Randall Munroe's xkcd, the nerdiest strip on the web, speaks for all us QM buffs this holiday season!

Prof. Anthony J. Leggett of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics "for pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids".

Superfluids can, in theory, be used in topological quantum computing .

Superconductors are materials which offer effectively zero resistance to current at nearly absolute zero temperatures. They have been in the news recently in the form of superconducting magnets for the Large Hadron Collider.

Superfluids exhibit fluid dynamics analogous to the electrical dynamics of superconductors: they will flow through the finest capillaries without friction. The connection between superfluids and superconductors is more than an analogy: the quantum theories of the two phenomena are intimately related.

Prof. Sir Anthony (he was knighted in 2004) spoke with me by phone from his office.

Google's not only watching your car for you, Google is all over quantum computing.

A Wired reprint of a Norwegian photo of the spiral cloud left by a Russian rocket spinning out of control illustrates a geometric analogy to a paradox of quantum entanglement.

Drowning in the ocean of quantum field theory, your correspondent grasps Planck and emerges to sputter another question.

"[R]enunciation of the visualisation of atomic phenomena is imposed upon us by the impossibility of their subdivision ..." - Niels Bohr, Discussions with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics

A thought experiment follows in which a visualizable model of a rotating disc replicates the prediction of quantum mechanics with respect to coincidence of observation of entangled particles.

Prof. John M. Martinis of the Martinis Group for Josephson Junction Quantum Computing at University of California, Santa Barbara, calls it "+Hdirt ... the Hamiltonian of dirt." That's his term for the nitty-gritty physics that comes up in his group's engineering of practical devices capable of maintaining coherent states of duration and quality sufficient for the needs of working quantum computers. Prof. Martinis spoke from his office in Santa Barbara.

Simon Trebst is a computational physicist working at Microsoft Station Q , a Microsoft research group at the University of California in Santa Barbara working on topological quantum computing.

Topological quantum computing is a theoretical approach to the problem of error correction in quantum computing. If we can't always keep transistors honest, each of whose 1/0 value is formed of tens of millions of electrons, how are we going to guarantee accuracy when a qubit might be a small agglomeration on the atomic scale?