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The Cold Chip
Leo wanted a plain answer. A headline had said quantum computers would break the locks on ordinary encrypted mail. His sister Imani worked with a research group, and he wanted to know whether that break had already happened. He took the train to the lab and stood beside a white cylinder that hummed.
Inside it, a small chip sat in the cold. This kind of quantum computer uses superconducting circuits, and those circuits have to stay near absolute zero. A classical bit is zero or one. A qubit on that chip can be held in superposition, a mix of zero and one, until the machine measures it. Imani said the state is easy to lose. Heat, a shake, or a stray signal can knock it apart. People call that decoherence. The cylinder was there to keep the world out.