Episode 37 Transcript: The Deep End: Quantum Computing

Molly Wood Voice-Over:
Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast for the climate economy. We dive deep into the climate crisis and come up with solutions. I'm Molly Wood. This week … ok buckle up, friends. Last week we did AI … and this week … we’re going to talk about … quantum computing. What!? I know. It’s a wild one. But here’s the thing … in the climate solutions conversation, you will often hear people talk about the need for game-changing innovation. You know me … I’m a fan of … needing everything. We have a lot of the tools already to make big POLICY and business and energy use changes … that would go a very long way … toward slowing global warming … and avoiding the worst impacts of climate change. We should be doing all of those things and yes … vote accordingly … And also … in a world where we are building a better future … where countries can industrialize without the damage that the first versions have created … where we can expand our safety and health and comfort and protect and restore nature … We should still be striving to do things … better … and so today we’re going to get SUPER COOL NERDY about some of the breakthroughs that could be enabled by this one BIG breakthrough … which is quantum computing … a world where calculations that once took years or were completely impossible … can now be solved in a matter of hours … which could lead to a revolution in new materials … like more efficient solar panels or advanced batteries or carbon-neutral fertilizer … and a bunch of things we can’t even come close to thinking of. Quantum computing is one of those things that’s been on the horizon for a very long time now … but I recently got introduced to a company called PsiQuantum … which is working to commercialize quantum computing as fast as possible … IF possible … And put it to work.

PS:
So my name is Pete Shadbolt. I'm a co-founder of PsyQuantum. We're a quantum computing company based in California.

Peter Shadbolt:
And I've worked on quantum computing for about 15 years myself, initially in the academic system and then moved to Silicon Valley about seven years ago to start the company. And the company is really just trying to do one thing, which is to build the kind of the real, the genuine error corrected quantum computer that people have dreamed about for decades. And it's a great, great privilege to have been able to spend my entire working life. trying to bring this technology to reality.

Molly Wood:
So let's start at sort of the top and give people just an overview of what we mean when we say quantum computing and why everybody has been working for so many decades to accomplish this technology and bring it to market.

Peter Shadbolt:
Yeah, so I think most people will have at least come across the term quantum computing or seen it in the media or something like that. It's an idea that's decades old. Today there are many, many teams spending billions of dollars trying to bring this technology to life. So both inside big corporations, Google, Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Amazon, all have...

Molly Wood:
Right.

Molly Wood:
It's very cool and kind of sci-fi when you put it that way, by the way, just think of it as like a generation's ship or something, you know, like you're going to send it out into the cosmos and you might not be alive when it gets where it's going.

Peter Shadbolt:
Yeah.

Peter Shadbolt:
Yeah, it's absolutely a sort of generational human project. I think it's very, very rare that humans come up with something like this, where once the idea is planted, they have to have it. I sometimes visualize like a black hole once you get over the event horizon of quantum computing. Once that idea is rooted, the rest of your life is just laid out in front of you. You've got to go and build this thing. I think about it in my...

Molly Wood:
Yeah.

Molly Wood:
So why? Like tell us the why of the potential. Yeah, I interrupted you because I couldn't stop geeking out about multi-generational spaceships, but that's on me.

Peter Shadbolt:
terms. Yeah, so I'm getting, yeah, so I appreciate I'm not answering the question. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, that's it. That's it. So like, so like what that so then yes, so it is really striking billions of dollars, thousands of years of human life, thousands of the best technical people. And you know, these are like the stellar elite technical people of our generation, frequently working on quantum computing. Why is the

Peter Shadbolt:
is the question. And so let me just briefly try to give a description of what quantum computing is in sort of boring terms. And then I'll talk about why we think that's so exciting in fairly abstract terms and why, you know, people are people are spending their life on this. So there is a guy called Rolf Landauer, who's one of the kind of grandfathers of information theory.

Peter Shadbolt:
And he has a beautiful expression, which I think is a great starting point for this, which is, he says, information is physical.

Peter Shadbolt:
So often we think of information as kind of an abstract thing that lives in the ether or in our brains or something like that. But what he's saying when he says information is physical is that really information only exists when it's encoded in some stuff. And that stuff might be little electrical patterns in your brain. It might be like bits of ink on a piece of paper.

