Word: quantum
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When scientists struggle to explain the weird implications of quantum mechanics, in which electrons can spin simultaneously clockwise and counterclockwise or dart here and there at the same time, they often fall back on a scenario concocted more than a half-century ago by the physicist Erwin Schrodinger...
...proposed, and rig up a Rube Goldberg contraption involving a hammer, a vial of poison and a quantum triggering device. If an electron is in one position, the hammer will remain safely cocked. But if the electron moves into the opposite location, the hammer will drop, smashing the vial and killing...
...laws of quantum mechanics hold that as long as the electron remains undisturbed, it hangs in limbo, occupying both its possible states. The cat, by extension, is both dead and alive...
Scientists still disagree over just what to make of Schrodinger's thought experiment. But that has not stopped them from exploiting the bizarre rules of quantum physics to make computers whose tiny registers can be both on and off--registering 1 and 0 at the same time. As hard as it is to fathom, theorists have proved that such a machine--a quantum computer--could perform multitudes of calculations simultaneously, leaving the mightiest supercomputers choking in the dust...
...latest of a steady stream of small developments, researchers in the Netherlands and Japan reported in the journal Science last week that they had caused an electrical current in a superconducting ring to flow simultaneously clockwise (representing 1) and counterclockwise (0). The result was a "qubit," a quantum representation of both the digits of binary arithmetic. In other labs, qubits have been devised from single atoms. Whatever is used as the quantum abacus beads, the result is an exponential explosion in computing power...