sort of curious. I’m guessing everybody here has heard about quantum computing. We comfortable with that?Really? No. OK. Yeah. But the field is much broader than that, includes sensing and communication. In many ways, those are leading the field and those will be something that we all experience near term. Making sure our financial transactions are secure by processing the information quantum mechanically, navigating without GPS. If you’ve driven a Lower Wacker drive, you can tell who has GPS and who doesn’t. But there are technologies emerging that don’t require satellite communication. They use the earth’s field with quantum sensors to navigate. I think things like that we’ll be experiencing and these will get deeper and richer as time goes on.Paul Rand: Let me ask you, we’re going to get into the future in a second, but two terms that always come up and you used one of them was super position and entanglement. Can you give a quick explanation what those two things are so people can get it?David Awschalom: Why me? So sure. So as Nadya said, one of the exciting things about quantum physics is that nature behaves in a way at the atomic level that we just don’t see so we don’t have much intuition. And superposition entanglement, I would say are the two cornerstones that drive this whole field. And one is like you were both mentioning earlier with our computer technology, right things are zero or one. It’s deterministic. They’re transistors. Electrons are there, they’re not there. In the quantum world, information can be not just zero or one, but an infinite combination of the two, sort of like a coin spinning on the table. Is it heads or is it tails? You don’t really know till you hit it, you measure it in some way. So that’s super position and it has all sorts of implications. It means memory that today a bit can be zero or one. In a quantum world, a quantum bit or one bit of memory could have a billion pieces of information. So it’s staggering. In principle, what this technology can bring. Entanglement, that’s a little dicey. So I used to be in Southern California and people would ask that, we’d say, “It’s like two bodies, one soul.” It sounds great. It has no meaning. Entanglement is a phenomena where you could take a piece of information and prepare it in a way that it’s shared by a large number of objects. And the interesting thing about this is that the act of looking at one of those objects impacts them all. And the particularly bizarre thing is it’s even without a physical connection. But entanglement, the way that all these quantum bits of information are connected, that’s sort of the secret sauce of computing and that leads to remarkable scaling technologies. And one last example I can give about that is today if you buy a computer and you want to double its power, you roughly double the number of bits. So you get one chip, you add another chip, you’ve roughly doubled it.With a quantum computer, if you had say a few thousand qubits and you want to double it, you just have to add one bit because of this entanglement the way they all share information. So you can see how that scales, right? A few thousand qubits and you actually add another few thousand, you enter the machine two to the several thousand times more powerful. It’s astronomical.Paul Rand: Right.David Awschalom: So those are the two bits of information. Yeah.Paul Rand: That’s great explanation. And actually I think it’s when you start hearing explanations of quantum, what you guys have thrown out really gets to the point of what you hear consistently. -Nadya Mason: I was going to say, superposition is a little bit easier to visualize because if you think about water waves and you think about two waves and then you put them on top of each other, you get a bigger wave and that’s sort of the principle of superposition. You can think about draw squiggles and add them together and where the squiggles go and cancel each other out. Entanglement is just we can’t visualize it. And so it’s one of those things I think you just have to accept it. You accept the fact that this is how nature works and then you work with it. And some of quantum physics is like that. And once you accept some of these hard to visualize concepts, you can really broaden your mind. So you just think, okay, this is how it works. Now what?Paul Rand: Excellent. Let’s talk about Richard Feynman if we can. And he was a quantum theory, really expert if that’s the right word or just a towering figure. And he actually, the quote that’s attributed to him is: “I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” Is that true?Fred Chong: I think it’s fairly true. I think that as Nadya mentioned that even the people who originated the theories were a little uncomfortable with them and it’s only through observation that it seems that they’re consistent, right? I’m trained as a classical computer scientist and I was not always in the quantum field. I think in the beginning when I first got into it, actually a friend of mine, Ike Chuang, who’s a physicist at MIT, he got me into this and he gave this talk and he sort of gave this introduction to quantum computation and I was like, “Ike, that is the greatest talk effort. This is like the first one I really understood.” He said, “Oh, that talk was carefully engineered to make you think you understand what’s going on.