Peter Shadbolt:
It might be rocks arranged on a beach. Whatever it is, you instantiate that information in a physical object. It's quite an unusual way of thinking about things, actually. We usually think of information as actually something more abstract. But no, he's saying it only exists when it's real. And the implication of this is that the things that you can do with information are dictated by the physics of the stuff.

Peter Shadbolt:
that you use to encode that information.

Peter Shadbolt:
So if I encode some information using rocks on the beach, I can move that information around. I can do some kind of rudimentary computation by moving rocks around. And I'm limited by how fast I can run backwards and forwards on the sand and where the waves come and sweep them over my rocks and so on. You can imagine all sorts of fun different ways to do this, as well as the mundane ways that we

Peter Shadbolt:
represent information today writing on paper and then more often you know either magnetic fields in a hard disk or electric fields in our in our computers and so on. The point is that all of that physics that we use today to manipulate information as far as we understand everything that's going on in our brain everything that's going on in our computers everything that's going on when we speak or

Peter Shadbolt:
compute by hand, all of that is the classical physics of 100 plus years ago. So it's basically Newton and Maxwell. So Newton's equations of balls bouncing around and things rolling down slopes and Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism, light, radio waves, things like that. Everything that we compute is constrained by that set of physical laws.

Peter Shadbolt:
What's interesting about quantum computing is that, you know, a hundred years ago, um, a number of physicists started to discover things that violated those established laws of physics. And this is what ultimately became the theory of quantum mechanics, a theory that has been sort of marveled at and puzzled over for a hundred plus years. And it's still sort of troubling to most physicists.

Peter Shadbolt:
And we won't get into the interesting aspects of quantum mechanics itself. But the piece that's relevant for quantum computing is that it's got new rules.

Peter Shadbolt:
So Newton and Maxwell, they tell you there are some rules, you know, things don't move unless you push on them and all this kind of stuff. They don't accelerate unless you push on all this kind of stuff. Yeah, exactly. And then quantum mechanics comes along and introduces some new rules. Oh, things actually can be in superposition. Oh, things can be entangled, whatever that means. Some like piece of mathematics that's very hard to describe fits on a postcard.

Molly Wood:
Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood:
Mm-hmm. Things can't necessarily exist in two places at once, et cetera. Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood:
Mm-hmm.

Peter Shadbolt:
very simple piece of mathematics, hard to describe in natural language, but definitely a new rule. And what that does is it introduces new things that you can do with information. So if you can encode your information in quantum mechanical systems, then you can do new operations. And the way I think about this is it's like we're playing a game of chess. There's some established rules. We can move the pieces around on the board.

Peter Shadbolt:
And suddenly these quantum mechanics guys show up and they introduce new rules into the game of chess. They say, hey, guess what? I can actually move the queen this way. And you say, that's not fair. And then, you know, of course they win the game and it's deeply asymmetric game of chess. That's what's going on with quantum computing is we have new physics, we have new rules. And so now we can play new strategies when we.

Peter Shadbolt:
design algorithms and when we try to do computation. And so this is a categorical difference. It's not an incremental efficiency saving type of change. It's really about putting humanity into a completely new regime in terms of the way in which we can compute.

Peter Shadbolt:
And that is a profoundly exciting idea. Now, everything that I've just said so far is very abstract. What does this mean for people's lives? What does this mean for industry? We'll get there. But let me just pause there and see if that's making sense as a sort of articulation of Common Compute.

Molly Wood:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think just to pick up on the chess metaphor, it's worth saying that it's not like suddenly the king could go wherever he wanted instead of one square at a time. It's more like the king or the queen could just vanish from the board and then appear somewhere else and maybe even show up simultaneously on someone else's chessboard and win the game over there. At that, like it's a step change in what we're thinking about what is possible. Yep.

Peter Shadbolt:
Yeah, that's right.

Peter Shadbolt:
That's right.

