Judging Panel

Ágnes Mócsy

Ágnes is a Brooklyn-based theoretical physicist, documentary filmmaker, producer, science communicator, inclusion/equity activist. She made significant contributions in nuclear physics investigating how matter formed microseconds after the Big Bang. She developed innovative physics and astronomy courses at Yale and Pratt teaching science through its intersectionality with the arts. After making Smashing Matters, currently she is directing and producing Rare Connections, documentary rooted at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, Michigan State University, where she is now Visiting Professor, on leave from her tenured Professor position at Pratt Institute. She is Fellow of the American Physical Society, Yale University Fellow, and Humboldt Fellow. Ágnes held positions at The Niels Bohr Institute, Denmark, at the Goethe University, Germany, at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and visiting appointments at École Polytechnique and Saclay, France and at Yale University. Find more on her website https://www.agnesmocsy.com/
 

Alex Winter

Alex Winter is a director, writer and actor who has worked across film, television and theater. Winter entered show business as a child actor with co-starring roles on Broadway in The King & I and Peter Pan, and came to prominence in movies such as Warner Bros’ hit The Lost Boys and the wildly popular Bill & Ted franchise. As a filmmaker, Winter’s narrative features include the cult classic Freaked, and the critically acclaimed Fever. In 2020, Winter released two new documentary feature films: Showbiz Kids premiered on HBO to widespread critical acclaim; and Zappa, the first all-access documentary on the life and times of Frank Zappa. A Critics Pick in the New York Times, Zappa was nominated for Best Music Documentary by the Critics Choice Awards. Winter also returned to screens in the highly anticipated Bill & Ted Face The Music, which opened in August 2020 as the number one movie in the U.S. and the UK. Previous documentary work includes The Panama Papers, Trust Machine, Deep Web, and Downloaded. Just completed is Winter’s next feature documentary, The YouTube Effect, produced by Winter/Trouper Productions in partnership with Gale Anne Hurd/Valhalla Entertainment and Glen Zipper. The film had its world premiere at Tribeca in June and will be released later this year.

alexwinter.com

Honor Harger

Honor Harger is responsible for the integrated resort’s attractions, including the iconic ArtScience Museum, Sands SkyPark, Digital Light Canvas and Sampan Ride. In this expanded role, she will also be instrumental in creating a range of new attractions as Marina Bay Sands embarks on its reinvestment of the property in the coming years. As Vice President of ArtScience Museum, Honor will continue to chart the direction and strategy at this leading cultural destination, which she has been overseeing since March 2014. Previously its Executive Director, Honor curated the Museum’s first permanent exhibition, FUTURE WORLD: Where Art Meets Science and has been credited for uplifting the span and depth of the museum’s programming and vision. Under her direction, ArtScience Museum have staged large-scale exhibitions by some of the world’s major artists, including Leonardo da Vinci and M.C. Escher, as well as showing work by contemporary artists including Theo Jansen, Lynette Wallworth, Ryoji Ikeda, Yang Yongliang, Semiconductor, Olafur Eliasson, Anish Kapoor, Mariko Mori and many more. During her tenure, the museum also presented significant exhibitions that explore aspects of science, including big data, particle physics, natural history, marine biology, cosmology and space exploration. Before joining Marina Bay Sands, Honor was the director of Lighthouse in Brighton, United Kingdom, from 2010 to 2014. In that role, she curated projects which showed the cultural impact of scientific ideas, such as Laboratory Life, Invisible Fields and Solar Systems. She was director of the AV Festival the UK's largest biennial of digital art, film and music from 2004 - 2008, and was also the first curator of webcasting for Tate Modern from 2000-2003. Honor has delivered lectures at many conferences including TED, LIFT, Webstock, and MuseumNext, as well as at the European Space Agency, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, California Institute of the Arts and the American Film Institute. Born and raised in New Zealand, Honor currently resides in Singapore.
 

Jamie Lochhead

Jamie Lochhead is a Director and Executive Producer with Windfall Films. He wrote and directed Einstein's Quantum Riddle, an award-winning documentary about quantum entanglement for NOVA, the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service's flagship science program, and the BBC. His projects have won numerous accolades, including BAFTA awards for Inside Nature’s Giants and Jabbed!, the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Silver Award for Ozone Hole: How We Saved the Planet, and two Emmy nominations for Inside Einstein’s Mind. His most recent project is the BBC documentary Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard.
 

José Ignacio Latorre

José Ignacio Latorre was appointed Director of the Centre for Quantum Technologies in July 2020. He is also Professor and Provost’s Chair in the National University of Singapore's Department of Physics. A leading figure in particle physics and quantum information, José Ignacio joined CQT, NUS from the University of Barcelona. He has been heading a research group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center to build the first quantum processor in Spain. He is one of the founders of the NNPDF collaboration for research on high-energy physics. José Ignacio is also the founder and director coordinator of the Centro de Ciencias de Benasque Pedro Pascual. José Ignacio produced two documentaries, one of them on the last voice of the Manhattan Project, and was one of the curators of the exhibition, Quantum, held at the CCCB in 2019.

