Scientific American Physicists Need to Be More Careful with How They Name Things The popular term “quantum supremacy,” which refers to quantum computers outperforming classical ones, is uncomfortably reminiscent of “white supremacy” Advertisement In 2012, the quantum physicist John Preskill wrote, “We hope to hasten the day when well controlled quantum systems can perform tasks surpassing what can be done in the classical world.” Less than a decade later, two quantum computing systems have met that mark: Google’s Sycamore, and the University of Science and Technology of China’s Jiǔzhāng. Both solved narrowly designed problems that are, so far as we know, impossible for classical computers to solve quickly. How quickly? How “impossible”? To solve a problem that took Jiǔzhāng 200 seconds, even the fastest supercomputers are estimated to take at least two billion years.