The achievement may not rank up there with Samuel Morse's transmitting "What hath God wrought" from Washington, DC, to Baltimore in 1844 or Alexander Graham Bell's voice intoning, "Watson, come here. I want you" from one room to another in 1876. Nevertheless, scientists may eventually mark as a milestone the day in 2001 when Isaac Chuang and his colleagues at IBM determined that the two prime factors of the number 15 are three and five.

What made their calculation remarkable, of course, wasn't the grammar school arithmetic, but that the calculation had been performed by seven atomic nuclei in a custom-designed fluorocarbon molecule. The irony that an experiment so complex and delicate would yield a result so pedestrian and mundane is not lost on Chuang, one of the world's most prominent researchers in quantum computing. "My group," he says with a chuckle, "holds the world record for the largest and most useless quantum computer."