Peter Shadbolt:
It's a step change, yeah. That's right. That's right. It's not a free-for-all. It's not that you can suddenly solve everything and that you can suddenly do whatever you want. But you can... Exactly. And you can imagine it in a game of chess, it only takes a few new rules before you're in deep trouble, right? Like if your competitor is playing with a couple of extra different rules, like you're in deep, deep trouble.

Peter Shadbolt:
And so yeah, that's kind of the mechanism. It's not that they have omnipotence and no constraints. They've just got some new pieces in their arsenal.

Molly Wood:
Right. OK, and so then why is it so hard? How come it's been so many human years?

Peter Shadbolt:
Yeah, yeah, so let me just briefly touch on sort of, because that's all very abstract.

Peter Shadbolt:
by the way why I have spent my life working on it is just this very broad notion of a new regime of computation. To bring that down to earth, what that then means is that we know of quantum algorithms for things like designing materials, designing drugs, solving optimization problems, breaking cryptographic codes.

Peter Shadbolt:
various fairly kind of scientific or technically involved, but clearly applicable problems. And the general theme of those problems is the following. If you think about like our...

Peter Shadbolt:
biggest companies, Fortune 100, Fortune 500 companies. Sometimes to me they look like a bunch of guys in suits shaking hands with each other.

Peter Shadbolt:
as a former academic. But if you think about it, like car company, materials company, energy company, pharmaceutical company, semiconductor company, they all sit on a foundation of chemistry, physics, and math, whether it's the drug that they're selling, the molecule that they're selling, whether it's the fuel molecule that they're selling, whether it's some reaction chemistry or some photovoltaic cell.

Peter Shadbolt:
battery chemistry for your electric vehicle. They're all sitting on a foundation of chemistry, physics and math and in many cases they've been able to take it easy for the last few decades using the same stuff whether that's you know the petrochemicals that we burn or whether that's the particular drug that they've been selling whatever.

Peter Shadbolt:
Suddenly in the last five, 10, 20 years, they've had to take seriously the prospect of radically reinventing the foundational chemistry, physics, materials, supply chains, math, computation that their industries have built upon. And this is where quantum computing is hoped to have real commercial impact, is in allowing much better innovation at these kind of roots.

Molly Wood:
Mm-hmm.

Peter Shadbolt:
at the root of these giant industries. We could talk more about that. But as you say, nobody has a quantum computer today. Why is it so hard? We believe incredibly valuable. So you have to, and it goes back to Ralph Landauer, information is physical. If you want to play these new rules, you have to find a way to reliably encode information in quantum mechanical systems.

Peter Shadbolt:
If your system is behaving like a regular old boring classical system, then you don't get to play with these new rules. And quantum mechanical systems are generally speaking exotic. That's why we don't see superposition and entanglement every day in our everyday lives. So that means single atoms, single electrons, single photons, objects that are extremely small or incredibly cold,

Peter Shadbolt:
And so there are a very wide variety of ways of doing this, but they all basically start out looking like physics experiments. So someone will trap a single atom in ultra-high vacuum, or they'll find a way to isolate a single photon, which is what we do, and then they'll play around to encode information into these systems. And this has been a very successful program.

Peter Shadbolt:
incredibly well-funded academic research for decades, and people have been very successful in making quantum bits, qubits, in all of these different platforms. And it took a long time, and there were all sorts of roadblocks, and people thought things might be impossible and so on. But today, everyone can make really nice qubits in all of these platforms. Why don't we have a quantum computer yet? Well, you need about a million qubits.

Peter Shadbolt:
to actually run these commercially valuable applications. Google today has 72. And so that gives you, hopefully, a feeling for the gap that we have to cross. And if you think about your laptop, your laptop has a billion transistors in it, at least. And that's a mass-produced article. The semiconductor industry spent a trillion dollars over the last 50 years to make that possible. It's a miracle that we can just stamp out.

Peter Shadbolt:
billions of transistors in our computers. Today, in most cases, we really don't have something like that for quantum computing. And so a lot of people are stuck in a regime of trying to scale up a science experiment, which is technically very, very challenging. They run into issues with noise, with reliability, with fabrication, packaging, cooling. Most of these systems, you might

Molly Wood:
Mm-hmm.