“Paul Rand: Kind of like this talk.Fred Chong: That’s right. So it’s kind of like what we’re trying to do. But I think if you think about it, even in computer science and classical computing, most people who work on computer systems, who write computer software don’t have a very low level understanding of the electronics, the electrons and devices that are underneath there. And in the complexity of our world, we’re not really in a position to have to get to that level of that depth of understanding to work with these things. And so to some degree, every computer scientist, every computational person, every systems person works at a certain level of abstraction and can get to that depth of understanding. I do feel like we’re at a point in quantum computation, which is still pretty early and we’ll talk about that later where it is useful to have some lower level understanding to get sort of the best functionality, the best efficiency out of some of the machines, but it has always been the case that most systems you can’t completely understand.I think that there are different levels that people can work with these things and even the whole field works on sort of some assumptions based on some observations and theories that we have.Paul Rand: Okay, excellent. Very good. At the beginning of our discussion, the hands went up about how often we hear about quantum. What we also hear a lot about, David, is Chicago and we are in a hotspot. How did we end up in a hotspot?David Awschalom: Well, I think the University of Chicago and the city deserve a huge amount of credit because when this was proposed about a dozen years or so ago, it wasn’t obvious this would become the field that it is today and it took a lot of risk and a lot of bravery by the university actually to invest in it at the scale they did. And I think what made Chicago very special is they embraced the idea that a lot of us propose that you can’t do this alone. You need to do this for the first time, start a new field in close collaboration with industry and the national labs and do it as a major collaboration, but from the very beginning. Don’t wait for 10 years of academic work and think about translating it, do it as a partnership. It’s a very different model for any university and certainly differentAnd I think this has just exploded. This worked incredibly well. It attracted students from all over the world. It attracted company researchers to invest their time and effort here. It brought talent to this region. It brought some investment to this region, but I think most of all, it brought, I would say infectious enthusiasm. It grows something that was risky but scientifically exciting. And so now we are in a time where it’s becoming a technology and Chicago’s really uniquely positioned and we’re quite fortunate to have major national labs here. And ironically, it turns out these billion dollar facilities are really critical for developing the technologies. This is an atom scale technology. We’ve never done anything like this and you need special tools to see the atoms, to control them, to understand the material. National synchrotrons facilities that the government’s graded building happen to be here in Illinois and near Chicago. So a lot of serendipity, I’d say a lot of bravery and remarkable talent that we’re able to bring here.Paul Rand: Fabulous. There’s a lot of thought about the impact economically that this could have. And we certainly have the governor involved in this to some pretty significant degrees and other types of investment being made. How do you think about it?Nadya Mason: I only hesitated because I think it’s not really how I think about it. It’s how- How it is? Yeah, how it is. Economics, right? That’s the way it is. But the quantum economy right now is a couple billion dollars. If you just look at how much money is being spent on quantum companies, the revenues, the outcomes, it’s a couple billion dollars today. There are estimates that that will grow to a hundred billion dollars in 10 years. That’s tremendous growth. This is really an emerging technology.Paul Rand: And that growth is going to come in where?Nadya Mason: Through quantum computing companies, through quantum sensors, through applications, through networks, through insurance companies that can improve their revenue by having better algorithms that determine whom to insure and when, and how, by better transportation networks, by more secure communications, less money spent in things that don’t work, more money spent on things that do in better medical care. All of these, everything that quantum will touch and we’ll talk more about that later, will contribute to the quantum economy. So if you start thinking about it broadly affecting finance, affecting healthcare, affecting pharmaceuticals, affecting transportation, it goes from maybe a hundred billion dollar industry in 10 years to possibly even a trillion dollar industry in 10 years, depending on the estimates of how much it touches and where it goes. So it’s huge. And I want to emphasize that there’s expected to be something like 200,000 quantum jobs created in the Midwest in the next 10 years.And those are 60% non-PhD jobs. So things that people who know how to deal with vacuum systems and construction work and laser work, all of these associated things are going to be real jobs coming. So the quantum economy is real. You mentioned the governor, the state has invested tremendously. $500 million Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park as well as for buildings on the U-Chicago campus. Paul Rand: Can you touch on that park very quickly?Nadya Mason: So the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park is, you can think of it’s a research park for quantum. So you can’t just ... Quantum is a new technology. It requires the quantum bits sometimes have to be cooled down to very low temperatures to process. So you need special infrastructure for these quantum technologies. This is a research park that’s designed to have that infrastructure. So we’ll have cooling elements that will work with different types of quantum computers so that they run effectively.Paul Rand: Got it.Nadya Mason: It’ll have test beds that the government is investing in to bring together different sorts of quantum platforms and make sure that they connect to each other, that they work. It’ll have micro electronics companies are coming in. So the idea is to really start putting together the elements that will build this quantum ecosystem economically. If I can give one example, I can say that if you think about what happened in the Bay Area with Silicon Valley, now we think of a hotbed of innovation, but that started in 1939 with Hewlett-Packard, an electronics company from the 30s coming in and setting up base in the Bay Area in Palo Alto. After 20 years later, we got the first semiconducting companies. 