[No. 14] Aya Furuta

There is a certain type of person in this world who is completely unsuited for experiments. I happen to be one of them. When I walk down a path, I bump into things. When I sit down, I knock over things around me. I forget things I'm holding. Having someone like me in an experimental research lab is a real nuisance. Equipment naturally wouldn't work, and on the rare occasion it did, it would stop immediately. To say it "stopped" sounds nice, but what I mean is that I broke it. Looking back, choosing to become a newspaper reporter instead of pursuing a career as a researcher was a wise decision.

During my graduate school days: conducting research in my work overalls.

In 1991, I graduated from the graduate program in the Department of Physics and joined Nikkei Inc. I then covered topics such as organ transplantation from brain-dead donors, AIDS, and drug-induced suffering. Reporting on medical care, which directly affects people's lives, was rewarding. I even went back to study medical economics at a graduate school in the UK, and I believed I would fulfill my career as a medical reporter.

But a newspaper reporter is still a salaried employee. In a 2001 personnel reshuffle, I was assigned to the IT field and unexpectedly returned to this world.

The world of physics and engineering, which I had stepped back into after a long time, seemed terribly boring compared to medicine, and I was inwardly disappointed. But that summer, the next turning point arrived. On vacation in Oxford, UK, I met Dr. David Deutsch, who proposed the theory of the quantum computer, a futuristic super-fast computer that was attracting a lot of attention at the time.

I visited him on a whim, but from the moment I saw his house, I had a feeling something was about to happen. It looked like a vacant house. The paint on the door was peeling, the window curtains were faded, and the garden was overgrown with weeds. When I rang the bell and the door opened, I was taken aback by the spectacular mess inside. Everything covered the floor, crept up the stairs, and filled every nook and cranny. Amidst it all stood Dr. Deutsch, a slender, tall man in a worn-out shirt with long, shoulder-length hair, smiling.

I later learned that the doctor does not lecture, does not give exams, and does not set foot in the university. Instead, he receives no salary and conducts his research exclusively at home. When I asked him, "Why are quantum computers so fast?" he stated unequivocally, "In my view, it's because they distribute the computation across many parallel universes."

His explanation was completely incomprehensible to me at the time, but it was strangely unforgettable. I wanted to know more about this outlandish computer, so I spent my weekends and vacations visiting researchers in various countries. Every time I had a new insight, I would revisit Dr. Deutsch to discuss it, and before I knew it, I was completely absorbed. I quickly went beyond the scope of what I could write for the newspaper, and there was no prospect of turning it into an article, but I recklessly continued my reporting.

As luck would have it, in 2004, as I write this, I was transferred from the newspaper to the editorial department of a science magazine called Nikkei Science (see photo). It's an entertainment magazine for science lovers, full of topics rarely covered in newspapers, such as cosmology and biological evolution. As if unearthing three years of shelved work, I gradually began to write.

In the meantime, I started receiving offers from other places and wrote the story of the invention of the quantum computer for two magazines. One was a new magazine from Kodansha called "Aries," and the other was—the Journal of the Physical Society of Japan (Photo 6). It was for the August 2004 issue, titled "Two Demons and Many Universes: The Origin of the Quantum Computer." When I was a budding researcher, I could never have imagined having an article I wrote published in the Journal of the Physical Society of Japan. The egg never hatched, but by a strange twist of fate, it has now come true. The reason I became engrossed in physics again, like a prodigal son returning home, might be because something cultivated during my university days remained somewhere inside me, calling out to me—or so I sometimes think.