Peter Shadbolt:
be familiar, are cooled to incredibly low temperatures, colder than deep space. And so, yeah, it's one of the hardest engineering challenges on the planet.

Molly Wood:
OK, so now, so then the challenge becomes scale and repeatability, which is what brings us to what you're doing that's different.

Peter Shadbolt:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and it's also worth saying, like...

Peter Shadbolt:
I think there's a very interesting sort of sociological perspective on quantum computing. All of these quantum computing companies come out of university research groups. So quantum is no different. A bunch of professors and postdocs and PhDs happily publishing papers, doing cool experiments, showing super breakthroughs and working with the university.

Peter Shadbolt:
comms department and so on and so on, and you're very familiar with this machinery. And then suddenly, yeah, so much better. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And so there's just a giant culture shock in getting out of that and changing your priorities. Your priority is no longer to do something novel.

Molly Wood:
Right. So you're better than Professor blah, but you haven't exactly changed society. Right? Totally. Ha, ha, ha.

Peter Shadbolt:
Your priority is no longer to marvel at how fascinating your technology is. Your priority is to go and build a billion devices that will work properly. And quantum mechanics especially, or quantum computing, is especially bad because the physics is so fascinating, right? And you know, still today, today there is a pop science journalist somewhere writing an article where they try to explain superposition or entanglement.

Molly Wood:
Oh, I read one last night about our consciousness. Yeah, the quantum consciousness thing, and it's a wave that touches the universe, and let me explain why they exist in this wet blob, and I was like, yeah, this is not helping.

Peter Shadbolt:
Yeah.

Peter Shadbolt:
And did you walk away feeling satisfied and like enlightened and it clicked. You get it, like finally, entanglement is just perfectly visualized in your mind.

Peter Shadbolt:
and I've read more than most, right? I've seen the Bob and the Sioux thing and the like, the, and the tesseract line and all of it. And none of

Molly Wood:
Certainly in the climate tech space where I'm very familiar with what you're talking about, which we often call the valley of death, like how do you get from the science project and impressing everybody at the science fair to commercialization? And it sounds like you have a bit of a novel approach at PsiQuantum. And I want to ask about that approach, but first I want to know what got you there? What pulled you out of academics into thinking like, let's make this, let's scale it.

Peter Shadbolt:
Mm-hmm.

Peter Shadbolt:
Yeah, so we, I was, I mean, for me personally, I've been just very lucky to randomly walk into the right rooms and whatever, and obviously I'm extremely privileged also, but you know, I've been, it was never, it was never a plan, it was the black hole of quantum computing, right, like we spent 10 or so years in the university system.

Peter Shadbolt:
proving out the basic science of the physical implementation that we use, which is based on single photons, so particles of light that are inside a silicon chip. That's how we build our qubits. I could tell you forever about how great they are and how much better they are than the other guy's qubits. I'll save you the full story. By the way.

Molly Wood:
You'll probably have to tell us like a little bit, you know, if you'll give us. You get to be the best guy at the science fair today. This is, it's your day.

Peter Shadbolt:
If you talk to the, the thing about that is though, if you talk to, quantum computing is poisoned by this, which is that if you talk to the next, I'll give you the spiel, right? Like I'll show you my lovely PowerPoint about why my qubit is so good and lovely. And you'll walk away and you say, wow, Pete's qubit sounds amazing. And then you'll go to like Alice at the next company and she'll produce her PowerPoint. And you'll walk away and say, Pete's an idiot. Why is he doing it that way? Alice's qubit is just like, it's got this.

Peter Shadbolt:
networking thing and it's got this like whatever you can always do this right like you can always produce exactly and so this is like you know I can we can differentiate ourselves on the technology but you point rightly to a different type of differentiation which is really the sort of philosophy and the approach of the company which is to tackle that valley of death and I think

Molly Wood:
Of course, but none of it will matter until somebody's qubit gets to Best Buy.

Peter Shadbolt:
really appreciate the way you're framing it. Like just tackle that valley, the only way to get across that valley of death as a start is really fast, like really fast, because you just cannot burn money for that long without running into trouble. And so yeah, our approach has been to try as far as possible to solve the hard problems up front, tackle the...

