Perspective 2

Posted on Apr 6, 2016 by Bob Wickizer in Science and Technology Blog |

In the Manhattan Project to produce the first atomic weapons, one of the projects my uncle supervised was “Monte Carlo calculations” of the properties of neutron shields and deflectors.  No they weren’t gambling.  Monte Carlo calculations are statistical methods of simulation.  When you have to lift a five-ton weapon with a propeller driven, 1940’s vintage aircraft, it is critical to know how much lead is needed.  Too much and it literally won’t fly.  Too little and the weapon won’t work.  Uncle Bob once described to me what it was like to have a building with 500 math and physics graduate students sitting at desks with calculators cranking out computations.  Today, an undergraduate could do those same computations (all of them that took 500 students several months) on an average laptop in a few minutes.

If you want a nice break from touristy San Francisco, take the ferry over to Angel Island.  If you climb around the military fortifications on the west end of the island, guarding the entrance to San Francisco Bay, you will find an historical plaque.  The plaque talks about how Congress in the early 1800s authorized $5M to build these guns and fortifications.  About three years after the guns were in place, the introduction of steel cladding on military ship’s wooden hulls rendered the entire gun emplacement obsolete.  Such is the nature of progress.  Today’s edge on the enemy (or the competition) becomes tomorrow’s scrap for the recycle bin.

Since the advent of transistors in the 1970s, electronic computing has been marching along to Gordon Moore’s Law (founder of Intel) that states memory capacity and CPU speed will double every 18 months.  People have predicted the demise of Moore’s Law several times in the last decade, but it continues to march on towards the fundamental limits of physics or until something radically different comes along.

Quantum computing is radically different.  Today’s quantum computers must be cooled to near absolute zero (-473 degrees Fahrenheit or really really cold) and they must be completely isolated from radio waves of all kinds.  These machines are the sci-fi of today but it appears that in the next few years to a decade ahead, practical quantum computers will be built that are millions or billions of times faster than any computer existing today.

Sadly, one major push for quantum computing comes from the financial industry that just wants a bigger calculator to predict market trends.  Another major use for these ultra-fast computers will be encrypting messages and decrypting secret data.  Those who rely upon conventional style computers for encryption of data will someday find that quantum computers will be able to break their “unbreakable” encryption.

Someday in the future, the recent FBI square off against Apple regarding the San Bernardino terrorist’s iPhone will seem as quaint and silly as an old rotary dial telephone is today.  It is always helpful to have some perspective on what we call “progress.”

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