Welcome to the Quantum-Steampunk Laboratory

I’ve always been attracted to grand, abstract ideas. And I love that physics lets you learn about the biggest puzzles of the Universe. It also lets you study everything. Historically, “science” was “natural philosophy,” and it encompassed a broad range of topics. I think of myself as drawn to physics through the lens of natural philosophy.

How it embodies the aesthetic of quantum thermodynamics, combining futuristic science with a sense of adventure. During the Victorian age, even the physics instruments were polished. Telescopes had whorls and curlicues that made them look beautiful. I hold that aesthetic of beauty as an ideal in science.

Quantum thermodynamics, once considered an oxymoron, has become accepted thanks to quantum information science tools, such as efficiency bounds and resource theories. People typically think of thermodynamics as applying to large systems with enormous numbers of particles. But since the 2010s, quantum thermodynamics has become broadly embraced. We’ve understood how quantum systems that don’t necessarily consist of lots of particles can nonetheless be regarded as thermodynamic, with flows of information. And experimentalists can build systems that exhibit quantum behaviors but consist of many—tens to hundreds of—particles. Predictions can now be checked.

At the beginning of my PhD, I came to a field with many siloed subcommunities that each had their own tool kit. Quantum fluctuation relations, for example, were very separate from quantum engines. I wanted to build bridges between these communities.

I want to apply quantum thermodynamics to other spheres of science. One example is solving a chemistry problem involving photoisomer molecules, which, for example, engineers use to enhance energy capture. A photoisomer rests in one configuration. If it absorbs a photon, it can transform into another configuration. By modeling a photoisomer using a quantum resource theory, my colleague David Limmer of the University of California, Berkeley, and I derived a bound on the probability that this transformation happens—using an extension of the second law of thermodynamics, which says which transformations can occur spontaneously.

Yes: Why should a classical and a quantum clock differ? A classical clock has hands that move at constant rates and have well-defined positions. If you observe the clock, you won’t disturb it—it continues to tell time. But we know a quantum system does not have a well-defined position and momentum. So a quantum clock must operate differently.

To give intuition about this in the quantum-clock chapter of my book, I start with a snippet from an imaginary novel with characters, Audrey and Caspian, analogous to the Alice and Bob of quantum information thought experiments. They’re in a market square in a quantum village in Victorian England. Audrey is anxious because she must be somewhere soon. Caspian points at the market square’s quantum clock, which looks very different from her pocket watch because its hands are blurry and their movements jagged.

I’ve enjoyed personal writing since second grade. In high school I was a community columnist for a city paper in Tampa, Florida. When I joined John Preskill’s lab at Caltech for my PhD, I made a personal commitment to write one article a month for the university’s Quantum Frontiers blog. Contributing to it continues to provide a creative outlet for me that complements and enhances physics.

A Scientific American editor who had read my blog posts asked me to write an article about quantum steampunk. Then an editor at Johns Hopkins University Press invited me to write a book because they wanted to expand their physics offerings for the general public. I couldn’t say no!

After I came to Maryland to start my research group, my colleagues and I won a grant to establish a Maryland Quantum-Thermodynamics Hub. That included funding for a quantum-steampunk short-story contest. One judge for the contest was an English faculty member, whom I later contacted about collaborating while applying for a grant to create a quantum-steampunk sculpture. She directed me to her MFA student Edward Daschle who was specializing in science fiction. He suggested we create a quantum-steampunk creative-writing course. Now we’ve co-taught the course twice.

Physics students have come because they love creating stories, and they don’t have an outlet for that part of their creativity. English majors come because they haven’t studied much science and want to expand their knowledge. All the students get a kick out of tours of the trapped-ion labs, and they appreciate workshopping their short stories. Daschle and I offer feedback about structural elements like character development and the physics and technology that the students incorporate.

For the centerpiece of the course, we prompt students to write stories set at least partially in the 1800s that include steampunk tropes and incorporate a quantum physics feature or technology. One student wrote about a Victorian showperson who made an invention that could stop time. The student was dissatisfied with the invention because it wasn’t really quantum. I helped him understand how entanglement can simulate certain closed time-like curves.

Both! But I’m a scientist first. I’m working on a research program centered on useful autonomous quantum machines. Quantum thermodynamicists have designed machines—batteries, clocks, refrigerators—but most are not practical for real-world use today. You’d invest a lot of work and get very little work out, aside from what you'd learn about fundamental physics and engineering. Autonomous quantum machines could circumvent this problem by consuming free energy to perform tasks on their own.