Listener supported, WNYC Studios.

This is Science Friday. I'm Flor Lichten.

Today in the podcast, decoding a technology that keeps getting hyped.

There are definitely many areas where quantum can benefit,

but it's not that it's going to replace everything that we do with our regular computers.

Quantum computing.

We keep seeing these exciting new headlines about breakthroughs,

like just in the last few months.

Google announced that its quantum computer

solved a math problem in five minutes that would have taken a normal supercomputer longer than

the age of the universe to solve. Microsoft told businesses to buckle up because we're on the

cusp of seeing quantum computers solve meaningful problems. So are we on the cusp? Up next, we're doing a quantum computer

check-in. What advancements are at the top of the queue? Which can we throw in the cube in? Here to parse

the news is Dr. Schohenie-Gosh, a quantum physicist and professor of physics and computer science

at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada, and CTO of the

Quantum Algorithms Institute. Dr. Gosh, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. Glad to be here.

Okay, before we get to the recent news, can you give us a refresher on what quantum computing is

in a way that will not break my brain? I'll do my best. So quantum computing is in a way that will not break my brain. I'll do my best. So quantum computing is a

very interesting and revolutionary approach to doing computing. So I think we're all familiar by now

with regular computers, which are actually quite simple machines.

Essentially, they're just a bunch of switches turning on and off inside.

If you look at your circuit board, all of those circuits are really just ways to convert all of our information that we're inputting into, you know, a sequence of zeros and ones,

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