A Month After the Million-Qubit Run, Singapore Explains What It Cannot Do

SINGAPORE — A month after the Singapore Institute ran a million-qubit processor over the Q-Net backbone, physicist Dr. Wei-Lin Tan spent an hour on Friday saying what the machine will never manage. "It does not send a message faster than light, and it never will," she told a room of science reporters. Q-Net, she reminded them, secures a channel — entanglement guarantees the key, the words still travel the classical network at ordinary speed. The clarification is not academic: the same public that watched the September milestone has begun crediting the machine with powers it has not got, from instant Mars links to mind-reading. Tan waved that off. "A million qubits is a magnificent calculator and a very good lock," she said. "It is not a magic wand, and pretending it is only sets us up to be disappointed." The Institute has scheduled three more public sessions this month.