>>12181293I also do research in quantum info and computation. I don't buy into the hype but I enjoy what I do. Honestly it's a lot of low-hanging fruit because the quantum theory is so well-established and a lot of problems in QIS are easy once you know where in the literature to look for results that readily adapt to the modern setting. But no one actually cared about these problems because they were never problems in the first place, until recently.
Lots of fun math and physics to do, this field especially actually WANTS rigorous proofs (unlike other areas of physics) so I get to have my cake and eat it too.
Is it going to revolutionize the world? Will we ever be able to build a fully fault-tolerant QC that can implement Shor's algorithm or phase estimation? No one knows. But that's not why I work on it. It's just good fun. Don't you think it's cool to be able to say "hey, my distillation gadget allows me to push T gate counts down by orders of magnitude", regardless of whether or not anyone will actually build a real T gate factory?
