From the fringes to the mainstream

Microsoft’s Majorana 1 quantum computing chip is pictured on February 19, 2025. Photo: Microsoft via Reuters

On February 19, 2025, Microsoft unveiled a new quantum computing chip that it said had topological qubits. The announcement spurred news organisations worldwide, which used words such as “superconductor” and “fermion” in their ledes. My colleagues had many questions for me about how the chip works. They asked me to report it, explain it, profile it, analyse it. It was gratifying because there was wide public interest in something that usually passes below the radar.

In fact, the chip made headlines in India in the same week that news was rife with allegations that pilgrims to the Maha Kumbh Mela in Prayagraj were bathing alongside pathogens and faecal matter in the rivers — a more sensational story.

The topological qubit is a long-sought type of qubit expected to make more powerful forms of quantum computing possible. There are some doubts in the scientific community about the details in Microsoft’s announcement, but the company is pursuing an ambitious goal that will take time. In the new chip’s case, it took a quarter century.

A science journalism fit for such pursuits should have the opportunity to move just as slowly and carefully. But it can’t. It’s difficult for an effective journalism of curiosity-driven research to be commercially viable. It’s also challenging to write ‘popular’ articles about the incremental bits in which progress happens on this front. The developments that do happen also remain abstract for a long time, until all the ideas are machined together to create an entity of definite technological value. Being able to publish on the Internet eases this problem to some degree, because of the lack of space constraints, but there are still time and labour constraints.

It isn’t until a revolutionary new technology appears that the value of investing in basic research becomes clear. Many scientists are rooting for more of it. India’s National Science Day, today, is itself rooted in celebrating the discovery of the Raman effect by curiosity-driven study. The Indian government also wants such research in this age of quantum computing, renewable energy, and artificial intelligence. But it isn’t until such technology appears that the value of investing in a science journalism of the underlying research — slow-moving, unglamorous, not application-oriented — also becomes clear. It might even be too late by then.

The scientific ideas that most journalists have overlooked are still very important: they’re the pillars on which the technologies reshaping the world stand. So it’s not fair that they’re overlooked when they’re happening and obscured by other concerns by the time they’ve matured. Without public understanding, input, and scrutiny in the developmental phase, the resulting technologies have fewer chances to be democratic, and the absence of the corresponding variety of journalism is partly to blame.

Science journalists keenly feel this particular pattern of public perception because the same oversight and obscuration that assail such curiosity-driven research also assail journalists who are writing stories about that research. Senior scientist C.P. Rajendran told The Hindu after the Finance Minister announced the 2025-2026 Union Budget that he observed “a growing corporatisation of science driven solely by immediate utility” rather than by curiosity. This turn towards “immediate utility” has also recast science journalists’ interest in research that doesn’t have such value as a drain on journalistic resources.

You might think just the fact that journalists are writing about an idea should fetch it from the fringes to the mainstream, but it does not. It has been sobering to learn how what counts as ‘public interest’ is constituted and how much power I have to change its constitution when I don’t have the enthusiastic participation of the people I believe my and my peers’ work serves.

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