Quantum revolution
The turn of the XXth century witnessed a revolution in physics comparable to Isaac Newton’s discovery of the universal laws of mechanics and of gravitation three centuries earlier._image.jpg)
The world required to be described in novel terms, as the immutable, deterministic view of our familiar universe had given way to a new world picture, one which featured chance, flux, and an incessant upsurge of waves of matter. Such a worldview was so radically new and counterintuitive that it gave rise to strong debates, to the effect that Albert Einstein himself tried to oppose it on the grounds that “God does not play dice”.
In spite of the intense debates that accompanied its emergence, quantum mechanics quickly proved an incredibly efficacious new tool to understand and to predict a wide array of new phenomena. It was so successful that in no time it broke free from the environment of research labs to become part of daily life, making it possible, for example, to understand why some materials were conductors, while others were insulators. Along with it, came, too, the discovery of transistors, on which much of modern electronics rests. It also led to understand how novel materials known as superconductors allow the transport of electricity with no loss, thus paving the way for new developments in the fields of medical imagery or energy distribution. Other aspects of the quantum theory led to the development of atomic clocks of astounding accuracy, which would be wrong by no more than fifteen seconds, had they been set at the beginning of the universe.
A hundred years later, at the turn of the XXIst century, Quantum mechanics has lost none of its astounding power. Contemporary research has undertaken the task of exploring its less immediately perceptible aspects. Groundbreaking developments have ensued, such as the teleportation of grains of light or the possibility, once predicted by the great physicist Richard Feynman, to build, one day, novel computers which, unlike the ones we are familiar with today, will be able to process innumerable numbers of operations in parallel.
The Wright Colloquium will be for us the occasion to explore, in the company of five internationallyknown specialists in the field, some of the fascinating aspects of quantum mechanics. We will appraise how efficiently quantum physics can describe our world, and confront its limitation when it is faced with the infinitely small (in relation to recent experiments carried out at the CERN) as with the incommensurably large scale of sidereal spaces.
We will appreciate the extent to which quantum physics already has impacted our everyday lives, and evoke the way in which novel fields such as quantum computers and quantum information will entail profound changes in the future.
The quantum adventure has only just begun!
Jochen Mannhart
Center for Electronic Correlations and Magnetism,
University of Augsburg, Germany
Quantum Physics on the Scale of Daily Life
Tuesday 16 November 2010 - 18h30
Wolfgang Ketterle
Nobel Laureate 2001 (Physics), Department of Physics,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, U.S.A.
When freezing cold is not cold enough
New forms of matter close to absolute zero temperature
David Gross
Nobel Laureate 2004 (Physics), Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa-Barbara, U.S.A.
Quantum Mechanics of the Very, Very Small and the Very, Very Large
Thursday 18 November 2010 - 18h30
Alain Aspect
CNRS senior scientist and Professor Institut d'Optique
and Ecole Polytechnique Palaiseau, France.
From Einstein’s intuition to quantum bits: a new quantum age?
Rainer Blatt
Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information,
Austrian Academy of Sciences and University of Innsbruck, Austria
The Quantum Way of Doing Computations
by CERN Bulletin
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