Can an aging corporation’s adventures in fundamental physics research open a new era of unimaginably powerful computers?
In 2012, physicists in the Netherlands announced a
discovery in particle physics that started chatter about a Nobel Prize.
Inside a tiny rod of semiconductor crystal chilled cooler than outer
space, they had caught the first glimpse of a strange particle called
the Majorana fermion, finally confirming a prediction made in 1937. It
was an advance seemingly unrelated to the challenges of selling office productivity software or competing with Amazon in cloud computing, but
Craig Mundie, then heading Microsoft’s technology and research strategy,
was delighted. The abstruse discovery—partly underwritten by
Microsoft—was crucial to a project at the company aimed at making it
possible to build immensely powerful computers that crunch data using
quantum physics. “It was a pivotal moment,” says Mundie. “This research
was guiding us toward a way of realizing one of these systems.”