20 years later, the first computer companies. 20 years later, the first internet companies, 20 years later, the first AI companies. That’s a trend, right? These are building on each other.Paul Rand: That’s a great way to put it.Nadya Mason: And that’s where we are now, but with quantum and in Chicago in the Midwest. Paul Rand: Alright. So Fred, nobody else in the world is thinking about this, right? It’s just us here in Chicago.Fred Chong: Definitely not.Paul Rand: Definitely not. OK. Tell us how it’s being looked at globally.Fred Chong: I mean, there is of course a lot of interest globally in quantum technology. Obviously there are implications for cryptography and security, which I think started a lot of nation states looking at this, but of course there’s a much larger potential even in all the things we’ve talked about, sensing, communication, computation, the impact of those things on problems we care about as what Nadya mentioned, medicine, energy, materials. So I think everyone wants to be in on the ground floor of that technology as it develops and developing both the sort of the technical expertise, but also the workforce and the infrastructure to take advantage of this. There’s a lot of competition, of course, globally, but I think it’s also a very global endeavor that we have very interesting cooperation with, for example, countries that are our allies. And so I think there is a lot to be done working with those different sort of scientific areas and talent that we have globally.Paul Rand: Would you use the word it’s a race?Fred Chong: I mean, there are certain aspects of it being a race, but of course there are also, I don’t know, maybe teams that work together in those.Paul Rand: You look like you’re interested to say something, David.David Awschalom: Sure. Just two quick things. One is I agree, but with new fields like quantum, most of the innovation happens with startup companies. And I think one of the things that this region’s done really well is make it very comfortable and easy for companies to start here. Keep some of the best ideas around ... And you heard a bit about the workforce, but I think the real key to success in this field will be where will the next legion of quantum engineers come from? Now these numbers are daunting.There’s over 190,000, as Nadya said, in the Midwest alone. It’s a tall order to create a workforce like this. And so I think one of the nice things of doing it here in the city and this region is we have one of the largest community college systems, for example, in the nation. So we have an engine to do this and I’m sure we will.Paul Rand: OK.Nadya Mason: Let me- Sorry, I wanted to ask one thing. I would be remiss if you asked about the quantum park and I wanted to mention that that is managed by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in partnership with a lot of entities around us. I think that’s important because as David mentioned, we’re relying on all the universities, the community colleges, University of Chicago, really need to work together, which we’re doing to build this. And so it’s a race, but also it has to be a community because we’re emerging and we’re not going to succeed without that.Paul Rand: OK. Let me continue, if I can, just on some of the things that you’re talking about. How is quantum, and start maybe Nadya with you, is part of the work that you do here at the University, how does it impact what you’re doing every day?Nadya Mason: Yeah. So for me personally, I’m an experimental scientist and I work on a topic called superconductivity, which is a phenomenon that occurs when electrons pair up and move through material without losing any energy. So no electrical resistance. These are used in MRI magnets, for example, to allow these big currents to go through them. So that’s my own personal research. It just so happens that superconductors also form the basis of some of the most popular quantum bits. For example, in IBM’s quantum computers based on superconducting qubits, that work is somewhat relevant there. So that’s part of what I do, but my other hat as the dean and also VP for partnerships, I work very hard to make sure that we are partnering well across the ecosystem with everyone who wants to contribute to quantum science and technology from workforce to grants and funding. It’s expensive, to infrastructure and development.Partnerships aren’t always easy, but they are necessary so they require work, but it’s work worth doing. Yeah.Paul Rand: Yeah. Great. Fred, can I put that question to you?Fred Chong: Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I do is I try to connect the sort of more abstract mathematical theory to the experimental work or sort of device work that’s being done. And so what that involves is working with a large group of grad students that are trained typically both in physics and computer science. And a lot of what we try to do is look at the problems that we’re trying to solve, how to break those problems into a sort of quantum part and a classical