The first superpower to harnesses quantum science will achieve military super-powers, Defense One reports: unbreakable communication security, and quantum supercomputers much more powerful than today's machines. As usual, the race is between the US and China.
Quantum computers are "as different from regular computers as humans are from jellyfish." While traditional computers encode information in classical bits that are in well-defined states - on or off, zero or one - quantum computers rely on quantum bits (qubits) that exhibit the ghostly superpositions typical of quantum physics - zero and one, on and off at the same time.
First introduced in 1957 by theoretical physicist Hugh Everett, the Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum physics says that the weird and counter-intuitive quantum superpositions extend across parallel universes. A qubit in a quantum superposition of zero and one states exists in two parallel universes. Similarly, two qubits require four parallel universes, and so forth. Doing the math, it's easy to see that a system of 1000 qubits spans a huge number of parallel universes.
To read more, click here.