This week, Microsoft announced Majorana 1, a new quantum processor that supposedly operates using a “new state of matter”—a phrase that, on its surface, sounds like an earth-shattering discovery. If you only read the headlines, you might think Microsoft has rewritten physics itself. But let’s be clear: this is not a new state of matter. It’s a known state of matter behaving in a new way. This distinction matters because, while Microsoft’s breakthrough in topological superconductivity is significant, their marketing plays into a common tech industry trend—dressing up engineering advancements as paradigm-shifting scientific discoveries.
What’s Really Happening?
What Microsoft has done is use electrification and quantum effects to enable a solid material to exhibit a more fluid, dynamic range of behavior at the quantum level. This allows the stability of topological superconductivity to support quantum computation in a way that could be more resilient to noise and errors than previous methods. However, the fundamental logic of the system remains binary—qubits still collapse to either 0 or 1 upon measurement, meaning that no matter how exotic the underlying material science gets, we’re still working within an inherently limited computing paradigm. If this were true revolutionary physics, we’d be talking about:- A fundamentally new phase of matter, like time crystals or room-temperature Bose-Einstein condensates.
- Ternary or continuous-variable quantum logic that goes beyond binary computing’s limitations.