Besides all of these bright minds coming and renting space and having their meals and training students, some two dozen distinguished research chairs, 43 post-doctoral fellows, and all that economic benefit locally, perhaps the best way to answer the question, colleague, would be to cite some of the information I heard watching one of the Perimeter's Friday night shows. They do a lot of public outreach, so literally 40,000 students can be online watching a physics lecture.
One of the lectures I watched was a discussion on transmitting electricity without a wire. Now all of us plug our toasters into the wall and we get our heat to make our toast. Can you imagine if we could do the same thing without actually using a wire plugged into the wall to transmit electricity? In other words, I could have a charger for my BlackBerry in my home, and no matter where I was, my BlackBerry would charge because the charger would transmit electricity. This possibility requires a level of understanding of electron movement that we don't actually have today, but the experts say it's possible. That could allow us to have energy plants 100 years in the future on the moon and transmit power safely back to our cities. It sounds like science fiction, but so did X-rays 100 years ago.
This is the type of research that's happening at the Perimeter. And in partnership with quantum computing—I'm sure all of us remember the binary code of ones and zeros. Perhaps the chair doesn't remember binary code, but it's ones and zeros. That is the basis for all computation on our planet today. If you knew that an electron was rotating to the right and another electron was rotating to the left, the right rotation could be the one and the left rotation could be a zero.
Second, most electrons have a charge, positive or negative. I don't want to get too complicated, because I'm not a physicist, but what I'm telling you is the potential for having a computer more powerful than anything we have right now, the size of a pin. Because we're not using ones and zeros, but instead we're using electrons with a positive charge that rotate to the right and electrons with a negative charge that rotate...and we've just quantified the next generation of computers.
So I don't know how to explain the value of that technology. It's really the difference between having a light bulb and not having a light bulb to the future of the world. But to me, having that intellectual property in Canada, producing it and building it here, is invaluable to providing the high-paying, high-quality jobs that this nation needs to have to compete with what is a changing global environment.
I hope I didn't go overboard there, but these are the kinds of real dreams that quantum computer physicists have every day.