Molly Wood:
Mm-hmm

Peter Shadbolt:
scary scaling challenges head on, and as much as possible use leverage to get to, to overcome these scaling problems. And what I mean by that is we try to build our chips and do our packaging and do our assembly and do our cryogenics, do all of that using existing technology. And that's not always possible. Sometimes we have to make quite extreme modifications, but we're always

Peter Shadbolt:
kind of trying to go to a big established semiconductor foundry, for instance, to make our chips. We could actually do things faster and cheaper in our own fab or in a university clean room. But we go through the pain and spend the money to go to a giant commercial chip foundry to make our chips. Because that comes to some extent with a promise that when we ask for a million devices or 1,000 wafers, that's immediately.

Peter Shadbolt:
a reasonable expectation of that facility. They've invested in cleanliness. They've invested in reproducibility. And none of it's easy, but we do think that leverage is key to having a fast path to a big system of millions of qubits. The flip side of that is that we don't build small quantum computers at CyQuantum. So we used to do that in our academic days.

Peter Shadbolt:
but we haven't spent any of our investors' money to build a 100-qubit quantum computer and stick it on the internet or something. And that makes it a marathon, like a real marathon. It would be very satisfying to have a small system that we could play around with and show to people and so on. But we just don't really think that that's a good use of resources relative to actually tackling the giant.

Peter Shadbolt:
manufacturing, cooling, connectivity, control electronics problems, that without solving those, we just will never have a quantum computer.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: So … PsiQuantum’s goal is to indeed build the entire quantum computer … soup to nuts to Qbits … and the big breakthrough IS this ability to be manufacturing chips for these systems … inside existing commercial chip foundries … so that even though they have to get a whole lot of things working in order to actually get quantum computers built … they at least don’t have to invent an entirely new mode of manufacturing.

I geeked out with Pete about this for a LOT longer … but let’s take a quick break … and when we come back … we’ll talk about how this all fits in … with solving climate change.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking with Pete Shadbolt … co-founder of PsiQuantum … about first … this kind of fascinating technology challenge and thanks for geeking out with me n that for a while …

And now … we’re going to get a little more specific … about quantum … and climate.

Molly Wood:
So there is, in fact, a reason you're on this show. I think one of the things that people, when we talk about quantum computing, people, much like the AI conversation, I think, everybody goes like, it'll just change everything. Materials discovery and drug discovery and this and that and basic chemistry and like 40 years of basic science will be compressed into these short timeframes. And then they always go, and also it'll be great for climate change. And then I always go, awesome, how? So.

Molly Wood:
This is one of those conversations where it's certainly materialist discovery. Like, please explain kind of there's a universe of things that could happen as a result of this, but try to bring it down to like, what does it mean for this particular crisis?

Peter Shadbolt:
Yeah, so obviously we are in a deep crisis. And I think, I'm somebody who cares deeply about the situation that we're in, and I've sort of tried to educate myself over the years. I don't know about you, I still find it very difficult to pass out the reality as far as

Peter Shadbolt:
you know, are we just going to build a bunch of cheap solar cells and wind turbines and, you know, do some degrowth and, I don't know, like change our political leadership and mitigate the worst excesses of capitalism and save ourselves? Or, yeah, or do we need to like take control of the weather and build fusion power plants and...

Molly Wood:
Done.

Peter Shadbolt:
like figure out how to build a giant array of solar panels in space and, you know, this is an endless debate, like is this a, like can we, can we, I mean it's just endlessly difficult to figure out like really where the risk level is and how extreme of an intervention we need. But there's a lot of people who I trust and who, whose, you know, opinion I take very seriously who will say that...

Peter Shadbolt:
There is no question that we need beyond state of the art technology to have any hope of putting humanity on a sensible future trajectory.

Peter Shadbolt:
And again, I still harbor some sympathies for like back to the land subsistence farming and whatever else. But you know, when I try to be serious, I take those people very seriously, like the climate technologies that we currently have are not good enough. And it's very hard to see a way to...

