Quantum Valley
A new tech hub is emerging that promises to revolutionize the lives of future generations in the way Silicon Valley has transformed ours. Where is this place? Closer than you think
by Dan Falk photos by Paul Orenstein R
AYMOND LAFLAMME almost dropped out of graduate school back in 1983. He was a tal- ented young physicist, but the program at the University of Cambridge was unforgiv- ing. Hunched over his books day and night,
he remembers being “invisible” to even his closest friends. But the intensive studying paid off and once his grades were posted — a very public affair at Cambridge — a classmate approached him with a message: “Professor Stephen Hawking would like to see you.” Laflamme would spend his first year with Hawking engrossed in a particularly daunting problem. What would happen to the flow of time if the universe stopped expanding and began to contract? Hawking expected time itself to run in reverse, “but I kept getting something dif- ferent,” recalls Laflamme. Each time they met, Hawking would suggest a slightly different approach — but no matter what Laflamme did with the equations, he kept getting the same answer: time kept marching forward. In the end, Hawking admitted he had made a mistake (a confession immortalized on page 150 of A Brief History of Time, for those who made it that far).
After years spent pondering the universe, Laflamme
turned his attention to the very tiniest scales: the quantum realm. What is the nature of the quantum world? Can we learn how to manipulate information using the rules of quantum mechanics? The work that had occupied Laflamme at Cambridge was both ambitious and pro- found — space, time, the universe and all that — but it won’t get you a better smartphone. Quantum computers, on the other hand, could be a game changer. “We’ve found a fundamentally new type of machine,” he says. “It can do things that we couldn’t imagine were possible before.”
BORN AND RAISED IN QUEBEC CITY, Laflamme, now 54, lives in Waterloo, Ont., where he serves as executive director of the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), headquar- tered on the campus of the University of Waterloo. The institute was launched a dozen years ago, the brainchild of Mike Lazaridis, billionaire founder of BlackBerry (for- merly Research in Motion). Recognizing the potential of quantum information science, Lazaridis teamed up with David Johnston, at that time president of the University of Waterloo, to establish an institute dedicated to probing
42 | CPA MAGAZINE | JUNE/JULY 2015
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