Perhaps because my 40th wedding anniversary is just a few weeks away, I have been thinking about anniversaries lately, which reminded me that we are celebrating the 20th anniversary of a number of milestones in quantum information science. In 1995 Cirac and Zoller proposed, and Wineland’s group first demonstrated, the ion trap quantum computer. Quantum error-correcting codes were invented by Shor and Steane, entanglement concentration and purification were described by Bennett et al., and there were many other fast-breaking developments. It was an exciting year.
But the event that moved me to write a blog post is the 1995 appearance of the word “qubit” in an American Physical Society journal. When I was a boy, two-level quantum systems were called “two-level quantum systems.” Which is a descriptive name, but a mouthful and far from euphonious. Think of all the time I’ve saved in the past 20 years by saying “qubit” instead of “two-level quantum system.” And saying “qubit” not only saves time, it also conveys the powerful insight that a quantum state encodes a novel type of information. (Alas, the spelling was bound to stir controversy, with the estimable David Mermin a passionate holdout for “qbit”. Give it up, David, you lost.)
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