On a crisp March evening in 1938, a lone figure stood at the port of Naples, a thick woollen coat wrapped about his narrow shoulders, his breath curling into the cool sea air. Ettore Majorana, the brilliant but haunted physicist, held a ticket for a ship bound for Palermo.
He boarded. And then vanished. No body, no letters, no final messages. Just a trail of scribbled equations in his notebooks and whispers among his colleagues in Rome.
Some say he foresaw the horrors nuclear physics would bring and withdrew into seclusion, refusing to be an Oppenheimer of his age. Others suggest he fled to South America or even entered a monastery.
What remains is his work, particularly his theorisation of a class of particles known as Majorana fermions, which are particles that are their own antiparticles.
A mathematical curiosity, shelved for decades until last week, when it suddenly became the cornerstone of a technological breakthrough that could reshape the world. These peculiar entities, elusive and ghostly, became the foundation of the technology Microsoft now claims will power the next era of computing.
While South Africans were locked in debate over a two percentage point VAT increase, Microsoft announced the creation of a new state of matter that could finally propel quantum computing from the realm of theory into reality. Using something called topoconductors, it built the first quantum processing unit on a topological core, calling it Majorana 1. This isn’t just a faster computer. It’s an entirely new kind of machine.
Our aperture of vision is so extremely narrow in SA that this news passed without a mention in any of the major business news platforms, as far as I can tell. I must admit that the whole premise of quantum computing ties my own mind into metaphysical knots — we’ve theorised that atoms are able to exist in multiple states simultaneously, after all. Just think about what that means for our understanding of reality, our philosophical view of existence, spirituality and the universe itself.
On a far more prosaic level, quantum computing has long promised to upend the way we process information, but the achilles heel has always been stability. Qubits, the building blocks of quantum computation, are notoriously fragile, collapsing at the slightest environmental disturbance. For decades, scientists have wrestled with this problem, searching for a way to make them robust enough for large-scale computation.
Microsoft believes it has cracked it. By using Majorana fermions, it has created a quantum bit that is not only more stable but exponentially more scalable. A qubit so small, at just one 100th of a millimetre, that it makes the dream of a million-qubit processor suddenly seem within reach.
In a press release dated February 19 Microsoft revealed its latest development but provided limited technical specifics. However, the company indicated that some of its data had been shared with select experts during a briefing at its research facility in Santa Barbara, California.
Among those given insight into the findings was Steven Simon, a theoretical physicist at the University of Oxford, who remarked, “would I stake my life on them seeing what they believe they’re seeing? No, but it looks promising”.
If Microsoft is correct, this is humanity’s quantum leap forward. And if that phrase sounds dramatic, it’s because it is. A fully realised quantum computer will do things that sound like science fiction: cracking encryption in seconds, rendering modern cybersecurity obsolete overnight. Simulating molecules with perfect accuracy, revolutionising drug discovery and materials science. Running AI models at speeds that make today’s AI look like a pocket calculator.
For SA, a country struggling to keep pace with the modern economy, the implications are seismic. Our financial institutions will need to rethink risk models as quantum computing allows markets to be simulated with unprecedented accuracy.
Humanity has a strange habit of underestimating its own moments of genius.
Our energy sector, lurching between crisis and bailout, could benefit from quantum-driven efficiency models for renewables. Even our mining industry, long the backbone of the economy, could be transformed as quantum algorithms optimise extraction techniques and locate mineral deposits with unprecedented precision.
But here’s the real problem. We’re not ready. The quantum arms race is already in full swing. Microsoft, Google, IBM and China’s state-backed researchers are pouring billions into this technology. The question is no longer whether quantum computing will change the world, but who will control it.
Yet our national conversation remains fixated on short-term crises. VAT hikes. Debt ceilings. Political scandals. These are important, yes. But if our policymakers, universities and research institutions don’t engage with quantum advancements, we will become passive consumers in a digital revolution that leaves us behind.
We have been here before. There was a time when SA had the expertise to lead in nuclear energy. Michael Thackeray left SA’s Council for Scientific & Industrial Research to work in the US as a pioneer of the lithium battery that powers the modern economy. There was a time when we had world-class scientists shaping global research. Somewhere along the way, we stopped looking ahead.
Humanity has a strange habit of underestimating its own moments of genius. When Majorana disappeared in 1938, his work was largely theoretical. It took nearly a century for the world to grasp its significance. Now, the future has arrived and not in some distant, utopian sci-fi dream but in a Microsoft announcement buried under the noise of daily politics.
It’s not even a question of whether SA will be ready when the quantum tide reshapes the world economy, when we can’t even fix a street in the Johannesburg CBD two years after a major gas explosion. We’ll still be arguing over apartheid while the future slips through our fingers.
• Avery, a financial journalist and broadcaster, produces BDTV's Business Watch. Contact him at Badger@businesslive.co.za.
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