Most technological change is incremental, but every so often a development comes along that changes the way we live. Printing was one, as were the electric telegraph, powered flight and the internet. There is another in the works, one that will make the super- computers of today as relevant to modern human existence as a neolithic axe.
The quantum computer is not an eight-cylinder version of the digital calculating machines we use today. It is a paradigm shift, a machine that in its ability to model the workings of the universe will leave present computers, reliant on their primitive language of 0s and 1s, in the dust.
A quantum computer uses subatomic particles, like electrons and photons, to do its sums. In conventional digital computing
