Science on Tap

A monthly lecture series at UMD that explores the latest discoveries in science and technology in a relaxed atmosphere with food and drink

"Quantum Steampunk"

Nicole Yunger Halpern
Fellow, Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science
University of Maryland

Thursday, March 28, 2024
Doors open at 6 p.m.
Lecture begins at 6:30 p.m.

Ledo Pizza
4509 Knox Rd.
College Park, MD 20740

Paid parking is available in the attached city garage, which guests can enter on Yale Avenue. Guests may enter the event venue via the Ledo entrance on the corner of Knox Road and Yale Avenue.

Food and beverages will be available for purchase at the event. 

If you have any questions about attending this event, including disability accommodations, please contact Rena Surana-Nirula at rena@umd.edu or 301-405-6563.

Subscribe to Receive Science on Tap Emails

About the Talk
A genre of science fiction is coming to life at the intersection of energy science, quantum physics, and information science. Steampunk literature and film juxtaposes futuristic technologies with Victorian settings. Automata, dirigibles, and time machines populate Sherlock Holmes's London; the American Wild, Wild West; and Meiji Japan. Outside of fiction, technology has advanced far beyond the steam engine to quantum computers, which will be able to solve certain problems far more quickly even than supercomputers can. Quantum computing has melded with energy science, which dates to the Victorian era, in an emerging field that I've dubbed quantum steampunk. Can quantum phenomena benefit engines as they benefit computation? How would a quantum engine, refrigerator, or battery look? What fundamental insights can we gain by scrutinizing time's arrow more and more minutely? I will discuss this real-world science fiction, covered in my book for the general public Quantum Steampunk: The Physics of Yesterday’s Tomorrow.

About the Speaker
Nicole Yunger Halpern is a theoretical physicist at the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science at the University of Maryland. Her book, Quantum Steampunk: The Physics of Yesterday's Tomorrow, won the PROSE Award for popular science and mathematics. Nicole earned her Ph.D. at Caltech, receiving the international Ilya Prigogine Prize for an energy-science thesis. As a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, she won the International Quantum Technology Emerging Researcher Award. Other accolades include the US ASPIRE Prize for early-career scientists and the Mary Somerville Medal for scientific outreach to the general public. Nicole has written over 100 articles for the blog Quantum Frontiers and suspects that a copy of her is a novelist in some parallel universe.