A quantum drama has a sad ending

Three years ago, Microsoft excitedly announced that it had jumped into the quantum computing realm with the discovery of an elusive particle that the company said it could harness to build a quantum computer.

Called a Majorana fermion, the particle would be used — in theory, anyway — as individual computational units (called qubits) in quantum computers. It was big news for Microsoft, which was looking to catch up with IBM and Google, who had each already built prototypes.

Sadly for Microsoft, the discovery didn’t pan out. In February of this year, the lead physicist and 21 co-authors of a paper announcing the particle’s discovery published a new article retracting the original findings.

It turns out that the original paper excluded some data, confounding some fellow physicists who wondered whether the oversight was intentional or a confirmation bias-induced oversight.
Either way, it was sad news for Microsoft.

Quantum frontier
Compared to quantum computing, what you do on a regular computer is like a caveman pounding on a rock. Quantum computing massively increases the capabilities of storing and manipulating information. It would supercharge processing and computational speed.

Classic computers currently manipulate individual bits, which are 0 and 1 (no and yes or off and on). In quantum computers, there are no bits. There are qubits, and they can exist as both 0 and 1 at the same time. The traditional laws of physics actually do not apply in the quantum world.

Google’s quantum computer boasts 53 qubits that can store 253 values, or more than 10,000,000,000,000,000 (10 quadrillion) combinations. IBM supposedly is working on 1,000 qubit quantum computers.

The technology is expected to lead to unimaginable improvements in everything from chemistry and emissions to diagnosing illness.

The power of quantum computing
How powerful is this? In 2019, Google’s infant quantum computer solved a problem considered impossible (as a practical matter) for regular machines. According to LiveScience, it completed the complex computation in 200 seconds, while the most powerful supercomputers would have needed approximately 10,000 years. That is a brisk 1.5 trillion times faster.