“What a relief,” said Susannah Glickman. A PhD student at Columbia University in New York, she had just successfully defended her dissertation on the history of quantum computing, and had morphed into Dr Susannah Glickman. Her thesis, as she wrote in the introduction, explored “how quantum computing went from the theoretical fringes to a brick and mortar set of institutions”.
I’m guessing, but I imagine hers is the first PhD in the history of quantum computing. Most historians who study technology generally investigate the origin and development of something in the past, be it telephones, engines or medical devices. But Glickman’s thesis – entitled “Histories, Tech, and a New Central Planning” – explores how and why the US invested tens of billions of dollars, launched various federal policies and programmes, and indeed created entire industries devoted to a technology whose applications lay entirely in the future.
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