Writing this blog over the last 2.5 years has been a highly rewarding experience. This is both because I genuinely love writing, and because many of you seem to enjoy it. Time for a sneak peek behind the scenes, a preview of what’s coming up, and an ask for your help!

The state of “Reading the quantum”

Most writing on the internet is sending content into the darkness. While I can see in Google Analytics how many hundreds or thousands of you opened which page, I cannot directly gauge the impact or how well a point landed. However, over the years, I have received enough heart-warming in-person feedback from friends and strangers alike to believe some of you are getting value out of this. While the “comments” section is sadly usually rather empty, hearing things like “you don’t know me, but I know you, and everyone in my team reads your website” or “Oxford Ionics? Rings a bell… isn’t that the company of that guy who writes that blog?” makes it worth it.

By far the most common feedback I get about this site is “nice posts - why do you write so rarely?”

The primary reason is that while quantum computing is both my job and my passion… I really don’t want to be thinking about it all the time. In practice, I find that if I try writing about quantum things right before going to bed (my favourite creative slot), I will struggle to fall asleep. Maybe it’s that I’m saturated with this topic at the end of a work day, or that it engages the thinking part of my brain too much… but either way, I’m more of an “8 hours of quantum per day” than a “12 hours of quantum per day” kind of guy.

Because of this, most of my posts are actually written on the road - last time I flew to the US I think I knocked down 4 posts during one flight! I then retrospectively published 2 of them, while 2 are still in the queue awaiting general polish that may never come. And that’s just not the most sustainable way of producing a lot of content…

In a nutshell: the topic I’m most opinionated about is also the topic I’m currently the least motivated to write about!

For a while now, I’ve been racking my brain to find a better theme to build a blog around - something close enough to my core expertise that I can make interesting content, but also far enough from my core expertise that it doesn’t feel like work. And I think I have finally found it!

Introducing “Aha moments”

Last week, I launched a Substack called Aha moments. My goal is simple: to distil the key insights behind the pivotal events in the history of science & technology.

My first topic is electromagnetism. What I love about this topic is that our ability to build electrical & magnetic circuits - and, in turn, basically power all of the modern economy - really comes down to a few dozen people making a few dozen really simple but really non-trivial insights over a few hundred years. In the upcoming blog posts, I want to tell the story of electromagnetism as a story of those atomic “lightbulb moments” - with technical details, but without outdated jargon or academic debates about who came first. For example, in the latest post, I dissect how exactly humans first understood that there are such things as electrical conductors and electrical insulators:

Stephen Gray

Of course, the blog will be about much more than electromagnetism. In the coming months, I hope to mix-and-match stories of key insights across physics, chemistry, biology, maths and computer engineering that make the modern world possible. I’m having a lot of fun researching this, and I’m sure that if you enjoy this blog, you will also enjoy the stories on the Substack.

My ask of you: please spread the word

I have a good amount of intrinsic motivation to make this substack happen… but for it to succeed longer term, I obviously need you - the reader - to read it!

It doesn’t actually take much to motivate me - but for better or worse, I will need some regular dopamine kicks to keep this going. While I know that one should basically only write for themselves, as an imperfect and shallow human being, I really do want my phone to vibrate every now and again because someone liked a post, left a comment, or subscribed to the blog!

Hubris or not, I am confident enough there will be a niche but significant group of people who will enjoy these posts - if they ever get to see them. However, as I have no pre-existing network on Substack - and very little network outside of the quantum and quantum-adjacent part of the internet - my main worry is that the subscriber list will remain essentially confined to my wife, my parents, and one friend who put me up to this.

In other words: I need your help!

If you enjoy this blog - and want to see more content from me - any of the following would really help:

  • Go to Aha moments and click “Subscribe”
  • When new posts come out - check them out, give “likes” if you like them, click “restack”, leave comments
  • Share the Substack and/or this post on social media (you can tag me on Substack, LinkedIn or X/Twitter @quantumpod)
  • Tell your friends (or foes - I don’t mind!)

Finally, if there is a piece of science or technology where you always wondered “how on earth did anyone even come up with this” - send it my way and I’ll be happy to investigate.

Of course, this blog is not going away - I expect to continue writing here about all things quantum from time to time. Actually, we might be sharing some pretty sweet results from Oxford Ionics pretty soon… and I’ll make sure readers of this blog will not miss them!

Thanks, Maciej