> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.kevinmeyer.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Field Notes: Quantum Computing - URL: https://www.kevinmeyer.com/field-notes-quantum-computing/ - Published: 2026-11-12T21:42:48.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-12T21:42:48.000Z - Author: Kevin Meyer - Tags: Field Notes ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c3/9a/c39a9c8a-1d82-46be-8e4f-ed7e6cd347f4/content/images/2026/11/quantum.jpg) *Enough to follow the conversation, and to know when someone's overselling it.* *Field Notes are short guides to subjects I've either worked in or simply couldn't stop reading about. Each one gets updated as the subject moves, and the* [*full collection lives here*](https://www.kevinmeyer.com/field-notes/)*.* **Last updated:** 9 November 2026\. First edition, adapted from [Quantum Computing for the Nontechnical Executive](https://www.kevinmeyer.com/quantum-computing-for-the-nontechnical-executive/). Field Notes get revised as the subject moves, and changes are logged here. ## Why I got curious After my last few posts on quantum, several of you wrote back with roughly the same reaction: intrigued, slightly unnerved, and not at all sure what the thing actually is. Fair enough. So here's a summary for anyone who wants the basics without a physics degree. I'll cover how the technology works, where it stands today, what to watch over the next decade, and what I'd do about it now. ## What is quantum computing? Quantum mechanics is the rulebook for very small things like electrons and photons. In this strange world, particles can exist in a blend of states until something measures them (**superposition**), and two particles can become linked so that measuring one instantly tells you about the other, even if they're separated by large distances (**entanglement**). A normal computer stores information as bits, each a 0 or a 1\. On or off, true or false. A quantum computer uses **qubits**, which can hold a weighted blend of both, and a few hundred entangled qubits can represent more combinations than there are atoms in the observable universe. The way I find most useful to think about it is that a quantum computer weighs every possible answer at once and hands back the likeliest, while a classical computer has to grind through candidates one at a time. A physicist would groan, but for lay people like us it's still the right mental model. Going a layer deeper, each possible answer carries an amplitude, and unlike an ordinary probability, an amplitude can be negative. A quantum algorithm is choreographed so wrong answers cancel each other out and right ones reinforce (**interference**), much the way noise-cancelling headphones erase the drone of a jet engine. Classical probabilities can only add, but quantum ones can subtract. You also don't get the answer in one shot. Measure the qubits and you get exactly one result, so you run the same circuit thousands of times and build a histogram. Anyone who's done Six Sigma work will recognize the setup: a good quantum algorithm is a process engineered so the histogram is one tall spike on the right answer, and the fuzz around it is mostly noise, closer to common-cause variation than signal. So instead of grinding through each scenario one at a time on a conventional computer, a quantum computer effectively tries all the possible answers at once and identifies the most probable one, which for the right problems the conventional computer can then quickly check. Think of it as a specialized coprocessor bolted onto a conventional computer, closer to a GPU than a PC. The problems that fit best are the ones nature poses, like how electrons behave in a drug molecule or a battery material. Classical computers handle those by approximating, trimming away the unlikely electron arrangements to keep the math manageable. A quantum computer can hold them all natively. ## How did we get here? The idea is older than most people think. In 1981 the physicist Richard Feynman argued that if you want to simulate nature, which runs on quantum rules, you need a computer that runs on them too. In 1994 Peter Shor showed that such a machine could also break the math behind most internet encryption, and that got the attention of governments. For the next two decades it was mostly lab work. In 2019 Google claimed its Sycamore chip had finished a calculation no supercomputer could match, though IBM disputed the claim almost immediately. The bigger milestone came in late 2024, when Google's Willow chip showed errors going down as more qubits were added. That was the first solid evidence that the error problem could be solved by scaling up, and it's why the timelines below started to feel real. ## What does the hardware look like? So what is a qubit, physically? It's both an idea and a thing. The idea is the basic unit of quantum information, the way a bit is the basic unit of ordinary information. A quantum bit... qubit. A bit doesn't care what it's made of: in your laptop it's a voltage on a transistor, and on an old punch card it was a hole or no hole. A qubit works the same way. It's any physical object with two distinct states that can sit in a blend of both and still be steered and read on command. That last part is what makes them so hard to build. Physical qubits are fragile. A stray vibration or flicker of heat scrambles them, so today's machines make errors constantly. Error correction bundles many **physical qubits** into