Scientific Computing: Computational Physics

After years of gaming someone showed me a spreadsheet and my life was changed. I discovered for the the first time that computers can be used for much more than playing a video game. One of the first uses of major computational computing was the calculation of real world variables and the dropping location for a bomb. Scientists found that they could use complex physics formulas and instantly calculate those formulas. This opened up computing to many new and exciting fields. Not the least of which is computing physics.

The first electronic digital computer was built in a basement of the physics department at Iowa State University.  The computer was invented by a man named Professor John Atanasoff.  In fact most major jumps in computing were made by physicists.  It just so happened that these physicists were simply experimenting with ideas and created a computer.

Professor Charles Bennet, IBM Fellow makes a great argument when he says that for a long time physics separated from computer science and we stopped making great computational advances.  We thought that we had finally found the answer and stopped looking.  But recently physicists have reentered the computer science community to work on quantum computers.

In a normal computer every bit has two modes, on and off.  This is a simple way of describing binary.    In a quantum computer each bit would be able to hold many modes, not just two.  A company known as D-Wave created a quantum computer where each bit can hold two states simultaneously.  This allows for a total of four modes, (0,0), (0,1), (1,0) and (1,1).  Because of this, each bit can provide twice the information of an ordinary bit while computing at the same speeds maybe faster.

Physics and computers have a long relationship and more recently this relation will begin to grow to what it once was.  Maybe in the near future we will see some more great and wondrous advances in computing that will provide answers to bigger questions.  Or perhaps, take over the world.