George van Hal
symposium
George van Hal is science reporter at the Volkskrant. Before that he wrote amongst others for the leading populair science magazine New Scientist. Van Hal published three books: ‘Robots, Aliens & Popcorn (2015), ‘Elastisch Universum’ (2016) and ‘De Quantumcomputer’ (2017).
Predicting the future of any technology is incredibly difficult. In 1943 the head of IBM said there’d be a market for, at most, five personal computers. In 1999 most people in The Netherlands felt they’d never need a mobile phone. The same now goes for quantum technology. The future we envision for quantum technology might be as accurate as Destination Moon, the science fiction movie predicting the moon landing eerily well more than a decade before it actually happened. Or it might be more like IBM’s prediction. One thing, however, is certain: quantum technology will have a large societal impact. George van Hal will take you from quantum past to quantum future, to end in the present: the moment we’ve reached quantum supremacy.