The Life Scientific: Peter Knight
Discovery
BBC
4.3 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 26 January 2026
⏱️ 27 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.
Transcript
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| 0:18.2 | The Pop Top Ten podcast with Scott Mills and Rylan, and comedy specials |
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| 0:30.3 | So for a whole bunch of exclusive scoops and podcasts, listen only on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:35.1 | Hello, there are some computing tasks and mathematical problems so hard and complicated |
| 0:41.4 | that it would take today's most powerful supercomputers literally millions of years to crack them. |
| 0:47.4 | But in the next decade or so, we're on course to creating a new kind of computer that could |
| 0:52.8 | solve such problems extremely quickly. |
| 0:55.5 | Welcome to the new world of quantum computers, whose tremendous power comes from exploiting |
| 1:00.6 | the laws of nature that govern the weird behaviour of atoms and subatomic particles, |
| 1:06.1 | the laws of quantum mechanics. |
| 1:08.7 | Sir Peter Knight, Emeritus Professor at Imperial College London, |
| 1:12.0 | is one of the UK's leading quantum physicists, a pioneer of the fields of quantum optics and |
| 1:17.4 | quantum information. For more than five decades, Peter's research, along with his many |
| 1:21.9 | leadership roles in UK science, have helped to take these remarkable fields from the realms of |
| 1:27.0 | the esoteric to the |
| 1:28.3 | frontiers of a new technological age. He's been the driving force behind the UK's |
| 1:33.0 | National Quantum Technologies Program, a one billion-pound government-funded endeavour to put |
| 1:39.0 | Britain at the forefront of the commercialisation of quantum computing, along with a host of |
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