University’s mine once produced gold, now the school plans to turn part of the dark, dusty tunnel into a quantum lab

On a recent weekday, mine manager Lee Fronapfel led a group of us, outfitted with headlamps and hard hats, down a pitch-black tunnel at the Edgar Experimental Mine in Idaho Springs.

Back in the 1870s, miners extracted gold, silver and lead here. These days, students from the Colorado School of Mines are blasting and boring through rock as an educational exercise to prepare for careers in the mining industry.

The mine, which the school purchased for education and research in the 1920s, is actually a great place to run all kinds of experiments. Now it’s part of the university’s push to be at the forefront of what proponents say could be the next big technological breakthrough. 

We’re not talking about AI. We’re talking about quantum.

Read the whole article on the CPR News website