Star Base Inc.

By the title of this post you might think that it is about an 80’s television show by the same name.   I really enjoyed Quantum Leap when it first aired and you can still catch re-runs if you have cable or satellite TV, but I digress.

In the past, I have talked about rate of change and its impact on IT infrastructure and application development. Today, I’m continuing along that line.

IT infrastructure is going to go through a massive transformation in the years ahead. Quantum technologies that were only theories in scientific journals just a few years ago are being prototyped in labs now. These new components will change the way we live forever.

Currently, data is processed by moving bunches of electrons about in huge batches. Think of the components in your PC as electrical plumbing. Data is usually stored as batches of electrons or in computer terms, bits. Imagine your computer’s hard drive as a bunch of very small buckets, some full of water, some not. This would represent the on and off that current computers understand or binary language.  This will change:

Improved technologies from emerging nanosciences are allowing us to replace batches of electrons with the smallest individual unit: the electron. As a result, computers will work at far higher speeds. Additionally, far less electricity will be required to do the same amount of work.  So what’s the big deal you may be thinking, that’s been happening for years.

The big difference now is “quantum superposition”.  In a nutshell, this means that a quantum particle can exist in multiple states and everything in between at the same time. This is because a quantum particle, such as an electron, behaves as both a particle and a wave.  Quantum physics is going to have a huge role in how we store and represent data in the future.

Next time, I will take a quantum dive deeper into this.