But what if you could confidently guess exactly when your phone was about to break and then prevent that from happening?

A team of scientists from the University of Sydney have taken that idea and used big data to predict what will happen in the random quantum world and fix the problem.

Professor Michael Biercuk, chief investigator at the Australian Research Council's Centre for Engineered Quantum Systems, has described the findings published in Nature Communications as significant.

The University of Sydney physics professor said the process behind the findings involved work with qubits, which are the "fundamental building blocks" for most quantum enabled technology.

"This allows us to represent information in a quantum system and manipulate it and it's how we think we're going to build technology in the future," Professor Biercuk said.

Scientists have previously grappled with the question of how to measure parts of the quantum system without destroying it. To overcome this, Professor Biercuk said the team had to "figure out a way to minimise the amount of measurement we would have to do".

Now that they have, Professor Biercuk said that he and his team can look into the future and make a "good guess" as to what might happen.

"We did experiments to confirm that our guesses were appropriate," he said. "When we knew our guesses were good, we were able to use that knowledge to pre-emptively correct the kind of changes we expect to see in the system."

The next goal for the team is to move beyond the physics experiments and start focusing on building technology.

"There's a whole variety of problems relevant to health, medicine, energy and environment that we think we may be able to solve by building technologies that are powered by quantum physics," Professor Biercuk said.

"The team is excited about moving forward from this first basic demonstration to much more complicated demonstrations of how you could keep quantum bits stable in order to put them to work.

"We think this will really put us on the path to developing useful quantum technologies in the next couple of years."