one reliable **logical qubit**, often at ratios of hundreds to one. Think of this as the power of redundancy. When a quantum company announces a qubit count, my first question now is which kind. Engineers have found several objects that qualify, which is why the industry looks like a zoo. IBM and Google build tiny loops of superconducting metal, chilled colder than deep space, that behave like artificial atoms. Quantinuum and IonQ use real atoms, individual charged ions suspended in electric fields and nudged with lasers. Atom Computing and QuEra hold neutral atoms in place with beams of light, PsiQuantum encodes qubits in single particles of light, Diraq uses the spin of single electrons in silicon chips built much like ordinary ones, and Microsoft is betting on an exotic topological design that's still being debated. Around every qubit sits a mountain of conventional engineering: refrigeration or vacuum systems, lasers or microwave controls, wiring, and a classical computer decoding errors in microseconds. [DARPA notes that no architecture has pulled ahead](https://www.wisdomtree.com/us/insights/blog/darpa-moves-quantum-from-roadmaps-to-hardware-testing-what-stage-c-means?ref=kevinmeyer.com), which I find reassuring as an investor and maddening as a reader. Reading those descriptions, I'm reminded of the old black-and-white photos of engineers standing beside ENIAC, a machine that filled a room and weighed about 30 tons, or the IBM System/360 behemoths a couple of decades later. Far greater computing power is now in your pocket as part of your phone. ## Where does it stand today? (November 2026) Honestly? Further along than the skeptics claim, and well short of what the press releases imply. Google reported in October 2025 that its Willow chip ran a physics simulation roughly 13,000 times faster than the best classical supercomputer. IBM and its partners announced in July that they'd entered the "quantum advantage era," but the [supporting papers were preprints](https://postquantum.com/industry-news/ibm-trusted-quantum-advantage-three-papers?ref=kevinmeyer.com), and advantage claims have a history of being matched later by better classical methods. Quantinuum's Helios, which the company says is the [most accurate commercial machine available](https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/quantinuum-ipo-targets-12-7b-162055146.html?ref=kevinmeyer.com), runs 98 physical qubits. I'd still call that a lab instrument with a sales team. And on November 6, IBM switched on its newest system, a [Quantum System Two in Chicago](https://quantumzeitgeist.com/quantum-zeitgeist-weekly-digest-nov-9/?ref=kevinmeyer.com) built around its Nighthawk chip, with drug discovery and power grid research among its first projects. Money has arrived ahead of the machines. McKinsey's [2026 Quantum Technology Monitor](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-technology/our-insights/mckinsey-quantum-technology-monitor-2026-a-commercial-tipping-point?ref=kevinmeyer.com) counts more than $1 billion in 2025 revenue for quantum computing companies and $12.6 billion invested in quantum startups that year. That revenue is now growing fast. IonQ booked $173.8 million in the third quarter and raised its [2026 guidance to $505 to $515 million](https://investors.ionq.com/news/news-details/2026/IonQ-Announces-Record-3Q26-Revenues-and-Raises-FY2026-Guidance-to-505---515-Million-as-Backlog-Grows-to-1-2-Billion/?ref=kevinmeyer.com), though it's worth knowing that almost half that quarter came from SkyWater, the chip foundry it bought this year. Consolidation is picking up too. Intel agreed in October to buy quantum software company Classiq for a [reported $2.3 billion](https://www.nextplatform.com/hpc/2026/10/28/intels-23-billion-bet-on-a-quantum-future-is-a-decade-in-the-making/5306068?ref=kevinmeyer.com), with closing expected in 2027. The test I watch most closely is DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, which asks whether anyone can build a quantum computer whose value exceeds its cost by 2033\. In October, [Atom Computing, Diraq, IBM, and IonQ](https://www.hpcwire.com/2026/10/07/atom-computing-diraq-ibm-and-ionq-advance-to-darpa-qbi-stage-c/?ref=kevinmeyer.com) joined Microsoft and PsiQuantum in the final, hands-on verification stage. ## What's hype and what's real? Quantum attracts more nonsense than any field I follow, partly because the real physics already sounds strange. Here's how I'd translate the claims you're most likely to hear. | What you'll hear | What's actually true | | --------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | "Quantum computers will replace regular computers." | They won't. They're coprocessors for a narrow set of problems, and your laptop isn't going anywhere. | | "A new chip with 1,000 qubits!" | That's almost always physical qubits. Ask how many logical, error-corrected qubits it supports, and expect a much smaller number. | | "Quantum advantage achieved." | Maybe. Several claims since 2019 were later matched by better classical algorithms, so I give each one a year before I believe it. | | "Quantum will break all encryption soon." | No machine today comes close. The real risk is data stolen now and decrypted later, which is why the deadlines below matter. | | "Quantum revenue is exploding." | Some of it is. Check how much comes from acquisitions and manufacturing services, which can make up a big share of the headline number. | Then there's the consumer fringe, where "quantum" is just a marketing word. You'll see wellness products promising quantum healing and quantum energy. More dangerous are online trading platforms calling themselves "Quantum AI," often advertised with deepfaked celebrity endorsements, which regulators including the UK's [FCA](https://www.fca.org.uk/news/warnings/quantum-ai?ref=kevinmeyer.com) and Hong Kong's [SFC](https://benzinga.com/markets/cryptocurrency/24/05/38895127/elon-musk-deepfake-scam-used-to-promote-fraudulent-crypto-trading-platform-hong-kongs-fina?ref=kevinmeyer.com)have flagged. If a product sold to consumers has "quantum" in its name, I assume the word is there for marketing. ## What happens in the next 5 to 10 years? I don't trust anyone's quantum forecast, including mine, so I'd watch for a handful of specific events instead. When one of them happens, I'll update this section. - **Error-corrected machines arriving on schedule.** IBM targets [Starling](https://aibusiness.com/quantum-computing/ibm-plans-first-large-scale-fault-tolerant-quantum-computer-by-2029?ref=kevinmeyer.com) for 2029, with 200 logical qubits running 100 million operations, and Quantinuum targets its [Apollo](https://siliconangle.com/2026/06/04/quantum-computer-maker-quantinuum-closes-flat-1-68b-ipo/?ref=kevinmeyer.com) machine the same year. IBM then plans Blue Jay, at 2,000 logical qubits, around 2033\. I'd treat these dates as aspirations, since hardware schedules slip and these are some of the hardest on earth. Then again, AI-assisted engineering may speed things up. - **The qubit count needed to break encryption.** In 2025 Google researchers estimated RSA-2048 could fall to a machine with [under a million noisy qubits](https://quantumzeitgeist.com/q-day/?ref=kevinmeyer.com), down from 20 million in a 2019 estimate, and preprints this spring claimed [far fewer still](https://quantumcomputingreport.com/?ref=kevinmeyer.com). Every drop brings the risk closer. - **The encryption deadlines.** In March, Google set [2029 as its own deadline](https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-security/cryptography-migration-timeline/?ref=kevinmeyer.com) for moving to post-quantum cryptography. I couldn't help noticing that one of the companies building the machine is racing to protect itself from it. NIST's [draft guidance](https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/ir/8547/ipd?ref=kevinmeyer.com) would deprecate RSA and its cousins after 2030 and disallow them after 2035. - **DARPA's verdict around 2033.** That's when the benchmarking initiative wants to know whether any quantum computer can be worth more than it costs. If that answer is yes, chemistry gets the machines first: catalysts and battery materials, then drug candidates, the argument I made in [While We Were Processing AI, Quantum Arrived](https://www.kevinmeyer.com/while-we-were-processing-ai-quantum-arrived/). Finance and logistics may follow on thinner evidence. McKinsey puts the value at stake at $1.3 to $2.7 trillion by 2035, a figure I hold loosely for an industry that currently books about what a decent midsize manufacturer does. ## What does this mean for me? The security work is already late, and the opportunity work can wait for evidence, so I'd sort everything by deadline. **Running a company, now through 2027.** Start with cryptography, since it's the one item with a deadline. Have IT build an inventory of where you use public-key encryption, including inside vendor products and long-lived equipment, then rank the data by how long it must stay secret. Ask every critical vendor for its post-quantum roadmap and write it into the next contract renewal. It's an asset inventory, the kind of unglamorous work operations people already know how to do. Then go after the data itself. "Harvest now, decrypt later" only works on data an attacker can reach, so the cheapest protection is having less of it lying around. Find the crown jewels that would still hurt in 2035 (trade secrets, formulas, personnel and medical records, M&A files) and delete what you no longer need. Move what's left into offline or tightly segmented storage, and re-encrypt it with AES-256, which quantum computers aren't expected to break in any practical sense. I spent a good part of my career in medical devices, where products can stay in the field longer than any of these deadlines. On the opportunity side, keep it small. If your business lives on chemistry or hard scheduling problems, give one curious engineer a modest budget, cloud access (the big cloud providers all rent quantum time), and a real problem to try. Skip the hardware, and be wary of consultants selling quantum readiness at enterprise prices. **Running a company, 2029 and beyond.** Anything customer-facing or holding long-lived secrets should be on post-quantum encryption by 2029, the standard Google has set for itself. By then you'll want a short list of problems worth testing and someone in-house with enough knowledge to guide the effort, so you're ready if the 2033 answer comes back yes. **Investing.