Quantum Week 2026: Turing Award to Bennett & Brassard, First Current-Delivering Quantum Battery, and UK’s £2 B Push for Domestic Quantum Computers

This cluster of announcements echoes December 1947 when the Bell Labs transistor patent, a modest lab result, coincided with pent-up post-war funding that birthed the modern electronics industry. Bennett and Brassard’s 1984 BB84 protocol—once conference-rejected—now receives computing’s highest honor, signalling the mainstreaming of ideas that were fringe even after Feynman’s 1981 call for quantum machines. Government cash floods in, much as the U.S. poured dollars into semiconductor fabs in the 1960s, illustrating a long-term trend: critical information technologies move from lone theorists, to corporate labs, to national strategic assets. If today’s prototypes overcome decoherence and scaling—still unsolved physics—the 2120s could regard 2026 as the moment quantum left the chalkboard. Yet hype cycles loom: similar exuberance surrounded superconducting computers in the 1950s and expert-systems AI in the 1980s before plateaus set in. The week therefore matters not because problems are solved, but because capital, prizes and prototypes have aligned—an inflection that, on a 100-year arc, either inaugurates a quantum infrastructure age or becomes another cautionary tale of premature technological exuberance.