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Canadian researchers have succeeded in side-stepping an obstacle of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, a strange law of the quantum world that says precise measurement is impossible, because the act of measuring changes what you are trying to measure.

Their experiment in an Ottawa lab — in which they measured the polarization states of single light particles, called photons — is seen as a small step toward a quantum computer, a major goal of modern science.

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“These results are the first direct measurements that are applicable to qubits — the fundamental unit of quantum information,” the authors write in Nature Photonics.

Regular computers represent data with ones and zeroes, called bits. But a quantum computer would use qubits, or quantum bits, which take advantage of the mysterious properties of matter on its smallest scale.

These include superposition, in which a qubit could be simultaneously one and zero, and entanglement, in which two qubits could remain connected even when they are physically far away.