Google Has Achieved 'Quantum Supremacy.' Just What the Heck Is That?

Here's a quick bit of topical multiple choice: What is "quantum supremacy?" If you answered c, you're correct -- except for the very afraid part. The fact is, quantum supremacy -- a term that is burning down the Internet today -- is really just an exceedingly fancy way of saying a super-duper kind of computer, one that not only operates on quantum principles, but masters them so deftly that it actually outperforms a traditional computer. Traditional silicon computers like the one you might be using to read this rely on chips that encode data in one of two states: 1 or 0. Gathered up and organized by the millions, billions and trillions, all those 1's and 0's take on meaning in the same way that the 8.3 million pixels in a 4K TV screen, or the who-know-how-many dots in a pointillist painting like George Seraut's masterpiece Sunday on La Grande Jatte, create a picture. But 1's and 0's are, by definition, binary things -- they are one or the other, but they can't be both.