Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Paul is President of Quantum Computing at ColdQuanta , where he leads the team building the world’s most useful quantum computer. So much of modern life relies on GPS that it has been estimated that an outage would cost the U.S. economy over $1 billion per day. Such an outage isn’t too far-fetched. We have seen recent examples of GPS being blocked in conflict zones, spoofed for nefarious purposes and disrupted by solar storms. At its heart, GPS is a timing system. To understand how timing relates to navigation, and how quantum technology will enable us to overcome the limitations of GPS, we need to go back in history a few hundred years. Dava Sobel’s book Longitude recounts the tale of John Harrison’s mechanical clock that revolutionized maritime navigation and global trade. In the same way that Harrison’s clock accelerated economic growth through the 18th and 19th centuries, optical clocks are … [Read more...] about A Quantum Leap In Timing