Mr Watson, come here; I want to see you,” Alexander Graham Bell famously told his assistant Thomas Watson in the first-ever telephone call made on March 10, 1876. Since then, change and activity has been the elementary theme in communications. We’re making it large: in a world where messages have been reduced to ‘brb’, ‘tk’, ‘hw r u’ and the like, X, formerly Twitter, has come up with a 10,000-character limit for its posts. One can write an essay on X now. Going small, or quantum, is the other side. Communication is set to enter the quantum realm; our very own ISRO plans to build a short-range optical quantum communication satellite, which will send encrypted data over a network, much like how WhatsApp works with end-to-end transcription, but in a more secure manner. The information will be encoded into binary values (representing 0 and 1) and then transmitted to the receiver. It will revolutionise how we communicate online. Researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, are also working in the field.
