It’s a weird, weird quantum world
Brief
In 1994, as Professor Peter Shor PhD ’85 tells it, internal seminars at AT&T Bell Labs were lively affairs. The audience of physicists was an active and inquisitive bunch, often pelting speakers with questions throughout their talks.
Shor, who worked at Bell Labs at the time, remembers several occasions when a speaker couldn’t get past their third slide, as they attempted to address a rapid line of questioning before their time was up.
That year, when Shor took his turn to present an algorithm he had recently worked out, the physicists paid keen attention to Shor’s entire talk — and then some.
“Mine went pretty well,” he told an MIT audience yesterday.
In that 1994 seminar talk, Shor presented a proof that showed how a quantum system could be applied to solve a particular problem more quickly than a classical computer.