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When element 61, also known as promethium, was first isolated by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1945, it completed the series of chemical elements known as lanthanides. However, aspects of the element’s exact chemical nature have remained a mystery until last year, when a team of scientists from ORNL and the National Institute of Standards and Technology used a combination of experimentation and computer simulation to purify the promethium radionuclide and synthesize a coordination complex that was characterized for the first time. The results of their work were recently published in Nature.

Actually, nothing is wrong with it if you are a computer science major. It’s just that it has no place in the philosophy department.

From the point of anyone wanting to work in natural language, symbolic logic has all of the vices of mathematics and none of its virtues. That is, it is obscure to the point of incomprehensibility (given the weak neurons of this English major at any rate), and it leads to no useful outcome in the domain of human affairs. This would not be so bad were it not for all those philosophy major curricula that ask freshmen to take a course in it as their “introduction” to philosophy. For anyone looking to explore the meaning of life, this is a complete turnoff.

What were the philosophy mavens thinking?

It seems like over the past few years, Quantum is being talked about more and more. We’re hearing words like qubits, entanglement, super position, and quantum computing. But what does that mean … and is quantum science really that big of a deal? Yeah, it is.

It’s because Quantum science has the potential to revolutionize our world. From processing data to predicting weather, to picking stocks or even discovering new medical drugs. Quantum, specifically quantum computers, could solve countless problems.

Dr. Heather Masson-Forsythe, an AAAS Science \& Technology Fellow in NSF’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, hosts this future-forward episode.

Featured guests include (in order of appearance):
Dr. Spiros Michalakis, the manager of outreach and a staff researcher at Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, an NSF Physics Frontiers Center.

Dolev Bluvstein, a doctoral student at Harvard University, working in the Lukin Group at the Quantum Optics Laboratory.

Dr. Scott Aaronson, Schlumberger Chair of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin and director of its Quantum Information Center.

In an interview Dr Stephanie Simmons, Chief Quantum Officer of Photonic, explains the need to scale quantum computers and their approach to tackling this challenge to pave the way for reliable, large-scale quantum computing.

For quantum computers to move from laboratory to commercialization, these devices will need to scale to millions of qubits.

Scaling quantum computers is critical to unlocking exponential speed-ups to help solve some of the world’s biggest problems and unlock its greatest opportunities, said Stephanie Simmons, CQO of Photonic, a company focused on using its photonically linked spin qubits in silicon to build a scalable, fault-tolerant and distributed quantum system.