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Comment An atom? (Score 1, Insightful) 210

Why would an atom even naively be the conceptual finest representation of a bit? Does he mean an electron? An atom is quite a large and complex object compared to an electron...Measuring an electron's presence or absence yields a simple bit. There's nothing atomic ABOUT an atom... why would that ever represent a bit?

Comment My understanding... (Score 1) 220

This type of thing is interesting in the realm of secure communications. Information does and can not travel faster than the speed of light, so don't get hung up on that. What you DO have is a communication medium like, say, fiber optics. By using a quantum medium, the state becomes disrupted upon measuring it. This means that each end can account for the other's measurement and thus be unconditionally certain that no other party has read the transmitted message. This is ideal for operations such as key distribution. I'd note that this process would actually be slightly slower to communicate than fiber optics. You have to send a traditional message over a non quantum wire communicating to the other party when and how to measure the quantum state. It's only application, arguably, is in network security. Quantum COMPUTATION, however, is a different subject. This is not that.

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