Peter Knight on quantum technologies

The Life Scientific

BBC

Technology, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Science

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 11 November 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

There are problems and tasks so hard and complicated that it would take today’s most powerful supercomputers millions of years to crack them. But in the next decade, we may well have quantum computers which could solve such problems in seconds.

Professor Sir Peter Knight is a British pioneer in the realms of quantum optics and quantum information science. During his three decades as a researcher at Imperial College London, he has advanced our understanding of the physics which underpins how quantum computers work.

Quantum optics was a new field of physics at the start of Peter Knight’s career in the early 1970s and he tells Jim Al-Khalili about the excitement and opportunities for a young scientist at the birth of a new scientific discipline. He also talks about the UK National Quantum Technologies Programme. Since his retirement in 2010, Peter Knight has been the driving force behind this £1 billion government-funded endeavour which has positioned the UK as a world leader in the development and commercialisation of quantum computing and other revolutionary quantum inventions.

Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem A BBC Studios Production

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts.
0:07.3	Hello, I'm Kimberly Wilson. I'm a psychologist, and in my new podcast, Complex, I'll be your guide
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0:19.0	I'm joined by expert guests covering topics
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0:24.2	burnout to empathy,
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0:27.3	so we can understand ourselves a little better.
0:30.5	Complex with me, Kimberly Wilson.
0:33.0	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:35.7	You're about to listen to the latest series of the Life Scientific.
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0:43.6	But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes
0:47.3	28 days before anywhere else, first on BBC Sounds.
0:52.9	Hello, there are some computing tasks and mathematical problems so hard and complicated
0:58.8	that it would take today's most powerful supercomputers literally millions of years to crack them.
1:04.8	But in the next decade or so, we're on course to creating a new kind of computer
1:09.6	that could solve such problems extremely quickly.
1:12.8	Welcome to the new world of quantum computers,
1:15.1	whose tremendous power comes from exploiting the laws of nature
1:18.9	that govern the weird behaviour of atoms and subatomic particles,
1:23.5	the laws of quantum mechanics.
	...

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