On the one hand, I'm happy whenever people get excited about physics. On the other hand, I hate it when they get excited because somebody said "Star Wars" and completely fail to see why an experiment is actually cool. This experiment will never lead to light-sabers. I'm sorry geeks, but it won't. It's still damned cool.
Just like you can build classical computers with many different things representing bits, from photons to electrons to mechanical levers, it is theoretically possible to build quantum computers with qubits made out of many different things. Photons have many tremendous advantages over most other things people have thought of, but some huge weaknesses. One of them is that it's very hard to get photons to interact with each other. If you can't make qubits interact with each other then you can't build a logic gate. That means you're humped. Strong photon-photon interaction is one of the holy grails of photonic quantum computing. It's huge (if indeed the interaction in this paper can be made strong and there isn't huge loss involved).
So, screw you cnet and screw your lightsabers. I love Star Wars as much as the next guy, but you've done the science a huge disservice by completely failing to explain why it's significant and geeking out over space opera that has about as much relevance to it as a flaming rodent of unusual size!
Just like you can build classical computers with many different things representing bits, from photons to electrons to mechanical levers, it is theoretically possible to build quantum computers with qubits made out of many different things. Photons have many tremendous advantages over most other things people have thought of, but some huge weaknesses. One of them is that it's very hard to get photons to interact with each other. If you can't make qubits interact with each other then you can't build a logic gate. That means you're humped. Strong photon-photon interaction is one of the holy grails of photonic quantum computing. It's huge (if indeed the interaction in this paper can be made strong and there isn't huge loss involved).
So, screw you cnet and screw your lightsabers. I love Star Wars as much as the next guy, but you've done the science a huge disservice by completely failing to explain why it's significant and geeking out over space opera that has about as much relevance to it as a flaming rodent of unusual size!