Encryption systems rely on “random” numbers, but conventional computers can’t generate them perfectly. New research at the Swiss federal technology institute ETH Zurich shows that quantum physics can. Researchers in Switzerland labored for 10 years, on a project that cost $12 million. The end result, published in Nature last month? Some really, really random numbers. Random numbers are the guardians of digital information, which moves through the internet via a system of public and private keys. Private keys consist of hundreds of bits (bits are zeros or ones that encode extremely large numbers) generated by a computer. Computers can come very close to achieving true randomness, but they are driven by process. A process can be complex and difficult to tease out, but it cannot be truly random. “If you knew what the computer was calculating, you would be able to predict it exactly,” said Morgan W. Mitchell, a quantum physicist at the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona. “You …