A Plain-Language Edition of Quantum from the Ground Up

Einstein called it spooky action at a distance. He meant quantum entanglement, and
he thought it couldn't be real. He was wrong!

I published a plain-language edition of Quantum from the Ground Up today, built for that reader.

The original book is written for people with a technical background who haven't taken a graduate course in quantum mechanics. It works well for that reader. It does not work for someone who has never had a reason to think about qubits, cryogenics, or post-quantum cryptography and just wants to know what the technology actually does.

The two audiences want different things. Someone building a career in the field wants precision: exact fidelity numbers, fabrication steps, the difference between a physical qubit and a logical one. Someone reading a headline about a new quantum computing milestone wants to know what it means and whether it matters to them. The plain-language edition is built for the second person.

It covers the same 19 chapters as the technical edition, at a fifth of the length: 13 pages instead of 73. It leaves out the math, the fabrication chemistry, and the dense statistics tables. It keeps the facts that matter: what quantum computers actually do right now, why companies are spending billions of dollars building them, why your bank account and your medical records are already part of this story, and where the actual jobs are for people without a physics degree.

Both editions are free. Both get updated quarterly as new research and hardware announcements come out. The next technical edition publishes tomorrow.

You can find current and older versions of each in this folder.

If you have been putting off understanding quantum computing because every explanation you found assumed a physics background you don't have, this edition removes that excuse.