Chad Rigetti has devoted his career to quantum computing—a phrase you’ve perhaps most recently encountered in Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
Superhero movies aside, quantum computing is somewhere between reality and moonshot. In the most rudimentary terms (all I feel remotely qualified to give you), a quantum computer uses counterintuitive rules of physics to compute some information exponentially faster than “classical” computers. It’s real—though it’s so far failed to scale or find widespread commercial use—and it holds an air of science fiction, even in how an expert like Rigetti thinks about it.
