This is very exciting to me! It's a great time to be interested in quantum mechanics. Quantum computers would pave the way for the holy grail of computational

This is very exciting to me! It's a great time to be interested in quantum mechanics. Quantum computers would pave the way for the holy grail of computational physics and materials science: perfect QM simulations. Imagine performing a simulation on a computer that matches up exactly* with experiment. Now that would be exciting. You could actually develop new materials right from the comfort of your chair at Starbucks (SSHing into a supercomputer of course). Your simulations would even be more accurate than a lot of experiments because of the absence of environmental and experimental errors. Recalling history, it's amazing to me how quickly the idea of a nuclear weapon went from conception to implementation. Also, it only took like 9 years to get a person to the moon. You basically had a bunch of the world's greatest scientists all gathered in one location with the motivation to get the task done. I wonder what would happen if a similar situation was applied to quantum physics research. * Leaving out plenty of details here. Quantum computers can tackle the NP hard fermion sign problem, which is the current main obstacle in high accuracy QM simulations, but there are still some lingering questions about whether the process of inputting a particular system into a quantum computer is itself an NP hard task. Not to mention that some heavier elements require relativistic treatment, the fact that I'm talking about quantum chemistry rather than particle physics, and the fact that even with a polynomial time algorithm, quantum computers may still be too slow to simulate a large system in a practical amount of time. But I can dream.