“Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.” Niels Bohr
Do you find quantum theory incomprehensibly strange? We all do, but maybe some short films can help. Or at least make weird natural phenomena more entertaining.
The Quantum Shorts 2012 competition, sponsored by Singapore-based Centre for Quantum Technologies and New Scientist magazine, challenged people to make a three minute film illustrating how quantum theory helps them view the world. Don’t expect any explanatory videos. These entries are more entertaining than educational.
In the world of the winning submission, Quantum Daughter, family dynamics bend across the multiverse, bananas are smart phones, and cell phone providers are “ interdimensional bureaucratic scumbags.”
The runner-up film is Alice in Quantumland, a love story that makes use of quantum tunneling, superposition, and vacuum fluctuations.
Winner in the Singapore schools category is a teenage play on the paradoxical thought experiment, Schrödinger’s cat.
Not to be overlooked, an explanation of superposition resolving to classical location through the story of a refugee who has no idea where he’s going until shown on a map that he’s arrived in England.
And two women drinking while describing principles outlined by Werner Karl Heisenberg, father of quantum mechanics.
Finding quantum theory clearer?