The Year’s Biggest Breakthroughs in Science and Tech (Feat.: OK, but Seriously, What Is Quantum Computing?)

Our final episode of the year is also my favorite annual tradition: conversations with scientists about the most important and, often, just plain mind-blowing breakthroughs of the previous 12 months. Today we’re talking about “organ clocks” (we’ll explain) and other key biotech advances of 2024 with Eric Topol, an American cardiologist and author who is also the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. But first, Derek attempts a Plain English–y summary of the most confusing thing he’s ever covered—QUANTUM COMPUTING—with a major assist from theoretical computer scientist Scott Aaronson, from the University of Texas at Austin.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

In the following excerpt, Derek Thompson talks about some of the biggest tech breakthroughs of the year. 

Derek Thompson: Our final episode of the year is also my favorite annual tradition, conversations with scientists about the most important and often just plain mind-blowing breakthroughs of the previous 12 months. Today, we’re talking about the key biotech advances of 2024 with Eric Topol, an American cardiologist and author who is also the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. 

But first, a breakthrough in quantum computing. This past December, as you might’ve heard, Google announced that its new quantum computer based on a chip called Willow solved a math problem in five minutes that would take one of the fastest supercomputers roughly 10 septillion years to crack. For context, 10 septillion years is the entire history of the universe, about 14 billion years, repeated several trillion times over. The achievement was so audacious that some people speculated that Google’s computer worked so fast because it was simultaneously performing its calculations in parallel universes, thus confirming the existence of a multiverse.

Now, maybe the idea of a computer working in multiple universes at the same time makes you feel queasy, uncomfortable. Maybe it makes you feel thrilled and awestruck. I’ll be honest with you, it just makes me feel confused and even a little annoyed. Quantum computing doesn’t make sense to most people, and to be quite blunt, when I read the news about Google, it made no sense to me. Typically, when I’ve heard the term “quantum computing,” I’ve felt several things at once: total bafflement about the concept, a bit of annoyance about an idea that seems like a lot of high-tech hype, and a strange feeling that’s something like intellectual jealousy. It’s like maybe there are people in your life who have fancy tastes in movies, and they tell you about some 1970s French film that they consider the best movie ever made. So you turn on the movie, and 15 minutes in, you’re like, “This is gobbledygook. What the hell are these movie hipsters talking about? This movie isn’t even boring. It actually makes no sense.”

That is how I’ve historically felt about quantum computing, but I don’t like to feel this way. Many of the smartest people in the 20th and 21st century have been awed by, obsessed by, inspired by the promise of this thing, and I want to feel their sense of awe. I want to appreciate their sense of wonder. So today’s episode begins with my attempt to do just that. I cannot promise that this is the single best summary of quantum computing that exists in the world. Actually, I could probably promise you that it’s not. But after reading several books about quantum and after speaking to several physicists and computer scientists, this is my best attempt to help folks like me feel the awe that the smartest scientists feel when they think about this machine. So the best way to explain the value of a quantum computer, I think, is to explain the origin of quantum mechanics.

In 1687, Isaac Newton published his Principia Mathematica, maybe the most important work in the history of physics. In it, he laid the groundwork for so-called classical physics or classical mechanics. Newton came up with precise rules for how everything in the universe moves in response to everything else. His theory was beautiful because, among other things, it explained reality as we experience it, the rise of the sun, the orbit of the moon. Even better, it explained the most quotidian details of our life to perfection. When we throw a baseball into a windless sky, it falls in an arc toward a friend’s glove, and that beautiful parabola can be exquisitely determined by knowing just a few factors, like the velocity of the ball and the forces acting on it.

Classical physics is so intuitive that even its most sophisticated ideas can be turned into thought experiments that a child could understand. For example, in the early 1900s, Albert Einstein famously overturned our understanding of gravity by proposing that it was a warping of space and time. In his biography of Einstein, Walter Isaacson explains this theory of gravity in one simple image. “Picture what it would be like to roll a bowling ball onto the two-dimensional surface of a trampoline, then roll some billiard balls. They move toward the bowling ball, not because it exerts some mysterious attraction, but because of the way it curves the trampoline fabric.”

How lovely is that? Gravity is not a force that lives inside of things. It is a field that permeates everything. Gravity is the infinite trampoline that holds every atom in the cosmos within its bendy frame. This is the point I want to emphasize about classical mechanics, because it’s going to come back to bite us when I talk about quantum computing. Newton’s theories are beautifully intuitive, and classical physics gives us hope that when we look at the world, we see things as they actually exist. And then, in the early 1900s, scientists gradually realized that this was wrong. The world we see is not reality as it actually exists.

This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guests: Scott Aaronson and Eric Topol
Producer: Devon Baroldi