A Shortcut Through Time

Veteran New York Times science writer George Johnson, an award-winning journalist, turns his attention to quantum computing, one of the most fascinating frontiers in technology. The field imagines supercomputers that harness individual atoms to carry out calculations so vast they are nearly beyond imagination, and do so at astonishing speed.

As conventional microchips keep getting smaller, engineers see a natural endpoint: a machine whose every switch is a single atom. Such a device would not follow the rules of everyday physics but the strange laws of quantum mechanics, which govern the very small.

Johnson walks general readers through the surprisingly straightforward ideas behind this vision, reports on how far the revolution has progressed, and weighs how profoundly these machines could reshape the world.