part. I think one of the hardest problems that we face is that quantum machines are actually relatively specialized, especially in their computation. You can think of them like a graphics processing unit or a GPU. We often call them a quantum processing unit or a QPU. The QPU is really good at certain things but not everything. And so a lot of what we do is to try to take problems and structure them so that some of it is done on a QPU and some of them is done on other kinds of classical computing like GPUs or different microprocessors or supercomputers of different kinds.This whole sort of notion of, I think IBM calls it the quantum centric supercomputer is something that we’re trying to design and then we’re trying to design problems for those. And then a lot of what we do is to take that solution and try to tailor it as well as we can to specific machines and devices. So that’s where the sort of appreciation of physics and communication with experimentalists and platforms is really important. So we can think about, it’s a little bit like programming your microprocessor, but thinking about the transistors in the microprocessor and thinking about sometimes they have problems or errors, noise, how do we deal with that? How do we sort of tailor the algorithm to the way that they’re organized? And so right now, because there’s so many technologies out there and they’re all different, each one has different properties and so it takes a lot of customization to get the problem down to the machine.Paul Rand: Since you touched on this a second ago, let me just do a follow-up questionCan you explain to folks what the distinctions are between a quantum computer and a classical computer?Fred Chong: Sure. I mean a lot of it actually comes down to the way sort of David explained superposition. And so I’ll just take it a little further. We already talked about how classical bits are ones and zeros, but they’re only in the one or zero state. So for example, if you take a whole bunch of classical bits together, they represent one number, right? If you take a bunch of quantum bits together in superposition, they represent, in some sense, they could represent every number that’s that size. To take it a little further, how do you get that supervision to compute something useful? So the famous algorithm, Shor’s algorithm, finds basically the factors which are the product of two primes. So you find these two primes, how do you find them? You search through a whole bunch of numbers. And if you’ve seen sort of the physics experiment where you have two slits of light, two slates of light goes through, you get a little pattern. Peter Shor would say that’s essentially what Shor’s algorithm does is it creates a pattern and from that pattern, you find the numbers that you’re looking for. And so what do quantum computers do? They are sort of structured algorithms or programs that exploit these sort of properties of supervisition and entanglement to compute something useful and a good analogy is something like this kind of interference.Paul Rand: Okay, good. Now that we understand quantum computers, can you tell us about the quantum internet? Because I know you also spent a lot of time on that.David Awschalom: Yeah. I’m also an experimental physicist. So we create and control states of matter, both with molecular systems, semiconductors and biological ones. At the end of the day, you want to connect all these things together and you want to do it in a special way, you want to entangle them. So the quantum internet’s essentially a way to connect quantum technologies together, quantum mechanics, whether they be computers, sensors, right? You buy some unnecessarily complicated drink at Starbucks. Is it okay to say Starbucks? Well, I said it.Paul Rand: I can’t believe you said Starbucks.David Awschalom: Yeah, sorry. And you want to make sure ... Let’s move on. And you want to make sure the transaction is secure. So you’d like to make sure your information is encoded properly quantum mechanically. One of the things we didn’t talk about is one of the interesting aspects of quantum physics is the act of looking at something changes it. So you might think that’s a problem if you’re building a technology, but it’s a huge asset for security because if someone tries to eavesdrop on your credit card number, you’d like to make sure they both A, don’t get it and B, the receiver knows someone’s tried to eavesdrop. Paul Rand: You hear the word unhackable a lot. Is that accurate?David Awschalom: I think it is actually.Paul Rand: OK.David Awschalom: Yeah. Well, I think the most accurate thing to say is you’ll know if someone tried to hack.Paul Rand: OK.David Awschalom: Right. So this type of security I think will be prevalent. I think we’re going to see this in the next few years actually in metropolitan areas. So the quantum network or quantum internet enables that.Paul Rand: OK, fantastic. I want to do a quick lightning round and I wonder if you can answer, I’m going to give you two or three questions just to kind of hit up. Where is the hype outpacing reality and what are the biggest hurdles that are standing in our way to getting to the reality that we’re looking for? Where would you start with in the hype and reality?Nadya Mason: Where’s the hype outpacing reality? I mean, we’re making a ton of progress on quantum computing. It’s not quite there yet. We do hear of things like the, I’ve heard of the ghost murmur thing, which is what we found the soldier with and anyway…. That is pretty technologically infeasible right now. The signal would be something like mild ... So that was using an entangled ... The idea was to use an quantum sensor, which is an amazing sensor. Some quantum sensor can do amazing things and can sense