Google is famous for ditching projects it loses interest in. The road to workable quantum computers will be long, but we must stick with it, says Douglas Heaven
Josie Ford
QUANTUM computing has hit the big time. In a paper leaked online just over a month ago, Google said it had performed the first quantum computation that was beyond an ordinary machine, a milestone known as quantum supremacy. Since then, the headlines have been breathless.
Google’s achievement has been heralded as doing everything from breaking the internet to solving the climate crisis. But let’s stop and breathe. Quantum computing’s true potential is still decades away and hitting peak quantum now may scupper the whole endeavour.
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