Almost 35 years ago, when I was a postgraduate, I wrote a whimsical novella about a girl who sees space and time differently. In truth, it was my first attempt to describe how the quantum world behaves in plain English, simple enough for A‑level students to grasp. Around the same time, I won the Department of Trade & Industry SMART Award for my work at Oxford and was named the British Association for the Advancement of Science Speaker of the Year.
That was then. This is now.
Today, as I prepare for my second PhD – this time in quantum physics – I find myself returning to those early questions with a more mature mind and a deeper sense of purpose. The first time round, I learned how to probe matter with high‑energy proton beams in vacuum and interpret the faintest signals from scattered particles. Now, I’m shifting from probing matter to probing information itself.
What strikes me most is how much the field has changed. When I was at Oxford, Shor’s algorithm didn’t exist. Quantum computing wasn’t a discipline; it was a thought experiment. We had Feynman’s 1981 lecture and a handful of speculative papers. The idea that a quantum algorithm could factor integers exponentially faster than classical methods — and threaten RSA — would have sounded like science fiction.
So encountering Shor’s algorithm now feels like meeting a future that arrived while I was busy building quant funds and raising a family. And strangely, it feels familiar. The same mathematical instincts I used in portfolio optimisation — structure, symmetry, constraints, eigenvectors — are the ones I now use to understand quantum circuits.
And then there’s DiVincenzo’s seven criteria. When I first revisited them, I felt an unexpected sense of comfort. They are engineering‑level sanity in a field that often feels metaphysical: well‑defined qubits, reliable initialisation, long coherence times, universal gates, efficient measurement, and the ability to interconvert and transmit quantum information. It’s a checklist that says: Yes, this is hard — but it is buildable.
So here I am, decades later, back in the world of research, exploring the frontier where physics, mathematics, and imagination meet. The questions are bigger now, the stakes higher, and the world more uncertain — but the curiosity is the same.
My long-list of PHILOSOPHICAL questions
- What happens to our models of the world when uncertainty is not noise but structure?
- If Shor’s algorithm can overturn the foundations of classical cryptography, what other “certainties” in our lives are waiting to collapse?
- In a quantum world, is classical reasoning simply too slow, too rigid, too linear to keep up?
- What if the real frontier is not technology, but our ability to think in superposition — to hold multiple possible worlds without rushing to collapse them?
- How do we lead, design, and govern when the future behaves more like a quantum state than a classical trajectory?
- If DiVincenzo’s criteria give us a blueprint for building quantum machines, what are the equivalent criteria for building quantum‑literate leaders?
- What becomes possible when we stop treating ambiguity as a threat and start treating it as information?
- And perhaps the most uncomfortable question of all: what if the limits we experience are not in physics, but in imagination?
