The HPC community is a very intelligent bunch, as a rule, but a few segments of the industry call for an exceptional, Himalayan level of smarts. One of them is quantum. Conversing – or trying to converse – with a quantum computing specialist is for most of us a withering and futile experience from which we emerge feeling strangely reduced. Quantum people speak a language we don’t know and play a sport we’ve never seen, yet we very much want to understand both. Quantum could change the world. But how? Into this opaque arena comes Bob Coecke, chief scientist at quantum company Quantinuum, who is co-author with Stefano Gogioso of the recently-released Quantum in Pictures: A New Way to Understand the Quantum World, which is intended to make quantum more accessible.