Author: Dr Mrittunjoy Guha Majumdar
The world of Physics saw a quantum revolution that quite literally saw a quantum leap, breaking asunder centuries’ old ideas of reality and establishing new ones. From the Annus Mirabilis 1905 to the middle of the 20th century, luminaries such as Planck, Einstein, de Broglie, Compton, Bohr, and many others strove to understand different aspects of the realm of quantum physics. There were some aspects that defied intuition and visualisation, especially given that the quantum picture was fundamentally at variance from the classical picture, be it the probabilistic dynamics being seen therein to ideas such as ‘spooky action at a…
What is our universe made of? What are its building blocks and fundamental reality? Greek philosopher Democritus came up with the idea of atoms being fundamental in 400 BC. Over the succeeding millennia, one went from Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham’s idea of light being composed of particles as promulgated in his work Kitāb al-Manāẓir in the 11th century and Sir Isaac Newton’s corpuscular theory expounded in his work Opticks to the work of pioneers like Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens and Augustin-Jean Fresnel on the wave-like nature of light. Going into the 20th century, with the advent of quantum physics, and the work of luminaries such as Max…
This is the Quantum Age! With the diversification of theoretical and experimental forays into realising quantum technology, the race to create the first fully functional and marketable quantum computer has heated up. Today, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Hitachi, Toshiba and various other companies are using everything from superconducting qubits to photonic systems for quantum computation and communication applications. Quantum computers are a million times faster than a regular computer (chip) — with Google announcing that it has a quantum computer that is 100 million times faster than any classical counterpart in its lab, able to withstand cyber attacks better, miniaturised (about 1,500 qubits in Intel’s…