By Hamish Johnston
Tomorrow I will be winging my way to Vancouver to attend the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science – the AAAS. I have lots on for the next few days, including a trip to the TRIUMF accelerator lab to find out how physicists there are planning to make medical isotopes using an accelerator rather than having to rely on ageing nuclear reactors.
I will also be spending a lot of time talking to people about quantum computing (QC). Indeed, a good chunk of the programme at the AAAS is devoted to QC, a field in which Canadian physicists have excelled.
One such physicist is Geordie Rose (right), founder of the quantum-computer maker D-Wave Systems, which is based in Vancouver. I plan to visit D-Wave on Friday, when I hope to find out what is in that giant box that often appears behind Geordie.
What I’m not looking forward to is the 10-hour flight – if only quantum teleportation worked for macroscopic objects.
