QUANTUM LORE
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IMAGE ABOVE: Cooling rubidium atoms to less than 170 billionths of a degree above absolute zero caused the individual atoms to condense into a "superatom" behaving as a single entity. The graphic shows three-dimensional successive snap shots in time in which the atoms condensed from less dense red, yellow and green areas into very dense blue to white areas.
If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics. --- Richard P. Feynman
NEW FUNDAMENTAL STATE OF MATTER
A whole bunch of cold atoms can also start to behave like one big quantum wave. This is called a Bose-Einstein Condensate. It is a fifth state of matter, distinct from solids, liquids, gasses, or plasmas. Because cold atoms are almost motionless, it’s easier to study their behaviour.
It was on the basis of quantum formulations by the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose
that Albert Einstein in 1924 predicted this new state of matter, the Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC). Ever since, physicists tried to achieve this new fundamental state of matter.
Seventy years passed before it finally happened on 5 June 1995. Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman at the University of Colorado Boulder NIST-JILA lab proved the phenomenon when they produced the first gaseous condensate in a rarefied gas of rubidium atoms at an extremely low temperature. They received the Nobel Prize in 2001.
Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA’s Cold Atom Lab is put in the International Space Station to study quantum nature of atoms, run remotely by scientists back on Earth, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California . Using lasers and magnetic fields, scientists run this lab remotely from Earth, cooling groups of atoms to temperatures colder than any naturally occurring matter in the universe. Cold atoms, nearly motionless, reveal their behaviors more clearly.
Can one be present in two places simultaneously? Not humans but atoms can exhibit rather mysterious behaviors limited to short ranges only. At times, atoms act like solid particles and also act like waves, just like waves.
So a single atom can pass through two places at the same time. Incredulously, an atom can be in two places at once!
Quantum science has led to new technologies to improve cellphones, computers, medical devices like MRI, and GPS.
QUANTUM LITERATURE CAN PEP UP FICTION
Setting tone to 2025 as the Year of Quantum Science declared by the UN on account of 100 years of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle
https://indico.un.org/event/1015312/
https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/opening-ceremony-international-year-quantum-science-and-technology
https://iupac.org/the-international-year-of-quantum-science-and-technology-2025/
Fiction authors, now your characters can tinker with light and vision or even devour a vista like a black hole. Quantum physics has opened up capturing of photons. In a limited way it has even existed in nature with opals and some butterflies. Photonic crystals occur in nature in the form of structural coloration and animal reflectors. And now they are getting fabricated in a huge range of spectacular patterns.
There are yet other ways to goof up light. During the last decades, Nobelist Serge Haroche has designed ingenious experiments to study quantum phenomena when matter and light interact. Haroche has been able to capture photons using another kind of trap–two mirrors which they can bounce between.
A photon sphere pops up arises around the event horizon of a black hole to return to the point where they were emitted from and consequently display boomerang-like properties. As the source emitting photons falls into the gravitational field towards the event horizon the shape of the trajectory of each boomerang photon changes, tending to a more circular form.
They can help scientists to understand cosmic mysteries like dark matter and dark energy.
There’s more to it. You can even condense light! Light can be condensed into a state called Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) that is not a liquid, but a unique state of matter. The only property it has in common with a fluid (liquid or gas), is that it takes the shape of its container. No pressure, no viscosity.
You are not going to see a Bose-Einstein condensate with your naked eye. Microscopic enhancement is required, and even then under special conditions necessary to avoid adding enough heat to the experiment to ruin the outcome. These three images showing the cold gas condensing from a thermal cloud into a BEC are images taken with a CCD camera.
We at www.bookreviews.today are teeming with ideas to pep up your manuscripts into something exquisite. You may avail our services of scientific icing upon your storyboard.
LEWIS CARROLL’S RIDDLE, “THE TWO CLOCKS"
brings out Schrödinger's Clock®"
I have two clocks: one doesn't go at all, and the other loses a minute a day: which would you prefer?
ANY ANSWER?
Lewis Carol was also a witty composer of puzzles while being a lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford. His writings were riddled with puns, word-play and logical fantasy.
It really chanced upon Antony Hurden, the inventor of Schrödinger’s Clock@, who was standing on a street corner in Wilmington (Vermont, USA) and noticed that the church clock had stopped. From where he was standing, he could see two faces of the clock, and that each face showed a different time. Thus, the church clock in Wilmington could be observed to be right four times a day. Or, using more modern terminology, its normal state is usually to show the wrong time, but four times a day, the clock changes state to show Now – i.e. the right time.
He happened to be holding a book on quantum mechanics (having just bought it in Bartleby’s Books in Wilmington), so Lewis Carroll’s riddle, the church clock in Wilmington, and quantum mechanics all came together to sow the idea for Schrödinger’s Clock®. Antony Hurden developed the concept for the clock around 2018. A working prototype of the clock is displayed at the Moyses Hall Museum in Bury St Edmunds.