things that nothing else can at a scale with resolution and accuracy. But as you move a mile away from the quantum sensor, the signal drops by a factor of a trillion. And so that’s maybe a little overhyped.Paul Rand: OK. And in terms of the biggest hurdles?Nadya Mason: So still for things for quantum computers, the biggest issue is that they have noise. They have errors. So if you think of a classical computer right now, you have about a trillion bits on there and there’s almost no errors. I mean, any error and you can’t, you’re expecting your airplane flight paths and things be accurate to incredible degree of accuracy. A small amount of errors can really disrupt what you can do with computers. And so you can afford very, very few quantum computers still have too many errors and they come from many sources, everything from cosmic rays to just material issues to things people don’t know. And so that’s a hard to solve problem right now.Paul Rand: OK. Fred, same question to you. Biggest hype issues and where’s it outpacing reality?Fred Chong: I think the biggest hype, especially in quantum computation is the generality of the technology. Paul Rand: What does that mean?Fred Chong: I think that people expect them quantum computers to replace classical computers, for example, to be your phone or your laptop. I think the reality is that it’s a very specialized technology and it has to be used strategically and that it can be used for important things, but we don’t expect to be holding them in our hands all the time. So I think that there will be impact, but it’s not the internet or your phone. I think that where do we want to go with this? I think that the biggest thing that we will see and is a challenge that hopefully we will make a lot of progress on is we need more sort of quantum algorithms or more quantum solutions, programs that are useful.I think that what we need are functional quantum computers, machines that are useful so that we can explore these algorithms. We’re just getting to the point where they’re sort of large enough and reliable enough that we can run useful things on them. And if we look at just the theory of quantum algorithms, there aren’t that many of them, but there are many that we can’t prove are good, but that if we explored them on machines, we might find that they’re quite useful. And so that’s sort of, I think the history of classical algorithms. So in fact, when I was talking to Peter Shor a few weeks ago, he was sort of saying- It’s aFred Chong: Yeah. So Peter invented the Shor's algorithm. Fred Chong: Yeah. And he’s a theorist, but he said a really interesting thing, which is people are disappointed that there aren’t more quantum algorithms. And he would say, “Well, he’s not disappointed because there weren’t that many classical algorithms until we had real computers to try them on. “And if you just use the theory, there are a lot of classicals you never would have tried because the theory would say they’re not going to work. And so I think we’re in an amazing time once we have these machines that we’ll be able to create, sort of explore algorithms and find useful ones. And then something I mentioned before is take those algorithms that we find and make them work together with classical computing so that we can solve important problems, real problems.Paul Rand: Excellent. David, can I put that same question to you? Where’s the hype outpacing the reality?David Awschalom: Well, I think we’ve just heard great answers about the hype. I mean, I don’t think about it as so much as hype as the fact that I think people don’t appreciate the impact of the field. I mean, quantum computing is not quantum technology as part of it. I think part of the hype to me is a litle bit of incomplete information. I think if people understood the impacts that we’ll probably see first of sensing and communication, I think it would broaden the attraction of people to this field. So it’s not so much hype as I think sort of misrepresenting the excitement of the field and where the discoveries will be. I mean, quantum centers, what we’ve been hearing and talking a little bit about, there’s a lot of work being done on MRI, for example, use quantum sensors in medicine. And you can do this in a lab, but imagine you could take MRI, magnetic resonance imaging to the level of a single molecule.You’d revolutionize parts of medicine and bioengineering. In principle, you would get the structure, function, relationship of all the proteins, things we can’t even dream of doing today. Things like this I believe will happen and things we’re not anticipating today. And so in a way, I think somehow we should get better at conveying that.So I’m not sure that’s a hype issue, but maybe not really exposing the field. Yeah.Paul Rand: Let me build on that with a follow-up question and we’ll get through this and then to get to some questions in the audience. Normally I like to say, what are we going to see in the next five years? But five years isn’t far enough out for quantum. Take me out 25 years. We’re sitting back in this room in 25 years and you’re saying, “Holy cow, let me tell you what’s been accomplished.” What do each of you think we’re going to be talking about at that point? Starting, David, if we could please with you.David Awschalom: Yeah. So you know everything we say will be wrong. Okay. No one ever gets this right. And historically, no one’s gotten it right because the fun of this field is people are discovering so quickly. The answers are changing, I would say yearly.It’s a tough call. A couple of things I do think will happen. I think that every high school student will be very familiar with quantum. You heard a little bit like, “Well, we don’t see it, but how do we experience it? “ And I’m