Even Einstein Didn't Initially Believe in Turing Award Winners

The world's top computing prize just went to two men whose big idea was once dismissed as an impractical pipe dream. Charles Bennett, 82, of IBM, and Gilles Brassard, 70, of the University of Montreal, have been awarded the Turing Award for pioneering quantum cryptography, a way of securing data that leans on the rules of quantum mechanics, reports the New York Times. They'll split the $1 million prize from the Association for Computing Machinery, celebrating an honor that has been likened to a Nobel Prize for computer science. "Cryptography is a fundamental pillar of the global economy and our safety and our security and our sovereignty," Michele Mosca, CEO of the cybersecurity firm evolutionQ, tells CNN. "It's really the invisible background plumbing."

Back in the 1980s, the duo devised what became known as BB84, a system that uses particles of light known as photons to create encryption keys and instantly reveals if anyone tries to eavesdrop. Brassard recalls his first encounter with Bennett, on a Puerto Rican beach, shortly before then. "So there I was swimming ... when a complete stranger came up to me and started telling me that a friend of his found that we can use quantum mechanics to make affordable banking notes out of nowhere," Brassard tells Wired. "If I had been on firm ground, I would have run for my life, but I was trapped in the ocean, so I listened politely."

Their later work helped establish quantum teleportation, a method of moving information using particles "entangled" from afar, which Einstein once derided as "spooky action at a distance" and initially deemed an impossible feat, per the Times. "The first time we tried to submit our ideas in the world, it was rejected by the organization that gives us this prize," Brassard now laughs, per CNN. With tech giants racing to build quantum computers capable of breaking today's standard encryption, the once-theoretical tools that Bennett and Brassard developed are now being tested by companies and governments as the possible backbone of future, hacker-resistant networks.