What Romero is learning about “spintronics,” or how electrons spin, can help humans make the dream of quantum computing a reality — which in turn could give artificial intelligence superhuman capabilities.
He described quantum computing as an “entangled” version of classical computing in which “all the numbers, the bits of information, are holding hands with each other.”
It’s a model of Romero’s own mind.
“For me, science is friendship,” he said.
“My colleagues are friends. Our conversations about physics are also conversations about our lives. We are joined by science as a way of living. And this is also true of our students. When a kid comes in knowing almost nothing, and you see them grow and become an adult, they feel like family. I cried when my last doctoral student defended his thesis! Because I felt I was losing family.”
Romero’s family roots are in Pamplona, Colombia, “a place small enough to lack traffic lights,” he said.
“My mother was a pedagogy professor. She left home at 7 a.m. and often returned at 10 p.m., keeping the family afloat after his father lost his sight. Science wasn’t our family business — perseverance was.”
When Romero left Pamplona in 1989 for the University of the Andes in Bogota, it was for a practical degree in civil engineering, though he didn’t much care for engineering.
When he had to take a physics class, he found he cared for that even less.
At first, anyway.
“I never wanted to be a physicist ever,” he said. “Before college, I never thought about physics, except maybe to hate it. When I had to take physics at university, I didn’t like it. I thought, ‘Come on, this is not fun.’”
It was the irrepressible, contagious enthusiasm of the professor, Luis Quiroga, that eventually captivated Romero that semester.
“I could see the pleasure he took in his work every time he was at the blackboard, explaining the concepts with so much enjoyment, and I understood that I wanted to have that feeling in my work too,” he said.
“My curiosity detonated. Around the same time, I started to fall for computing — this was the era of floppy discs and punch cards — because every new constraint in computer science felt like a puzzle box that had just enough give for me to pry it open. So, I was able to be there for those earliest ‘click-whirr’ moments when machines began answering us back, and I have spent the decades since then trying to improve the conversation.”
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