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Quantum Information

Putting certainty in the bank

Nature volume 436, pages 633–634 (2005)Cite this article

A new way to manipulate quantum states resolves a long-standing conundrum about who knows what, and when and how, in the quantum world. The result is, as one has come to expect, startling and counterintuitive.

Claude Shannon's landmark 1948 theory of communication1 tackles a nuts-and-bolts question: how do we find the best way to communicate using a given resource, such as a telegraph line or a satellite antenna? To answer that question, Shannon first took a detour into more philosophical territory by working out how to quantify the elusive concepts ‘uncertainty’ and ‘information’. More than half a century on, quantum-information theorists have in many ways taken the opposite approach. Inspired by Shannon, but working with the notoriously counterintuitive theory of quantum mechanics, they seek to understand uncertainty and information in the quantum world by analysing the practical questions first, in the hope that the answers might then illuminate more fundamental conceptual issues.

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  1. School of Computer Science, McGill University, 3480 University Street, Montreal, H3A 2A7, Quebec, Canada

    Patrick Hayden

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  1. Patrick Hayden
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Hayden, P. Putting certainty in the bank. Nature 436, 633–634 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/436633a

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