Peter Shadbolt:
to sustain good quality of life without something new. And so that is really why, where, you know, quantum computing gets attached to climate is that there are a ton of people in the space of quantum computing who I think genuinely care and who are afraid of the future. By the way, there are also opportunists.

Peter Shadbolt:
people who just want to spin a nice story and raise some money. And sometimes those are both the same person, by the way. But again, there's clearly a ton of people. When we bring this up internally inside the company, the number of engineers who get excited about the prospect of like,

Molly Wood:
Right. What? I am shocked.

Molly Wood:
Absolutely.

Peter Shadbolt:
no matter how speculative deploying a quantum computer to try to solve these problems, they really, really get excited about doing that work and it's super motivational. As opposed to perhaps, you know, might be nice to go and solve some financial problems and make somebody loads of money on Wall Street, but you know, you can understand why people wanna spend their lives on... Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so...

Molly Wood:
I guess if I had to choose between cryptography and solving climate, I would probably, yeah, totally. I like the idea though that, I mean, as much as you've described quantum itself as an animating principle that takes over your whole life, I like the idea that there's still some bandwidth, no pun intended, left internally to get excited about solving climate change.

Peter Shadbolt:
100% yeah, no, it's extremely motivating to people. And so the list of, and so, you know, there's a list that's now quite tired of examples that people roll out. So the general theme is to accelerate the design of new molecules, new materials, new photovoltaic cells. So specifically things like catalysts for carbon sequestration, you can imagine a wonderful new catalyst.

Peter Shadbolt:
By the way, we know, I mean, do you know the example of like nitrogen fixation? Have you heard that story?

Molly Wood:
I have, but they have not. Ha ha ha.

Peter Shadbolt:
OK, I'll tell the story and apologies to any of you. So the thing about quantum computing is these stories become so tired that you get told over and over again. But this is a good one.

Molly Wood:
which is hilarious. They're tired to you, but trust me when I tell you that, that this audience is like, I don't know what you're talking about. Well, to be fair, some of you already know and I, my apologies if you do, but.

Peter Shadbolt:
Yeah, great, great.

Peter Shadbolt:
Okay, so depending on how organic of a diet you eat, half of the nitrogen in your body was made in a factory, which is quite a striking thing to think about. Like your body right now, half of that nitrogen was made in a factory, and it was made in an industrial process called the Haber-Bosch process, which we use to make nitrogen fertilizer. And the Haber-Bosch process...

Peter Shadbolt:
was invented in living memory for some people, it's not particularly an old idea, and it's in very intensive, energy intensive, so you burn gas, you burn like a few percent of natural gas worldwide is used for Haber-Bosch to make fertilizer, and you burn it at incredibly high temperature, incredibly high pressure, and you can make nitrogen-based fertilizer this way.

Peter Shadbolt:
Of course, if you think about bacteria in the soil, nitrogen-fixing bacteria, they are also making nitrogen fertilizer, and they're doing it at room temperature, at ambient pressure. They're not burning huge amounts of fuel to do this. How do they do it? Nobody really knows. The chemical machinery that they're using to do that is quite poorly understood. And so this is just one kind of...

Peter Shadbolt:
glimmer of hope, right, that you should be able to design chemical. And by the way, the Haber-Bosch process and artificial fertilizer, that's a teeny tiny little molecular, or teeny tiny piece of chemistry that debatably is responsible for millions of lives, right? Like that humans manage to sustain growth and sustain our agriculture and scale our agriculture, thanks in part to that.

Peter Shadbolt:
And so, yeah, the fact that in nature, these things can be done with dramatically lower energy costs, that's a glimmer of hope that humans can find new chemistry, new molecules that would allow us to sustain our quality of life with much, much lower impact on the environment. And so, you can interpret that.

