I, who had been thinking myself so vast, a temple, a church, a whole universe, unconfined and capable of being everywhere on the verge of things and here too, am now nothing but what you see...
— The Waves, Virginia Woolf, p. 207

Any coherent system worth studying must begin with first principles. When we understand these foundations, we gain not only clarity about the system’s inner workings, but also the power to imagine what it might become. So let’s begin at the beginning: with the qubit. This might sound deeply abstract, even remote from daily life, but the reality is quite the opposite. Qubits are set to transform how we compute, how we communicate, and even how we understand the nature of reality. So keep reading, because the future won't explain itself!

You may find that this first foray leaves you with more questions than answers. That is, in fact, a good thing. Quantum computing is still in its infancy. Many of its core questions remain unanswered, and even the answers we do have are steeped in probabilistic reasoning and logical paradoxes that can defy classical intuition. The goal of this newsletter therefore is not to provide comprehensive answers from the outset, nor to immediately throw you headlong into the rigorous mathematics that underpin quantum mechanics (though don't worry, it's coming!). Rather, I’m here to accompany you through these early explorations, not to resolve every uncertainty, but to offer just enough clarity to invite the right questions forward.

So what is quantum information?

For now, let's define it simply as the information that is stored, transmitted, and processed by quantum systems.

We can further ground that idea in something more familiar by revisiting how classical information functions. Traditional computers, like the kind you use everyday, encode information as bits, which can be either 0 or 1. Now you've probably heard this before a million times, but what does it actually mean?

Consider a practical example: when you press a key on your keyboard, that keystroke gets translated into a digital signal, a precise pattern of electrical voltages. A high voltage might represent True or 1, while a low voltage represents False or 0. These 1s and 0s, also known as bits, get routed through logic gates, tiny physical circuits that perform simple operations like AND (true only if both inputs are true), OR (true if either input is true), and NOT (flipping true to false, and vice versa).

Billions of these gates are packed into your computer's processor, guiding the flow of electricity in meticulously orchestrated patterns. Software then interprets these complex patterns as letters, numbers, sounds, images, websites, apps, and all of the complex phenomena we experience while operating our devices. In other words, at the lowest level, every action or process performed by a computer begins as these True/False abstractions: electricity flowing through silicon. This is known as boolean logic, a fancy term that just means the translation of logical propositions (e.g., typing the letter ‘a’ on the keyboard generates the pixels for that letter onto the screen) into binary sequences.

This is the mechanical reality beneath all classical computing. And while it may already seem mind-bending that the staggering complexities of our entire digital world arise from electrical signals flickering through microscopic switches, the quantum world elevates that strangeness to an entirely new level.

Let’s return now to quantum information. Imagine a decision still in the process of unfolding—not indecision, and not randomness either. A qubit is like this: a whisper of possibility suspended between outcomes. Not a shrug, nor a random coin flip, but something more organized, like a crowd of maybes moving in quiet coordination, nudging the system toward an answer that doesn't yet exist.

That is, until you look.

The moment you observe a qubit, it chooses. Its suspended state collapses into a definite value—commonly 0 or 1—based on the probabilities encoded within its configuration. But crucially, the act of observation changes the system. It's not just that we uncover an answer, we participate in bringing it into being.

A single qubit is like asking a yes-or-no question, but instead of answering right away, the system holds the question open. You can push on it, rotate it, influence it. Only when you finally ask it does it give you either a "yes" or "no", but the path you took along the way shapes that answer.

As Virginia Woolf wrote: "I... am now nothing but what you see."

The qubit, like the self, becomes something concrete only in the act of being seen. This means that a qubit is not merely a fancier bit, but an entirely different kind of information. Classical bits are deterministic. We can set them in motion within a physical system, trace their exact path along logic gates, and predict their outcome without ambiguity. Qubits, in contrast, can exist in superposition, just like our simultaneous red and blue thread above. Moreover, thanks to the phenomenon of entanglement, qubits can become linked in such a way that the measurement of one instantaneously reveals information about the state of the other, no matter how far apart they are in the universe (though in that moment, no information actually travels between them).

In most modern computers, bits are represented by tiny electrical signals, flickers of voltage flowing through microscopic circuits. But a bit itself is just an abstraction. It’s a choice between two alternatives, a unit of distinction that can embody varied physical forms. Bits have been stored in magnetic orientations on a hard drive, in pits on a disc, and in the positions of mechanical switches in older machines. What matters is not so much the material, but the ability to represent either 0 or 1.

A qubit is different. It is not an abstract idea carried by a medium. It is the medium. A qubit is a physical system that behaves in quantum ways. It might be an electron, a photon, a trapped ion, or the vibration of a superconducting current. Each of these systems has unique properties that determine how information is stored, manipulated, and observed. This variety of possible qubit implementations is a blessing and a curse: it provides more flexibility to researchers building quantum systems, but challenges standardization and system stability.

Also unlike a bit, a qubit can exist in a superposition of 0 and 1 at the same time. While a qubit itself is fundamentally a two-level system, quantum systems can be built with three or more levels. When that happens, the qubit becomes a qutrit (three possible states) or a qudit (more than three states). The more dimensions a quantum system can explore, the more information it can encode, and the more complex the computations it can perform. When qubits are entangled, their shared state grows exponentially with each added qubit. This opens the door to algorithms that would take classical computers centuries or millennia to solve, but that a quantum system, shaped correctly, might resolve in minutes. This expansion is possible not because of some abstraction layered on top, but because quantum systems are inherently physical. Their information complexity is shaped by how we construct and measure them.

We will dive deeper into the physicality of quantum systems in future issues, but for now just know that quantum information isn't tied to any single medium. It can live in particles of light, the spin of electrons, in trapped atoms, or in the strange harmonics of superconducting loops. This flexibility makes it both powerful and extremely fragile. Every quantum system carries its own vulnerabilities, and every measurement risks breaking what it reveals.

Quantum information doesn't just challenge how we build computers, but also how we think about information itself. It is no longer merely a fixed, measureable, primarily binary existence, but a structured potential that becomes real only through interaction. In this new paradigm, knowing is not a passive observation, but a participatory experience.

These differences—superposition, entanglement, and measurement—necessitate a new kind of computing in a fundamentally different language, one that we will explore from a variety of angles. We'll discuss manipulating qubits through quantum gates, what it means to entangle them, and why you can't clone quantum information the way you can simply copy a file on your computer.

But for now, I leave you with this food for thought: a qubit is not a switch, but the whisper of a universe becoming itself through the of act being seen.

Livingstone, C. (2018). Experimental identities: Quantum physics in The Waves. Journal of Literature and Science, 11(1), 66–81.

Wong, T. G. (2022). Introduction to classical and quantum computing (Paperback edition, 388 pp.). Rooted Grove. ISBN 9798985593105.

Woolf, V. (1931). The Waves. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.2478/page/n209

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