imagining when people were trying to convince each other that gravity existed, they’d say, “Well, I don’t see it. I don’t taste it. It can’t be real.” But you study it in school now. And I think that’s going to happen with quantum mechanics. People will be really familiar with it. They’ll have intuition. I think that will lead to completely new technologies that we’re not thinking about. I do think medicine will be very different. I think home diagnostics will be very different.Paul Rand: Home diagnostics?David Awschalom: Yeah. Be able to do tests at home instantly with quantum centers. I think we’ll revolutionize and democratize medicines so people around the world will experience it and I believe that will really impact standard of life. But I think things like this will happen. I think there’ll be advancements in computing technologies. I’m not personally believing that will be the most exciting advance. I know sacrilegious to say that. Right now, to me, it’s one of the most exciting things, but 30, 40, 50 years from now, I’m not sure. I think this is why students should get engaged in it.Paul Rand: That’s a great plug. Fred, can I ask you this question? Where are we going to be 25 years?Fred Chong: Yeah. I mean, as David said, 25 years is an eternity to the future, but I think we can talk about what we’re excited about. I think that, for example, right now I’m working with some cancer doctors and genomics people on precision oncology and precision treatments for cancer patients. The hope is even in five to 10 years that that would significantly sort of improve the outcomes of those cancer patients. And what we’re looking at is looking at many more cancer indicators or biomarkers than can be typically done in classical computing at the same timeAnd look at combinations of them in terms of how they work together to predict a cancer as opposed to one at a time. And so that’s something that I think hopefully in five years we’ll start thinking. But in 25 years, I think combined with things like better sensors, biological sensors, much more precise different kinds of tests that we can do and the computing to sort of process that data, both in terms of the sensor streams, but then also computing it together to like look at what the outcomes are for, for example, in treatments or things like that will really lead to holistically a much better sort of health system in terms of individual treatment and health and survivability.David Awschalom: And I think a great example of what Fred just said is, five years ago, we would never have thought we could build quantum sensors out of proteins. And now here in Chicago, we’re doing it because of a highly collaborative environment to be able to do it. But if you’d asked this question five years ago, I’d say maybe in a decade or two, but now it’s happening.Nadya Mason: And we have a new center for quantum biology and medicine, which is bringing doctors into quantum labs to exploit this technology and to develop new ones right now, right? I mean, it’s all happening now.Paul Rand: So can you follow through on that if you can and maybe talk about that, but also your answer to that question 25 years out.Nadya Mason: Yeah. I mean, they’ve really said everything there is to say here. It’s going to revolutionize. I mean, I think the most immediate impact will be in medicine, I think, right? We’ll be in quantum sensing probably in things like protein qubits that are going inside cells right now where you could imagine imaging processes at the cellular level, like looking at a disease and how it impacts individual cells. That’s just not possible right now without quantum technology and that technology is being developed. So I think in the next five, 10 years, you will definitely see impact from that. But I want to get just another ... 25 years is really hard to describe. So let me give another analogy. If you think about GPS, which uses quantum technology, maybe people don’t realize that GPS runs to find your location, they need a perfect time and their clocks are adjusted using Einstein’s theory of special relativity.So the idea that time isn’t constant and it changes with space and motion, they have to make minute adjustments to the clock using the special theory of relativity. Now that might seem like a trivial thing to do, but without it, GPS locations would drift by miles every day.You wouldn’t actually have any ability to do the things we do today like locate where we are in our cars or use Pokemon GO, or any of the important things that we do would be impossible. And I mentioned that because what seems like small corrections and small effects ends up having incredible impact on what we can do and how we live. And I think that that’s a really good analogy for what Quantum will do. It may look like it has a small effect. We can go a little bit smaller inside a cell.We can do a little bit better at our financial transactions or at how we understand simulating systems like for new chemicals, but that little bit of better may make the difference between where we are today and solving enormous grand challenges in the future.

Podcast Podcast Lea Ceasrine: Big Brains is a production of the University of Chicago Podcast Network or sponsored by the Graham School. Are you a lifelong learner with an insatiable curiosity? Access more than 50 open enrollment courses every quarter. Learn more at graham.uchicago.edu/bigbrains. And if you like what you heard in our podcast, please leave us a rating and review. The show is hosted by Paul M. Rand and produced by me, Lea Ceasrine, with help by Eric Fey. Thanks for listening.Exploring the groundbreaking research and discoveries transforming our worldSubscribe:More From Big Brains Episode 181 Episode 180 Episode 179