In May 1981, at a conference center housed in a chateau-style mansion outside Boston, a few dozen physicists and computer scientists gathered for a three-day meeting. The assembled brainpower was formidable: One attendee, Caltech’s Richard Feynman, was already a Nobel laureate and would earn a widespread reputation for genius when his 1985 memoir “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character became a bestseller. Numerous others, such as Paul Benioff, Arthur Burks, Freeman Dyson, Edward Fredkin, Rolf Landauer, John Wheeler, and Konrad Zuse, were among the most accomplished figures in their respective research areas.
The conference they were attending, The Physics of Computation, was held from May 6 to 8 and cohosted by IBM and MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science. It would come to be regarded as a seminal moment in the history of quantum computing—not that anyone present grasped that as it was happening.
“It’s hard to put yourself back in…
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Source : fastcompany.com
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