Date28th, Oct 2019

Summary:

Quantum computers could be used to crack open chemistry's most elusive problems or help to create new medicines

Full text:

Technology 28 October 2019
An employee collects newly-manufactured pills from a machine

Quantum computers could help with drug development

Adam Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images

It could be decades before we have quantum computers that can do anything useful, but once we get there, what will we use them for?

The first use could be in chemistry. As the physicist Richard Feynman once said, “Nature isn’t classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical.”

The forces, molecules, particles and more involved in a chemical reaction all interact in different ways. When trying to simulate what will happen, the combinations …