Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.

If you have not been sleeping under a rock or whatever it is in recent years and you have

some interest in physics and science more broadly, you will have heard of quantum computers.

You all know about quantum mechanics, you all know about computers. There seems to be

a new thing on the horizon where we're going to use quantum mechanics to build a new powerful,

different kind of computer. In fact, I sometimes speak in the future tense. It's happened.

We have working quantum computers right now, but so far they're not big enough and they're

not efficient enough, they're not accurate enough to really beat their classical counterparts

at any particular kind of calculation that you might want to do. However, the technology

is improving. The theoretical understanding is improving. We're very hopeful that pretty

soon quantum computers will be doing things more efficiently for certain kinds of things

than classical computers do. It's a very obvious fun topic for us to discuss here on Mindscape.

We brought in one of the world's top experts, my Caltech colleague John Preskel. John

like me started out as a theoretical particle physicist, cosmologist, gravity person. He

made a very explicit choice to move into quantum information science and quantum computing.

He since become one of the world's leaders in that project. He's also the best person

to talk to about the big picture for quantum computing because as we'll discuss in the

podcast in the conversation, though he is certainly personally extremely excited about

the both the intellectual adventure of quantum computing and the technological prospects

for making it work, he is also relentlessly careful not to overhype. He's very, very

specific about what he thinks quantum computers will be good for. Especially this most obvious

thing in the world, which is simulating quantum mechanical systems like chemical reactions

...