Of course, those problems will have developed new facets by the time the new president is inaugurated in January. By then Transmeta's stock will have doubled because everybody will need a new computer architecture based on a "revolutionary combination of a VLIW engine and 'code morphing' software." Then again, Transmeta's Crusoe processor may wind up as just one more innovative product that came out before its time.

And what about the $60 billion America-only national missile-defense system? Soon after the inaugural balloons have burst, the next president will need to make the crucial decision of preliminary deployment — and in doing so possibly risk relations with Russia, Europe and China.

What's a new president to do? Encourage entrepreneurship with innovative tax structures or regulate behemoths like Microsoft out of existence? Be a global leader or an isolationist?

Such questions might be easier to solve if politicians played by the laws of quantum mechanics. This arcane science says that matter, and the information it carries, can exist in several states at once — states that would ordinarily be mutually exclusive, like the bit values of 0 and 1. When information is in a delicate physical form — for instance, a single photon of light — any effort to read it changes the data, because the photon can be in several states at the same time. As the leading IBM researcher on quantum cryptography likes to say, if you could read Romeo and Juliet in a quantum state, the very act might turn it into Hamlet.

IBM Fellow Charles H. Bennett sees information not as a "thing," with a value independent of the act of observation, but as a slippery substance that, like an atom or electron, is disturbed when viewed. Bennett says quantum information theory reveals the beauty and simplicity of the world.

In collaboration with Gilles Brassard at the University of Montreal and their students, Bennett has built a system that lets one person pass information to another with the assurance that no one has eavesdropped on it. Data is sent in a delicate quantum form, in which any observation by a third party would change it and thus alert the recipient.

Suppose you could envelop a future president in a quantum state. Would he behave like himself or like his opponent? Would his policies be expansive or constrictive? Could he say one thing today and the opposite tomorrow?

Could you vote for him twice?

Nicolas Mokhoff is EE Times Editor, Special Issues.