Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything

by Michio Kaku

Three physicists won the Nobel Prize in 1956 for the creation of this wonder device: Bell Laboratories scientists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley. Today, a replica of the world’s first transistor is on display in a glass case in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington. It is a crude, awkward-looking device, but delegations of scientists from around the world are known to approach this transistor with silent reverence, and some even bow in front of it, as if it were some deity. Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley used a new quantum form of matter, called the semiconductor. (Metals are conductors, which allow for the free flow of electrons. Insulators, like glass, plastic, or rubber, do not conduct electricity. Semiconductors are in between and can both carry and stop the flow of electrons.) The transistor exploits this crucial property. It is the successor to the old vacuum tube that was ingeniously used by Turing and others.