The race looks exceedingly well worth running. Unlike traditional computers, which use discrete zeros and ones, quantum computing's bits – dubbed qubits – can be either a one, a zero or both at the same time.

This property, called superposition, promises a massive increase in computing speeds, potentially solving our biggest challenges. These could range from tackling climate change to understanding the origins and fate of the cosmos, or "the Big Bang, Big Crunch", as Professor Hayden puts it.

'Early days'

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As if to highlight the pace of advances, the physics professor describes the late-1990s as "the early days" of his field, when "a lot of very sensible and otherwise open-minded scientists, said quantum computer will never work".

Obstacles include the microscopic nature of the work - such as trying to control and write information on a single electron. Calculations can be thrown out by random fluctuations in the qubit, such as those from heat.

So-called error correction research has lowered the fault rate to 1 in 10,000. Even so, the largest quantum computer - one now being tested by Google - is still only 72 qubits in size, while IBM has a 50-qubit one.

“To reach the full promise of quantum computing, we need a one million-qubit device,” Professor Hayden said, adding that level may be achieved in the next generation of devices.

"The stage that we’re at right now, the leading technologies – super conducting circuits – have a road map to get up to a few hundred, maybe 1000 qubits," he said.

"After that, they hit some pretty severe constraints," Professor Hayden said, adding "there’s a 30 per cent chance that something completely different comes along that might be the way to scale it up in the future”.

'Mt Everest of computing'

That doesn't mean current devices won't be useful for very specialised applications. And even a "totally useless computation" could before long deliver an important achievement in the race by beating the world's most powerful super computer, he said.

“That’s going to happen," Professor Hayden said. "That’s going to be a Mt Everest of computing.”

Some of the milestones already achieved by the field will feature in Professor Hayden's talk at Sydney University.

The annual Simon Marais lecture is supported by a bequest from a former investor who died in 2015, and which also donated $5 million to establish a maths institute at the university to be led by Geordie Williamson, the youngest living fellow of the Royal Society.

These include how the technology driving quantum computing can help explain the origin of space itself.

“It’s a turns out - and it’s a surprise - that lots of those ideas are just very useful for thinking about the emergence of space and time," Professor Hayden said. "Stuff that was missing [from quantum physics] was really necessary to understand just the basic ways that, particularly, space emerges."

The closer Professor Hayden looks, the more remarkable nature appears, even as science races to decode it.

"The beauty and intricacy of the structure that’s there is so far beyond the capacity of any single human imagination to come up with," he said. "I’m always astonished by the incredible richness of the natural world."

Lecture details: 6:00 pm – 7:10 pm on Wednesday, 5 September at Sydney University's Nanoscience Hub.