** I own speculative positions in some of these companies, so take my view with the appropriate salt. Pure-play valuations have been extraordinary: at the end of 2025, IonQ traded around 150 times trailing sales, D-Wave around 300, and Rigetti close to 1,000\. Quantinuum raised $1.68 billion in its June IPO on 2025 revenue of about $31 million and a net loss of $193 million. Those prices assume a winner, and the people running the most rigorous evaluation can't name one yet. My approach is to own the probability that quantum works and let someone else pick the winning qubit. Large companies with serious quantum programs (IBM, Alphabet, Microsoft, Honeywell as Quantinuum's largest shareholder) let the speculation ride inside a real business. Suppliers of cryogenics and lasers get paid regardless of which qubit wins, and post-quantum security vendors have a revenue driver with a federal deadline attached. My own quantum portfolio currently holds QBTS, INFQ, FORM, HQ, IONQ, KEYS, QNT, and RGTI, with INFQ, IONQ, and QNT as my highest-conviction positions. You need a strong stomach: each of these has swung 50% or more in either direction this year alone. Whatever you hold in pure plays, size it as money you can watch fall 80 percent without losing sleep. (Not investment advice, obviously. I'm a retired operator with a spreadsheet.) **Holding crypto.** As I wrote early this year, the same quantum computing power can [break the signatures that protect crypto wallets](https://www.kevinmeyer.com/why-quantum-computing-threatens-blockchains-cryptographic-foundation/). Most crypto providers are working on it, but a similar "harvest now" problem exists, since many public keys sit openly on the ledger today. ## How to sound quantum smart at dinner (or in the boardroom) For the next time quantum comes up over drinks, or worse, in a board meeting where everyone's nodding along: - **The one-liner:** it weighs every possible answer at once and hands back the likeliest. If someone pushes, the real trick is interference, where wrong answers cancel out. - **Ask "physical or logical?"** Headline qubit counts are physical. The number that matters is logical, error-corrected qubits, and it's much smaller. - **Call it a coprocessor.** It'll sit beside conventional computers the way a GPU does, handling the narrow problems nature poses. - **Chemistry first.** Catalysts, batteries and drug molecules get the early wins from quantum computing power; everything else waits. - **Remember 2029.** It's the target for IBM's Starling, Quantinuum's Apollo and Google's own encryption migration. - **Drop "harvest now, decrypt later."** Then ask who owns your company's cryptography inventory, and watch for scared faces in the room. ## Glossary - **Qubit:** the basic unit of quantum information. Any physical object with two states that can hold a blend of both and still be steered and read on command. - **Superposition:** a qubit's ability to hold a weighted blend of 0 and 1 until it's measured. - **Entanglement:** a link between qubits, so that measuring one tells you about the others, even at a distance. - **Interference:** how quantum algorithms make wrong answers cancel out and right ones reinforce. - **Physical vs. logical qubit:** physical qubits are the actual, error-prone hardware. A logical qubit is a reliable one built from many physical qubits using error correction. - **Quantum advantage:** a quantum computer doing a useful task faster or cheaper than the best classical method. It's claimed often and disputed almost as often. - **Shor's algorithm:** the 1994 algorithm that would let a large enough quantum computer break RSA and elliptic curve encryption. - **Post-quantum cryptography (PQC):** newer encryption built on math problems quantum computers aren't expected to solve. NIST has published the standards. - **Harvest now, decrypt later:** copying encrypted data today to read once quantum hardware can break it. - **Annealer:** a different kind of quantum machine, sold by D-Wave, built for a narrower class of scheduling and routing problems. ## Further reading - [McKinsey Quantum Technology Monitor 2026](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-technology/our-insights/mckinsey-quantum-technology-monitor-2026-a-commercial-tipping-point?ref=kevinmeyer.com): the annual market overview. Good for funding and revenue numbers, but I'd take its forecasts with salt. - [NIST IR 8547 (draft)](https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/ir/8547/ipd?ref=kevinmeyer.com): the proposed timeline for retiring today's encryption. It's dry, but most corporate deadlines trace back to it. - [Google's cryptography migration timeline](https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-security/cryptography-migration-timeline/?ref=kevinmeyer.com): how one of the companies building quantum computers is protecting itself from them. - [DARPA QBI Stage C (HPCwire)](https://www.hpcwire.com/2026/10/07/atom-computing-diraq-ibm-and-ionq-advance-to-darpa-qbi-stage-c/?ref=kevinmeyer.com): which companies are still in the most rigorous test of whether any of this pays off. - [Quantum Snake Oil Dictionary (PostQuantum)](https://postquantum.com/quantum-snake-oil/quantum-ai-trading/?ref=kevinmeyer.com): a running list of quantum marketing terms and what's actually behind them. - Richard Feynman, "Simulating Physics with Computers" (1981 talk, published 1982) \[LINK\]: where the whole idea started, and more readable than you'd expect. - On this blog: [While We Were Processing AI, Quantum Arrived](https://www.kevinmeyer.com/while-we-were-processing-ai-quantum-arrived/), [Why Quantum Computing Threatens Blockchain's Cryptographic Foundation](https://www.kevinmeyer.com/why-quantum-computing-threatens-blockchains-cryptographic-foundation/), and [Quantum Consciousness: Are Our Minds Connected by Spooky Physics?](https://www.kevinmeyer.com/quantum-consciousness-are-our-minds-connected-by-spooky-physics/)