Appendix B - Putting Weirdness to Work

Summary

According to Charles de Gaulle, Napoleon's military genius lay in his ability “to grasp the situation, to adapt himself to it, and to exploit it to his own advantage”. Most of this book has treated the first two of these steps: learning what quantum mechanics is and how to work with it, whether we like it or not. This appendix moves on to the third step of exploitation.

The applications of quantum mechanics are myriad. Quantum mechanics underlies all chemical and biochemical reactions, the design of drugs and of alloys, and the generation of medical X-rays. It is essential to the laser, to the transistor, and to a sensitive detector of magnetic field called the SQUID (Superconducting QUantum Interference Device). But for the purposes of this book, it is useful to focus on only three of these applications: quantum cryptography, tunneling applications, and quantum computers. The first of these was treated in chapter 13; this appendix describes the second and third. These descriptions are segregated into an appendix because I don't know how to treat them thoroughly at the mathematical level of this book. Consequently, the treatments here are more descriptive and less analytic than the treatments in the chapters.