The Invisible Lighthouse
Updated
On the rooftop of a seven-story building on Long Island, scientist Justine Haupt has installed what her lab calls a lighthouse. Unlike a typical lighthouse, the purpose of Haupt’s project is not to warn ships. Instead, it catches single particles of light, one at a time, that have been fired thirteen miles away through the open air, from a tower at Stony Brook University. The light at play here is far too faint for the human eye to register. In fact, someone could stand directly in its path and be completely unaware. And yet, the technology being sent along that invisible thread may very well turn out to be among the most consequential technologies of this century and is definitely worth understanding in greater detail. Likewise, who is paying for this and what do they intend to do with it?
Until now, quantum networks ran mostly through fiber-optic cables buried underground. Sure, this method is quite reliable, but its reach is limited. It can’t extend up into the sky and connect to satellites, ships, or planes, and it can’t connect to a village with no infrastructure. With that in mind, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory set out to achieve the impossible, sending the fragile quantum signal normally transmitted inside fiber-optic cables directly through the sky. Using mirror technology from astronomy, which are thin mirrors that bend themselves into new shapes thousands of times per second to cancel out the blurring of the atmosphere, they achieved the first permanent quantum open-air link of its kind. And next is a Yale connection across the Long Island Sound. Two rooftops and a beam of light may sound like a modest step, but it is the key to something much more significant. Since fiber-optic cable can’t extend to a satellite, sending the signal through open air is the only way a quantum network will ever reach orbit, and from there it can reach the entire world.
Similar to a scene from a science fiction movie, we must pay attention to what is happening here, because it is indeed quite strange. Think about it. A pair of entangled photons travel through the beam. In quantum physics, entanglement is a property in which two particles become so completely linked with each other that measuring one instantly tells you all about the other, no matter how far apart they are. Albert Einstein hated this idea, insisting that it was spooky. Perhaps it is spooky, but it is also real and has uses that extend beyond today’s methods of communication. For example, when someone tries to intercept an entangled signal, the very act of even looking at it disturbs it, and both sides are aware that they have been watched. In this scenario, it means that entanglement creates a line that cannot be secretly tapped. With unprecedented possibilities, Haupt’s work is clearly more than just academic curiosity.
Make no mistake: Haupt’s work is not part of a private startup burning through venture money. No indeed, not by a long shot. The work at Brookhaven is a federal project, primarily funded by the Office of Science at the Department of Energy (DOE). Or, in other words, it is paid for by US taxpayers. All of it, the basic research, the risk, the years of failed attempts and rooftop tinkerings, is publicly funded. But who will ultimately own the payoff? This is a question worth asking because the hungry-money crowd has taken notice.
Like clockwork, investors are circling quantum technology like vultures around prey, the same way they circle every promising technology. They position themselves early to capture the returns on research financed by the general public. One investor recently put it plainly, calling the rooftop experiment proof that the business opportunity is real, and listing secure networks for government, finance, and defense as the lucrative prize. We’ve seen the pattern before. Taxpayers fund the discovery, then private capital lines up to sell it back to us as a necessity.
But the deeper reason scientists are working on this project has nothing to do with Wall Street. Instead, as is the case with AI, it has to do with a race that the United States has been silently losing. While America builds its first permanent open-air link across a few miles of Long Island, China has already built a working quantum-encrypted network spanning more than twelve thousand kilometers, connecting numerous cities as well as government agencies and banks, all tied to satellites in the sky. In 2025, Chinese scientists sent a quantum-secured signal nearly thirteen thousand kilometers between Beijing and South Africa. To be clear, this technology is not cheap. It takes national laboratories, single-photon detectors, satellites, and massive budgets that only governments and the largest of corporations can command. Thus, on the specific matter of quantum communication, China is not catching up to the United States. Instead, it is the other way around.
So, why does the government care so much about an unhackable communication line? Because the flip side of quantum is a destructive weapon. Indeed, still years away but on the horizon, a powerful enough quantum computer could shred the encryption that currently protects our bank accounts, medical records, and state secrets, cracking in just hours what would take today’s machines millions of years. According to intelligence agencies, they believe hostile governments are already stealing encrypted American data. And they are storing it, waiting for the day they can break it open. These bad actors call it harvest now, decrypt later. The unbreakable line on Haupt’s Long Island rooftop is one answer to that threat, and a way to communicate that stays secret and secure despite the code-breaking machines of the future.
Haupt’s experiment also explains why the word quantum is increasingly used alongside the next generation of wireless. Researchers have already included quantum key protection into the plans for 6G networks, including the same open-air optical approach Brookhaven is testing, which is meant to secure everything from self-driving cars to the ordinary traffic of daily life. Indeed, Haupt’s quiet rooftop experiment offers an eye-opening glimpse into the inner workings of the world being crafted for us.
None of this makes the science any less remarkable, or as Einstein put it, spooky. Sure, it is a real achievement that has been paid for with public money, circled by private capital, and raced against by foreign powers. And, as is the case in other shenanigans, the same handful of governments and corporations competing to build these unbreakable lines are also racing to build the quantum computers that will one day crack everyone else’s. The powerful are quietly securing the ability to keep perfect secrets and to break the secrets of anyone else. The rest of us get neither. Herein lies the conundrum. When perfect secrecy and perfect surveillance belong to the same select few, what happens to the rest of us?