Yesterday I was talking with Yuzuru Sato, a fellow postdoc here at the Santa Fe Institute, and he was telling me how amazed he was at the size of quantum information science. Actually it’s sort of the field’s dirty little secret that it is so intellectually expansive. I think, perhaps, that an outsiders view of quantum information science contains not much more than quantum key distribution and Shor’s algorithm. But in the past ten years a lot more has happened, quantum error correction, quantum information theory, the study of quantum entanglement, etc. have all progressed a huge amount. But to a larger extend, these results haven’t been spread to the larger world. Part of this, maybe, is that we’re just having too much fun working on the problems. Someday, I hazard to bet, we’ll look back at this decade and the next decade as a golden age of intellectual expansion of quantum information science. But don’t tell anyone: it’s just too fun right now!
O brave new quantum world!