I’ve left sunny Stockholm and I’m back at the office in blustery Bristol, but I still have a few good quantum tales to tell from the science-writers’ workshop at NORDITA last week. On Thursday, the main speaker of the day was Raymond Laflamme, who is the current director of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Laflamme – who kick-started his career working on cosmology at the University of Cambridge in the UK as a student of Stephen Hawking – studies quantum decoherence and how to protect quantum systems from it by applying quantum error-correction codes, as well as using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to develop a scalable method of controlling quantum systems.
Laflamme is an enthusiastic proponent of quantum technologies and believes that they are set to transform the world as we know it. “Quantum information technology will change your lives and your children’s lives…but your grandchildren will think its passé!” he exclaimed early on in the day. As someone who has been studying the quantum world for years now, Laflamme is still very humble about what researchers definitively know about the underlying reasons for quantum mechanics. Talking about the double-slit experiment with one photon, he told me that “if you are not surprised by this, then you are way ahead of us”.
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