A Brief History of Quantum Computing
While the debate between quantum and classical physics became widely publicized at the 1927 Solvay Conference — where Einstein, Bohr, and their contemporaries famously exchanged passionate arguments over the meaning of the new theory — it would not be until 1981 that the “Quantum 2.0” era truly began, when Richard Feynman championed the idea of using quantum mechanics itself to simulate nature. Shor’s algorithm then rose to fame in 1994, demonstrating that a quantum computer could factor large numbers efficiently and, in doing so, unsettling the foundations of modern cryptography and drawing the field into the mainstream imagination.