What elite sport prepared me for in the lab — and what it didn’t

Some historical events are so catastrophic they resist comprehension. And yet they compel us to try to understand them, again and again.

Quantum computers, devices that process information leveraging quantum mechanical effects, could tackle some tasks that are difficult or impossible to solve using classical computers. These systems represent data as qubits, units of information that can exist in multiple states at once, unlike the bits used by classical computers that represent data using binary values ("0" or "1").