"Schrödinger's Clock®" is now a patented timepiece that demonstrates the quantum mechanical principle of superposition by randomly showing either the correct time or the wrong time until it is observed. When a user looks at the clock or interacts with it, the uncertainty collapses, and the clock then settles to display the correct, observable time. The clock was created by Antony Hurden to apply the same principles as the famous Schrödinger's Cat experiment conceived upon the familiar concept of time.
We know from Einstein’s special theory of relativity that when a clock moves relative to another clock, the time shown on it slows down. But quantum mechanics allows one to start thinking about what happens if this clock were to move in a superposition of two different speeds.
[Suggested Answer: Now observe, the one which loses a minute a day has to lose twelve hours, or seven hundred and twenty minutes before it is right again, consequently it is only right once in two years, whereas the other is evidently right as often as the time it points to comes round, which happens twice a day.]
allauthors.info delves into quantum science to bring out the genre of quantum lore, the strand of fiction that perceives beyond the apparent.
Quantum Saga at Heligoland
We suggest you to dash for Heligoland to shake your legs, the quantum way and you spin right and left at the same time – that’s the exuberance of quantum weirdness. It was the summer of 1925, a barren, windswept island without a single tree in the North Sea awaited a breakthrough in the physics.
Werner Heisenberg was reeling under a severe attack of hay fever undergoing aspirin and cocaine treatment that failed to provide any succor. He was already frazzled with intensive theoretical research but evaded his expectations. He retreated to this derelict island. Heligoland, an island in the North Sea where Werner Heisenberg then barely 23 years old secluded himself while developing the basic ideas of quantum mechanics.
While a student of Arnold Sommerfeld at Munich, Heisenberg had first met the Danish physicist Niels Bohr in 1922 at the Bohr Festival, Göttingen. He and Bohr went for long hikes in the mountains and discussed the failure of existing theories to account for the new experimental results on the quantum structure of matter.
In 2020, Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli wrote the book Helgoland in Italian about quantum mechanics and the relational interpretation that he had developed. The book review in The Guardian reads, “A skilled storyteller reflects on the genius of Werner Heisenberg, who developed the theory that explains the evolution of stars and makes computers possible?.. Carlo Rovelli recounts the first act of magic performed by Heisenberg in the opening of Helgoland, his remarkably wide-ranging new meditation on quantum theory.”
Heisenberg’s insight was that electrons around an atom — whose orbits had puzzled physicists with conflicting predictions and measurements — should be defined by only observables; their leaps and transitions, instead of trajectories. This required developing a specific mathematics called matrix mechanics to zero in a new, quantum, era in physics.
In his late teenage years, Heisenberg read Plato's Timaeus while hiking in the Bavarian Alps. He recounted philosophical conversations with his fellow students and teachers about understanding the atom while receiving his scientific training in Munich, Göttingen and Copenhagen.[9] Heisenberg later stated that "My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing"[10] and that "Modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language".
Its 100 years of that epochal finding and science fraternity including Nobel Laureates are making a beeline to capture a flashback that has ushered us to the present quantum world. United Nations has declared 2025, Int'l Year of Quantum Science & Tech.
A whiff of quantumlore awaits authors at allauthors.info
From left:The three physics laureates Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg and Enrico Fermi on a boat on Lake Como, Italy, in September 1927 . Photo: CERN / © Franco Rasetti
From left: John Bardeen, Nobel Laureate in Physics 1944 Isidor Isaac Rabi and Nobel Laureate in Physics 1932 Werner Heisenberg. Photo taken on 2 July 1962.
Source: Dutch National Archives Public domain CC BY-SA 3.0 nl, via Wikimedia Commons
The Story of That Historical Night ---
"One evening I reached the point where I was ready to determine the individual terms in the #energy table, or, as we put it today, in the energy #matrix, by what would now be considered an extremely clumsy series of calculations. When the first terms seemed to accord with the energy principle, I became rather excited, and I began to make countless arithmetical errors. As a result, it was almost three o'clock in the morning before the final result of my computations lay before me. The energy principle had held for all terms, and I could no longer doubt the mathematical consistency and coherence of the kind of quantum mechanics to which my calculations pointed. At first, I was deeply alarmed. I had the feeling that, through the surface of atomic phenomena, I was looking at a strangely beautiful interior, and I felt almost giddy at the thought that I now had to probe this wealth of mathematical structures nature had so generously spread out before me. I was far too excited to sleep, and so, as a new day dawned, I made for the southern tip of the island, where I had been longing to climb a rock jutting out into the sea. I now did so without too much trouble, and waited for the sun to rise."
Source - Book - "Physics and Beyond", subtitle - "Encounters and Conversations" (1971), p. 61 by Werner Heisenberg.