Peter Shadbolt:
example in two different ways. One of them is to say, well, that's a specific target. Let's go and design a new fertilizer. And there's a lot of people who take that very seriously. Microsoft has done groundbreaking work on that idea, using a quantum computer to go and reduce the time to search for new chemistry like this, as opposed to trial and error. I used to actually do this. I used to work with my arms in a glove box mixing up

Peter Shadbolt:
chemicals trying to design a new lithium ion battery for some applications but you can think for a car you know for an electric car and it's literally trial and error right like you mix the stuff up you take it out you test it you see what happened it didn't work it's an incredibly slow process of development and so the idea with a quantum computer is that we would just we would computerize that whole process and this is what we did with aircraft for instance

Peter Shadbolt:
when you want to design an aircraft wing, you used to build it out of balsa wood and plaster, put it in a wind tunnel, observe the air flowing over the wing, and now you want to try a different design. You take it back to the wood shop, you add a little bit of wood on the leading edge, you take it back to the wind tunnel. Now, of course, you just move a slider in your software and run the simulation again, and you can iterate much, much.

Peter Shadbolt:
So you can either think of that in terms of directly targeting fertilizer as a single example of many, or you can think of it more broadly as this is a leveling up of humans' ability to master the physical substrate of our world. And that debatably is a necessary tool for us to overcome these grand and...

Peter Shadbolt:
arguably insurmountable challenges that we currently face.

Molly Wood:
Let's close the loop quickly on why it is that quantum computing is so unique to that task. I think we probably haven't explained that it's the ability to simulate multiple things at the same time. Explain why it shortens that process so dramatically.

Peter Shadbolt:
Oh, great question.

Peter Shadbolt:
Yeah, so I keep talking about chemistry and materials and small things. The reason that those are great targets for quantum computing is that they are themselves quantum mechanical. So a molecule, a reaction, you've got single atoms, single electrons.

Peter Shadbolt:
interacting with each other. And so if you want to accurately predict what happens in those situations, very often you need to capture the quantum mechanics of the system in question. And that is computationally incredibly difficult for all of our conventional computers, and in most cases it's impossible for conventional computers to answer these questions. Some...

Peter Shadbolt:
Progress has been made using AI to solve these problems, but most scientists expect that progress will be limited.

Peter Shadbolt:
encroach on the area where you would run an Equinum computer but will by no means.

Peter Shadbolt:
encompass that domain. So yeah, the reason that we keep talking about chemistry and molecules is that quantum computers are really, really good, as you can imagine, at simulating quantum mechanical systems. And most people believe that they are really the only computers that could accurately predict the behavior of these things in the long term.

Molly Wood:
Please.

Peter Shadbolt:
like these very first computers we used during World War II. We're going to do ballistics calculations for the Navy or something. We're going to figure out where the bombs are going to land. And then, I don't know, maybe we'll do some banking or something, like some logistics. And that's it. It was a very, very short list of things. And of course, these are universal machines. They're programmable machines. And people's creativity was pretty much boundless. So.

Peter Shadbolt:
I think there's a very, I understand that in quantum computing, everyone wants to hear these concrete examples. And I wouldn't be doing this if we didn't have a long enough list of concrete examples that if that's all there is, it's still worth doing this. So finding new drugs, finding new materials, finding new catalysts for the carbon sequestration, finding new fuels, that's already like...

Molly Wood:
Right.

Peter Shadbolt:
billions and billions and billions of dollars and huge, huge impact if any of those comes off. But I'm also personally really optimistic that we barely scratched the surface and we'll look back on that list and say, man, we were so narrow minded about what we were going to do with these things.

Molly Wood:
Yep, you so much better articulated exactly what I was about to say. There's the whole universe of problems we don't even know we're going to solve. Love it. Well, I just made it shorter. No, no. Pete Shadbolt, thank you so much for the time. I really, this is so fascinating. I know we're going to be hearing a lot more from you.

Peter Shadbolt:
No, you articulated it better. That's... I waffled and rambo-ed.

Peter Shadbolt:
Thank you, Molly. Real pleasure.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:
All right … that's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening and hanging with us … Pete is both a genius and a bit of a poet … and yes …

he acknowledges that this … may never work … but still … I like to imagine that our human ingenuity knows no bounds … especially when it comes … to our own survival.

And I’d like to hear what YOU think … please email me your thoughts and suggestions to in at everybody in the pool dot com and find all the latest episodes and more at everybody in the pool dot com, the website. And if you want to become a subscriber and get an ad free version of the show, hit the link in the description in your podcast app of choice.

Remember … together … we can get this done. See you next week.