What is the greatest technological achievement
of mankind?
Many would answer it is the landing on the
moon in the 1960's.
And yes, this was a remarkable achievement
but the fact that we can integrate billions of transistors 
on a single chip;
that really changed our everyday lives.
Nowadays integrated circuits are everywhere
around us, in our cars and in our phones.
And even in this journey to the moon, computers
played a vital role.
Quantum computing is now in a very similar
stage as those days of the 1960's.
Computer engineers had to solder components all one
to another, if you have ten components, this is ok.
But once you go to the thousands and ten thousands,
this is a very complicated task.
Now if you ask me what is the biggest challenge
for quantum computing,
it is to go from this small qubit application 
to a large scale system.
I think we are only beginning to understand
what a quantum computer can do.
But of the applications we know the ones that
motivate me most, are to compute the behaviour
of molecules and materials, which in turn
can have really important impact in designing
new medication, new drugs, better energy storage,
energy transport and so forth.
A future quantum computer will exist out of
many layers.
A layer will be the qubits, but also think
about the compilers, software, a quantum algorithm.
And all those layers; they need to communicate
with each other.
It really requires a lot of creativity that
problems and solutions that you are implementing
on one side are complimentary to complete
the other side.
And solving this big puzzle is really what
excites me.
So over time I have gotten used to working
with one single electron,
and holding on to it and manipulating its quantum state 
and doing computations with it.
But when I pause to think about it, it is
really quite amazing.
So this course we created for people who want
to understand how the most profound aspects
of quantum mechanics have the potential to
revolutionize the world.