BOOK REVIEWS ON QUANTUM LITERATURE:
Read Quantum Philosopher Kenneth Schmitt to rediscover yourself!
Can quantum science explain universal consciousness? That is precisely what Kenneth Schmitt strives to achieve in this volume of his book.
These are artificial atoms in colloidal state seen by irradiated UV light. Different sized quantum dots or artificial atoms emit different colour light due to quantum confinement.
Bonhomie with Artificial Atoms
It’s high time for our book authors to start juggling with Artificial Atoms
Quantum dots (QDs) also called artificial atoms are semiconductor nanocrystals of a few nanometres in size with optical and electronic properties that remarkably differ from those of larger particles.
An Artificial Atom is a nanostructure that can confine the motion of an electron in all three spatial dimensions. This gives rise to a set of discrete and narrow electronic energy levels, similar to those of atomic physics.
Essentially, artificial atoms (quantum dots) are small boxes about 100 nm on a side, contained in a semiconductor, and holding a number of electrons that may be varied at will. As in real atoms, the electrons are attracted to a central location which is a positively charged nucleus; trapped in a bowl-like parabolic potential well in which electrons tend to fall in towards the bottom of the bowl.
In most cases the nanostructures resemble "pancakes" in which the electrons are restricted to motion in vertical and horizontal axes.
Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.
- NIELS BOHR
Quantum Tunnelling
Quantum mechanics allows a particle to move straight through a barrier, using a process called tunnelling. As soon as large numbers of particles are involved, quantum mechanical effects usually become insignificant. The laureates’ experiments demonstrated that quantum mechanical properties can be made concrete on a macroscopic scale.
A major question in physics is the maximum size of a system that can demonstrate quantum mechanical effects. 2025 Nobel Prize laureates conducted experiments with an electrical circuit in which they demonstrated both quantum mechanical tunnelling and quantised energy levels in a system big enough to be held in the hand.
“It is wonderful to be able to celebrate the way that century-old quantum mechanics continually offers new surprises. It is also enormously useful, as quantum mechanics is the foundation of all digital technology,”
- Olle Eriksson, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.
The transistors in computer microchips are one example of the established quantum technology that surrounds us. This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics has provided opportunities for developing the next generation of quantum technology, including quantum cryptography, quantum computers, and quantum sensors.
John Clarke - Michel H. Devoret - John M. Martinis “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit” - Their experiments on a chip revealed quantum physics in action
In 1984 and 1985, John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis conducted a series of experiments with an electronic circuit built of superconductors, components that can conduct a current with no electrical resistance. In the circuit, the superconducting components were separated by a thin layer of non-conductive material, a setup known as a Josephson junction. By refining and measuring all the various properties of their circuit, they were able to control and explore the phenomena that arose when they passed a current through it. Together, the charged particles moving through the superconductor comprised a system that behaved as if they were a single particle that filled the entire circuit.
This macroscopic particle-like system is initially in a state in which current flows without any voltage. The system is trapped in this state, as if behind a barrier that it cannot cross. In the experiment the system shows its quantum character by managing to escape the zero-voltage state through tunnelling. The system’s changed state is detected through the appearance of a voltage.
QUANTUM LORE 2025
QUANTUM LORE 2025
In 2025, quantum fiction continued exploring parallel worlds, altered realities, and quantum concepts, with notable releases like *Quantum Genesis (MD Hanley) and *Quantum Veil (SD Taylor), alongside broader sci-fi with quantum undertones, such as *Edge of Oblivion (Kirk Weddell), while anthologies like *The Big Book of Quantum Fiction (Tracy Shew) gathered submissions for future publication, emphasizing subtle, reality-bending elements over literal tech.
Specific 2025 Quantum Fiction Releases (or with quantum themes):
Quantum Genesis (The Quantum Genesis Series Book 1) by MD Hanley (Dec 2025).
Quantum Veil: Timekeepers Dawn (Quantum Time Series Book 2) by SD Taylor (Sep 2025).
Edge of Oblivion by Kirk Weddell (Dec 2025) - Features a quantum AI and fractured spacetime.
Bunnyster by Samantha Baldin (Sep 2025) - Labeled as quantum fiction.
The Afterlife Project by Tim Weed (June 2025) - Uses tech for interstellar travel to send someone to the future, touching on temporal themes.
Awakened by Laura Elliott & Kelechi Okafor (June 2025) - Explores neural chips and consciousness.
Trends in Quantum Fiction for 2025:
Subtle Quantum Elements: Rather than rayguns, the focus is on "strange, unexplained 'differences'" in plot, cause-and-effect, and perception, as noted by Tracy Shew's anthology call.
Parallel Realities & Uncertainty: Stories often delve into coexisting past/present/future or questioning perceived reality.
Quantum AI: Integration of artificial intelligence with quantum mechanics, as seen in Edge of Oblivion.
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