Some tap their fingers. Others bite their nails. We all have a way of coping when a computer forces us to wait while it thinks and executes instructions. But the days of staring at a tiny hourglass may soon end, thanks to scientists who are developing the blueprint for a blazing-fast computing system. These machines would use subatomic particles to create a quantum computer so powerful it would make today's fastest supercomputer look like a pocket calculator.

Quantum computers deliver immense power by taking advantage of the weird behavior of matter at the atomic level. If you shrunk yourself to the size of an electron (almost one-quadrillionth your height), you'd find the world didn't make much sense. At that quantum scale, conventional physics breaks down and objects don't function the way they do in the larger world. For one thing, they're capable of existing in two states at once. If a baseball worked the same way as an electron, it would be able to spin both clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. That behavior, called superposition, is something physicists want to exploit to increase computing power.

At the most basic level, a conventional computer thinks with the help of lots of tiny switches. If an electrical circuit is closed and current can pass through, it represents a one. If it's open, it's a zero. Using lots of these tiny switches and those bits of information, a processor can remember numbers and do all sorts of mathematical tricks to meet computing needs.

A quantum computer takes that model a step further. Instead of storing a bit of information in a mechanical circuit, it uses a subatomic particle. Since these particles can exist in more than one state at a time, they become qubits, which hold several bits of information at once. In other words, while a bit must be a one or a zero, a qubit can be a one or a zero, a one and a zero, several ones, or several zeros. So a single electron can hold several times more information than a mechanical circuit. Add to that the fact that you can fit about 63 trillion electrons in the space that a transistor takes up, and it becomes clear just why a quantum computer would be so powerful.

It's hard to describe the immense speed at which these machines would operate. Consider a computational process such as factoring, where you come up with all the numbers that can be multiplied together to get the original number. The fact that really huge numbers are hard to factor is what makes modern cryptography work, keeping your credit-card number safe when you use it to buy something online. A sufficiently large number might take today's fastest supercomputer a thousand years to factor; a quantum computer could do it in seconds.

But there's a problem with storing information on the quantum level. "Quantum states are very shy," says Nabil Amer, manager of the physics of information group at IBM Research. "They don't like to be looked at, seen, touched, or thought about." Essentially, to disturb a qubit's quantum state is to force it to stop acting weird and lose its special processing power.

Scientists have struggled to find a way to isolate qubits from their environment, yet still be able to manipulate them enough to send and receive data. In a recent work outlined in the journal Nature, researchers at MIT and the University of Michigan proposed a series of interconnected ion traps, each containing a few charged atoms, or ions. These ions can move single-file between the traps to trade data and are cooled with lasers to keep them from losing information.

It's an important step toward the construction of an entire quantum computer and an "elegant, potentially very powerful solution," Amer says. Meanwhile, his team at IBM Research has tried to sidestep the difficulties of handling individual qubits by dealing with them in numbers. In December, they revealed that they'd caused a billion-billion custom-built molecules in a test tube to become a quantum computer, making the five fluorine and two carbon atoms in each molecule turn into seven qubits. That's not a great deal of processing power, but it's an excellent start. "If you really want to play the game, you've got to go to hundreds or thousands of qubits," Amer says.

And while it may still be decades before scientists build the Holy Grail of a full-scale, working quantum computer, these discoveries are leading to products that may show up in stores sooner than you think. Amer predicts that within just a few years, quantum cryptography cards will be available to plug into ordinary servers. Because qubits are so prickly about being disturbed, they provide built-in security. Users will be certain their communications aren't eavesdropped on, Amer says. "It assures you of totally absolute, unbreakable security."