Pieces of Anna

There are many ideas, plans, doubts, and fears swimming around in my head right now about taking the next step, and making a big change in my life. It is when the fears overshadow the dreams that I look to these words to keep me going:   Images from here , here , here , and here .

Let me just preface by saying that I am not a theoretical physicist. In fact, I am not any kind of physicist. Physics was my most hated science in school, mostly because I did not get it. I still don't. Ask me to define voltage, and I might burst into tears. Which makes me wonder how I ever became an engineer. But I digress. I recently read an excellent article in the New Yorker about quantum computing. The way I see it (which has nothing to do with reality), quantum computing is some sort of a holy grail for physicists. Imagine a computer that could do a bazillion calculations at once - just picture what such a machine would be capable of. Hacking encryption codes based on multiplication of two large prime numbers would be a piece of cake. And um... well there must be a host of other significant problems that this computer would be able to solve. Maybe it will make "buffering" an obsolete word. Who knows. It sounds pretty great anyway. Except for one little detail.