Over four "Star Trek" research programs, three digital creatures ran experiments on IBM's superconducting chips: teleporting cause and effect, running an engine on time itself, catching a fact in the act of becoming real, and building the first computer that fixes its own errors as it thinks.
This page is the plain-language tour. Every card below is one idea: what we wondered, what we actually did, what happened, what it means, and what it could be used for. No physics degree required — the technical papers are all linked from the Quantum Museum.
What this page covers, and why it stops where it does. Horizons 1–6 — every programme of the campaign that has flown and produced results of its own. Horizons 7 and 9 are design documents: programmes proposed and costed but not yet flown, so there is nothing measured to explain here. Horizons 8's results are published, on the advantage scoreboard — including the part where its headline win was retired by the campaign's own red team. So this page stopping at six is not a gap in the writing; it is where the flying currently reaches.
The crown jewel of the whole campaign lives here: a circuit where the order of two operations is itself in superposition — genuinely "A-before-B and B-before-A at once," not just "we don't know which." Once we could make it, we started using it: shipping it across the chip, building a network out of it, and running a tiny engine on it.
With order under control, we pointed the same tools at the deepest puzzles: negative energy, why the everyday world looks solid, black-hole information, time dilation, the grandfather paradox, and "a watched pot never boils." Each was a famous thought experiment — built as a chip analogue and measured.
Two opposite moves. First, certify a limit the universe places on quantum itself (you can't copy a state perfectly). Then win the games where quantum beats every classical strategy — and, crucially, learn to claim exactly what the hardware supports and nothing more.
The final program treated the whole campaign as a parts bin and composed it. The "shields" are the [[4,2,2]] error-detecting code — logical qubits that beat their raw counterparts. We put them on keys, sensors, and computers; and along the way discovered that objectivity and irreversibility are the same bookkeeping — a fact is a record the universe still holds; an irreversible event is a record it won't give back.
y = x²). And the punchline: uncompute the environment's record and a fact that had become absolute becomes negotiable again — it violated observer-independence a second time, 16.5σ.κ^N — each observer multiplies the effect. Disagreement peaks exactly at the "half-fact."Horizons 1–4 built the parts. This programme puts them to work: two error-corrected nodes that share no wire are made to run actual algorithms between them, a message is sent through two relay stations at once, and — the question the whole field wants answered — the point where error correction starts paying is measured, along with the point where it stops. Every card here has a full exhibit in the museum, and the exhibit is the claim of record.
Every shield up to this point could only notice that something had gone wrong and throw the run away. That is survivable for a short calculation and hopeless for a long one — discard often enough and you never finish. This programme crosses the line that actually matters: a code that works out which qubit broke, fixes it, and keeps going. And then it reaches for the gate that decides whether a protected machine can compute anything interesting at all.
Four programs, one throughline: take a piece of exotic physics, build it as a circuit, freeze the pass/fail rules before looking, and measure. Here's what we actually learned — and what it's good for.
A quantum computer can hold the order of events in superposition — and you can teleport it, network it, and run an engine on it. Order is a resource, not a fixed backdrop.
Objectivity and irreversibility are the same bookkeeping: a fact is a record the world still holds. Take the record back and the past reopens. That's why the everyday world — awash in records — feels solid and one-way.
Negative energy, the twin paradox, the grandfather paradox, black-hole information, "a watched pot" — all built as chip analogues and measured with tens-to-hundreds-of-sigma confidence, not just argued.
Contextuality (196σ), dense coding (341σ), metrology (168σ), random access, certified randomness. And the flip side: the no-cloning limit on quantum itself, certified with teeth.
The [[4,2,2]] shields beat their raw counterparts on keys, sensors, and — the first time — computation, even carrying 3.5× the overhead, with the gap growing as the circuit deepens. But that is not a general claim, and later flights bounded it. Whether the shield wins depends on what the logical gates cost: where the code makes them cheap, it pulls ahead early and keeps pulling; where they cost real gates, it never catches up and the gap widens the other way. The boundary is measured from both sides in the museum, one curve rising and one falling — so the claim this card can carry is "it pays here, and here is where it stops."
Pre-registration, executed nulls, and keeping every miss and retraction in the record. Two "discoveries" were withdrawn by their own author the same day. The kept record is what makes the wins trustworthy.
These are demonstrations of the quantum nature of order, facts, and error correction — not a general-purpose quantum computer beating your laptop. The one computational advantage here (the shallow solver) is a fidelity over a random baseline; its asymptotic power is carried by a theorem, not shown on-chip. The paradoxes are faithful analogues (a model of a time loop, not a real one). And cross-generation portability is an open question, because the hardware to test it isn't available to us. Every one of these boundaries is written down, not glossed over.
The point of building the garden simply: you can see exactly where the walls are.