1981. Remember that number. It is the year Richard Feynman, in a lecture at MIT, proposed using quantum mechanical phenomena to do calculations that would be impractical or impossible on conventional computers. The talk was called “Simulating Physics with Computers”, and Feynman is now credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing.
The bottom line is that a physicist best known for other things set the agenda for an industry that did not yet exist.
The man behind the talk
Feynman was born in Queens, New York, on May 11, 1918. He studied at MIT, took a perfect score on the physics section of the Princeton entrance exams, and earned his PhD at Princeton in 1942 under John Archibald Wheeler. His thesis laid the groundwork for the path integral formulation and for the diagrams that now carry his name, a pictorial way of writing out how subatomic particles behave. Physicists still use them.
He helped develop the atomic bomb during the war. In 1965 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Julian Schwinger and Shin’ichiro Tomonaga for fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics. Later he held the Richard C. Tolman professorship at Caltech, and in the 1980s the public met him as a member of the Rogers Commission on the Challenger disaster. A 1999 Physics World poll of 130 leading physicists ranked him seventh-greatest of all time.
He also wrote and lectured for ordinary readers. The Feynman Lectures on Physics came out between 1961 and 1964.
Why 1981 still matters
By the numbers, the idea has had a long road from lecture hall to engineering lab. A commentator on the history of the field describes it as an early spark for hundreds of researchers, and says investment from governments, large technology firms and startups is now pushing it along. The same commentator expects quantum computing to touch cryptography, materials science and drug discovery, though the technology is still at an early stage and faces real technical hurdles.
Investors will note the pattern. Feynman gave the talk in 1981, and the field is still working on it.
He died on February 15, 1988.
Sources
- Richard Feynman – Wikipedia
- From Turing to Feynman: The Transformative Journey of AI and Quantum Computing
