circa 1931: German-born physicist Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) standing beside a blackboard with ... [+] chalk-marked mathematical calculations written across it. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

40 years ago, Nobel Prize-winner Richard Feynman argued that nature isn't classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better make it quantum mechanical. This was later perceived as a rallying cry for developing a quantum computer, leading to todays rapid progress in the search for quantum supremacy. Heres a very short history of the evolution of quantum computing.

1905Albert Einstein explains the photoelectric effectshining light on certain materials can function to release electrons from the materialand suggests that light itself consists of individual quantum particles or photons.

1924The term quantum mechanics is first used in a paper by Max Born

1925Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and Pascual Jordan formulate matrix mechanics, the first conceptually autonomous and logically consistent formulation of quantum mechanics

1925 to 1927Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg develop the Copenhagen interpretation, one of the earliest interpretations of quantum mechanics which remains one of the most commonly taught

1930Paul Dirac publishes The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, a textbook that has become a standard reference book that is still used today

1935Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen publish a paper highlighting the counterintuitive nature of quantum superpositions and arguing that the description of physical reality provided by quantum mechanics is incomplete

1935Erwin Schrdinger, discussing quantum superposition with Albert Einstein and critiquing the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, develops a thought experiment in which a cat (forever known as Schrdingers cat) is simultaneously dead and alive; Schrdinger also coins the term quantum entanglement

1947Albert Einstein refers for the first time to quantum entanglement as spooky action at a distance in a letter to Max Born

1976Roman Stanisaw Ingarden of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toru, Poland, publishes one of the first attempts at creating a quantum information theory

1980Paul Benioff of the Argonne National Laboratory publishes a paper describing a quantum mechanical model of a Turing machine or a classical computer, the first to demonstrate the possibility of quantum computing

1981In a keynote speech titled Simulating Physics with Computers, Richard Feynman of the California Institute of Technology argues that a quantum computer had the potential to simulate physical phenomena that a classical computer could not simulate

1985David Deutsch of the University of Oxford formulates a description for a quantum Turing machine

1992The DeutschJozsa algorithm is one of the first examples of a quantum algorithm that is exponentially faster than any possible deterministic classical algorithm

1993The first paper describing the idea of quantum teleportation is published

1994Peter Shor of Bell Laboratories develops a quantum algorithm for factoring integers that has the potential to decrypt RSA-encrypted communications, a widely-used method for securing data transmissions

1994The National Institute of Standards and Technology organizes the first US government-sponsored conference on quantum computing

1996Lov Grover of Bell Laboratories invents the quantum database search algorithm

1998First demonstration of quantum error correction; first proof that a certain subclass of quantum computations can be efficiently emulated with classical computers

1999Yasunobu Nakamura of the University of Tokyo and Jaw-Shen Tsai of Tokyo University of Science demonstrate that a superconducting circuit can be used as a qubit

2002The first version of the Quantum Computation Roadmap, a living document involving key quantum computing researchers, is published

2004First five-photon entanglement demonstrated by Jian-Wei Pan's group at the University of Science and Technology in China

2011The first commercially available quantum computer is offered by D-Wave Systems

2012 1QB Information Technologies (1QBit), the first dedicated quantum computing software company, is founded

2014Physicists at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, teleport information between two quantum bits separated by about 10 feet with zero percent error rate

2017 Chinese researchers report the first quantum teleportation of independent single-photon qubits from a ground observatory to a low Earth orbit satellite with a distance of up to 1400 km

2018The National Quantum Initiative Act is signed into law by President Donald Trump, establishing the goals and priorities for a 10-year plan to accelerate the development of quantum information science and technology applications in the United States

2019Google claims to have reached quantum supremacy by performing a series of operations in 200 seconds that would take a supercomputer about 10,000 years to complete; IBM responds by suggesting it could take 2.5 days instead of 10,000 years, highlighting techniques a supercomputer may use to maximize computing speed

The race for quantum supremacy is on, to being able to demonstrate a practical quantum device that can solve a problem that no classical computer can solve in any feasible amount of time. Speedand sustainabilityhas always been the measure of the jump to the next stage of computing.

In 1944, Richard Feynman, then a junior staff member at Los Alamos, organized a contest between human computers and the Los Alamos IBM facility, with both performing a calculation for the plutonium bomb. For two days, the human computers kept up with the machines. But on the third day, recalled an observer, the punched-card machine operation began to move decisively ahead, as the people performing the hand computing could not sustain their initial fast pace, while the machines did not tire and continued at their steady pace (seeWhen Computers Were Human, by David Alan Greer).

Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman stands in front of a blackboard strewn with notation ... [+] in his lab in Los Angeles, Californina. (Photo by Kevin Fleming/Corbis via Getty Images)

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27 Milestones In The History Of Quantum Computing - Forbes