Editorial: The Quantum Pace of Progress

It feels like 2025 just began, and suddenly we’re wrapping up another year. Maybe that’s because the pace of life — like the pace of technology — keeps accelerating.

Each generation builds upon yesterday’s breakthroughs so quickly that what once took centuries now happens in years. For example, the telephone took 75 years to reach 100 million users, while the Internet took seven years. ChatGPT reached 100 million users in just two months, making it the fastest-growing consumer app in history. Your parents or grandparents may remember a world before television — and you yourself may recall what life was like before the Internet. But children today will never know a world without AI.

Quantum computing perfectly encapsulates this acceleration. Just decades ago, the idea of computers solving problems by exploiting quantum mechanics seemed like science fiction. Now, it’s an inevitability.

In the 1940s, some of the earliest electromechanical computers, like the Harvard Mark I, could compute around three additions per second. By comparison, the computational power of a modern smartphone chip of today is measured in trillions of operations per second — over a 300-billion-fold increase in basic computational speed. This vast jump in computing power over the past 80 years was enabled by the shift from electromechanical relays to electronic transistors (movement of electrons); the difference is essentially the speed of mechanical motion vs. the speed of light.

Looking at quantum computing, it took less than ten years for IBM to go from 5 qubits in its first superconducting quantum processor in 2016 to 1,121 qubits in 2023. Unlike classical computing, quantum computing power scales exponentially with the number of qubits. In theory, that’s a leap from exploring 32 possible quantum states (2⁵) to more than 10³³⁷ (2^1,121) — a mind-bogglingly large number. The difference in computational power is incalculable. Of course, the real-world limitations of quantum computing mean that today’s processors can’t even come close to manipulating and exploring all 2^1,121 states for practical computations. Nonetheless, every leap forward expands our understanding of what might one day be possible.

“Quantum computers will be a path to understanding molecular behavior dynamically at the chemical and biochemical scale, opening the gate to entirely new problem sets that would otherwise be unreachable by any classical computer,” writes Austin Lin in his article on pp. 30–35.

The United Nations (UN) declared 2025 as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ), marking 100 years since the initial development of quantum mechanics. With the goal of raising awareness of quantum computing and fostering global cooperation, the UN hopes that this centenary celebration will help transition quantum science from the research lab to the public consciousness. Even as IYQ comes to a close, “quantum computing is just now leaving the port of its inaugural journey,” writes Lin.

If time seems to be moving faster, maybe it’s because the future keeps arriving ahead of schedule. As the world races ahead, what remains constant is the ingenuity of engineers — who not only keep up with the newest technologies, but help define them.

Emily Petruzzelli, Editor-in-Chief