The Wall Street Journal | By: Jack Nicas | October 16, 2017:

The ultra-powerful machine has the potential to disrupt everything from science and medicine to national security—assuming it works.

Hartmut Neven believes in parallel universes. On a recent morning outside Google’s Los Angeles office, the 53-year-old computer scientist was lecturing me on how quantum mechanics—the physics of atoms and particles—backs the theory of a so-called multiverse.

Neven points to the tape recorder between us. What we’re seeing is only one of the device’s “classical configurations,” he says. “But somewhere, not perceived by us right now, there are other versions.”

According to Neven, this is true for not just tape recorders but all physical objects. “Even for systems like you and me,” he says. “There is a different configuration of all of us in a parallel universe.”

Neven, who speaks with a thick German accent and favors pink Christian Louboutin sneakers covered in spikes, has led some of Google’s most groundbreaking projects, from image-recognition software to Google Glass, a consumer flop that pioneered the idea of head-worn computers. The task in front of him is the most complex of his career:

Build a computer based on the strange laws of quantum mechanics.

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