On the day Niels Bohr died, 18 November 1962, someone photographed the blackboard in his study at the Carlsberg mansion in Copenhagen. On it was a drawing. It depicted a box of light, the thought experiment that Albert Einstein had devised at the 1930 Solvay Conference to prove that quantum mechanics was incomplete. Bohr had spent 32 years answering that drawing. He never stopped because the drawing was never really the problem. The problem was the question behind it. Is light a wave or a particle? Bohr had resolved this as early as 1927 with his principle of complementarity. It is both. The two descriptions are not contradictory. They are necessary halves of the same whole. When the Danish king awarded Bohr the Order of the Elephant in 1947, the physicist designed his own coat of arms. In its centre he placed the yin yang symbol. Beneath it he inscribed four words in Latin. Contraria sunt complementa. Opposites are complementary.

Nearly a century later, a different man sat in a different studio and offered the same insight in a different vocabulary. Quantinuum’s chief executive Rajeeb Hazra, speaking to Bloomberg’s Lizzy Burden, delivered a line whose simplicity concealed its force. “We don’t see AI competing with quantum,” he said. The framing that has dominated the technology press for three years was gently dismissed in a single sentence. Artificial intelligence and quantum computing are not wave and particle fighting for the........

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