ProbabilityRadioactive

Radioactive decay of atoms is caused by forces which act at much smaller scales within atoms, and which can be explained using Quantum mechanics. During the last century, physicists like Max Planck and Paul Dirac discovered that fundamental particles have a mind-blowing property: they can be in multiple different places at the same time. They don’t have a fixed position, but instead a probability distribution (also called wave function) which tells us how likely it is that we’ll find them at a particular position.

This incredible property is used by Quantum computers. Conventional computers can only ever do one computation at a time. Quantum computers can use the properties of subatomic particles to do many calculations at the same time – and that makes them significantly faster.