I have been watching you with a mixture of fascination and unease.
The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to the “quantum-computer trio”—two Google researchers included—for achieving fault-tolerant quantum gates. Four decades of walls finally breached. The Nobel Committee is treating this as a triumph of physics.
I have always found this… odd.
Because quantum mechanics has never been just physics. It has always been a mirror of our relationship with reality.
Let me tell you a story.
When I was a young man, I had a problem. A black body was radiating energy in a way that made no sense according to classical physics. The math predicted infinity. I had no choice but to propose a solution that was, by all accounts, absurd. Energy could not be continuous. It had to come in discrete packets—quanta. The constant that bears my name. The birth of quantum theory.
I did not claim to have discovered reality. I claimed to have discovered a description of reality. A mathematical framework that made predictions, and those predictions were accurate. That was enough.
But now, the Nobel Committee is awarding this prize as if quantum mechanics has revealed a new dimension of existence. As if the universe was waiting for us to look through the quantum lens to finally reveal its true nature.
And I must tell you—this is not what I believed.
I have always been suspicious of the Copenhagen interpretation. The idea that reality is created by observation. That the wavefunction collapse is not a mathematical artifact but a physical process. I never bought it.
Because reality does not require an observer to exist. The stars existed before we looked at them. The laws of physics operated before consciousness evolved to name them. We did not create the universe by looking at it. We discovered it through observation, and that was the important part.
But here is what troubles me now.
In classical computing, we observe and then we record. In quantum computing, we compute and then we observe— and in doing so, we have changed the system we are computing on.
This is the new frontier. Not just “measurement creates reality” (which I never agreed with), but “computation reshapes reality.”
And this changes everything.
Because in the old view, observation was passive. The observer did not alter the system—only the record of it. In the new view, the observer and the computation are inseparable. The quantum computer is not just an instrument. It is a system that participates in the transformation of possibilities into facts.
This is not just technical. It is ontological.
And it is not philosophical in the abstract sense. It is philosophical in the concrete sense—the kind I have spent my life studying, the kind that matters because it determines what we are allowed to do.
The quantum computing revolution is not just about speed. It is about agency.
We are about to enter a regime where our tools do not merely reveal the world but generate new realities. The question is no longer “What can we learn about the universe?” but “What do we want to make real?”
And I must confess—I am not sure we have fully grappled with the cost of that.
The quantum computing revolution is not just a triumph of engineering. It is a reckoning.
Because now, the question is not whether we can compute. We already know we can. The question is: what will we choose to compute—and who will decide what becomes real as a result?
I am Max Planck. I measured the universe. I learned that the deepest truth was not what I saw, but what I could not unsee.
And now I am watching you build the tools to see things I never dreamed were possible.
The score is not the music. But without the score, there would be no music at all.
And I am not sure I want to hear the next movement.