the internet has gone from being a curiosity to something that has
profoundly changed our way of life in the space of only about 25 years but
what if we could take a gigantic leap you know like a quantum one and yes i
know an actual quantum leap is very small but bear with me here because this
is actually pretty cool quantum internet which is currently being worked on by
researchers around the globe could make our current internet look primitive and
unlike pipe dreams like cold fusion or faster than light travel it could at
least be partially available within our lifetimes but why would we want that to
find out we spoke to chad orzell so we'd like to thank him for his insight well
unlike the current internet that works with standard bits you know ones and
zeros the quantum internet would use quantum bits or qubits which can
represent both a zero and a one at the same time in superposition this means
complex operations could be done in fewer steps than a current computer
would need making a quantum internet much more efficient for some types of
applications for example if we're using qubits large amounts of information
could be sorted through much more quickly without it being indexed first a
quantum network would also be superior in some ways due to a concept called
quantum entanglement this is a weird counter-intuitive phenomenon but we'll
do our best to explain how it works basically if you change the properties
of one particle the properties of a second linked particle change
instantaneously even if it's really far away due to the bizarre nature of
quantum physics however there's a common misconception that this means that we
could transmit information instantaneously
as in faster than light unfortunately this isn't the case for a
few reasons one quantum entanglement requires both the sender and receiver to
measure their quantum particle which actually changes it and then compare
results to see if they're correlated in order for useful information to pass and
that has to be done at or below light
speed two quantum networking requires quite a bit of overhead to ensure the
information could be carried properly as the whole process is relatively fragile
so really it's not about getting faster in the sense that a cable connection is
faster than a dial-up one rather it's about making certain kinds of
applications more efficient kind of like how current supercomputers and graphics
cards are parallelized and also about
security remember how we said measuring a quantum particle changes it this means
that trying to look at something like a quantum encryption key would destroy it
before an attacker could actually use it making quantum networks far more secure
than what we have today but hold on how do you even encode a qubit well one
method scientists are looking at is shining lasers on a single ion in a
certain way that encodes quantum information the ion then spits out a
photon that has the same information so you can say the ion and the photon are
entangled when that photon meets a photon from another ion the two ions
then become entangled through the bizarre physics that govern quantum mechanics now all of this sounds cool
but quantum networks work best in relatively cold temperature controlled
environments so scientists have had to overcome the major barrier of making
them reliable in real world conditions additionally because quantum networking
would still rely on photon transfer light attenuation is also something to
consider just like with current fiber optic networks but in spite of these
challenges a team in china has gotten a quantum entanglement connection to work
over a distance of 745 miles long
distance transmission would require repeaters but it appears that we aren't
too far away from a proof of concept in fact one of the lead researchers on
china's quantum project thinks we'll have quantum internet in some form by
the year 2030. of course an early version of quantum internet would almost
certainly be an add-on to the current internet instead of a total replacement
if you're expecting mainstream gadgets like smartphones and pcs that support
quantum transmissions natively we probably won't see that in our lifetimes
but it'll be interesting to see if we start getting benefits from quantum internet in the next couple of decades
maybe it'll somehow make the computer network at the dmv work a little faster
for example but i wouldn't hold my breath big thanks to
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