Neal Hartman

With a mechanical engineering degree from the University of California at Berkeley, Neal Hartman worked as an engineer at CERN, the European Laboratory for High Energy Physics, for 18 years. He has been actively involved in science/art outreach since 2007, and co-founded CineGlobe, the International Film Festival at CERN, showcasing films of all types inspired by science and technology. Neal was director of production for TEDxCERN for five editions, and worked as a local producer for TED Global>Geneva. As Chairman of the World VR Forum in 2017, he has organised multiple events in virtual reality, and conducted a year of research into virtual reality at the Swiss Polytechnic University in Lausanne (EPFL). Neal is a founding member of the Foundation Board for the Geneva International Film Festival (GIFF). With degrees in both engineering and film directing (from the University of Westminster), his passions are equally shared between art and science. Between 2020 and 2021, Neal served as director of Science Gallery Venice, the Italian node of the international Science Gallery Network.
 

Quantum Theories: A to Z

W is for ...
Wave-particle duality

It is possible to describe an atom, an electron, or a photon as either a wave or a particle. In reality, they are both: a wave and a particle.

S is for ...
Schrödinger’s Cat

A hypothetical experiment in which a cat kept in a closed box can be alive and dead at the same time – as long as nobody lifts the lid to take a look.

C is for ...
Cryptography

People have been hiding information in messages for millennia, but the quantum world provides a whole new way to do it.

T is for ...
Time

The arrow of time is “irreversible”—time goes forward. On microscopic quantum scales, this seems less certain. A recent experiment shows that the forward pointing of the arrow of time remains a fundamental rule for quantum measurements.

L is for ...
Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

At CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, this machine is smashing apart particles in order to discover their constituent parts and the quantum laws that govern their behaviour.

H is for ...
Hidden Variables

One school of thought says that the strangeness of quantum theory can be put down to a lack of information; if we could find the “hidden variables” the mysteries would all go away.

Q is for ...
Quantum States

Quantum states, which represent the state of affairs of a quantum system, change by a different set of rules than classical states.

G is for ...
Gravity

Our best theory of gravity no longer belongs to Isaac Newton. It’s Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. There’s just one problem: it is incompatible with quantum theory. The effort to tie the two together provides the greatest challenge to physics in the 21st century.

V is for ...
Virtual particles

Quantum theory’s uncertainty principle says that since not even empty space can have zero energy, the universe is fizzing with particle-antiparticle pairs that pop in and out of existence. These “virtual” particles are the source of Hawking radiation.

K is for ...
Key

Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is a way to create secure cryptographic keys, allowing for more secure communication.

F is for ...
Free Will

Ideas at the heart of quantum theory, to do with randomness and the character of the molecules that make up the physical matter of our brains, lead some researchers to suggest humans can’t have free will.

Q is for ...
Qubit

One quantum bit of information is known as a qubit (pronounced Q-bit). The ability of quantum particles to exist in many different states at once means a single quantum object can represent multiple qubits at once, opening up the possibility of extremely fast information processing.

M is for ...
Many Worlds Theory

Some researchers think the best way to explain the strange characteristics of the quantum world is to allow that each quantum event creates a new universe.

Y is for ...
Young's Double Slit Experiment

In 1801, Thomas Young proved light was a wave, and overthrew Newton’s idea that light was a “corpuscle”.

P is for ...
Probability

Quantum mechanics is a probabilistic theory: it does not give definite answers, but only the probability that an experiment will come up with a particular answer. This was the source of Einstein’s objection that God “does not play dice” with the universe.

M is for ...
Multiverse

Our most successful theories of cosmology suggest that our universe is one of many universes that bubble off from one another. It’s not clear whether it will ever be possible to detect these other universes.

B is for ...
Bell's Theorem

In 1964, John Bell came up with a way of testing whether quantum theory was a true reflection of reality. In 1982, the results came in – and the world has never been the same since!

L is for ...
Light

We used to believe light was a wave, then we discovered it had the properties of a particle that we call a photon. Now we know it, like all elementary quantum objects, is both a wave and a particle!

T is for ...
Tunnelling

This happens when quantum objects “borrow” energy in order to bypass an obstacle such as a gap in an electrical circuit. It is possible thanks to the uncertainty principle, and enables quantum particles to do things other particles can’t.

P is for ...
Planck's Constant

This is one of the universal constants of nature, and relates the energy of a single quantum of radiation to its frequency. It is central to quantum theory and appears in many important formulae, including the Schrödinger Equation.

M is for ...
Maths

Quantum physics is the study of nature at the very small. Mathematics is one language used to formalise or describe quantum phenomena.

U is for ...
Universe

To many researchers, the universe behaves like a gigantic quantum computer that is busy processing all the information it contains.

R is for ...
Reality

Since the predictions of quantum theory have been right in every experiment ever done, many researchers think it is the best guide we have to the nature of reality. Unfortunately, that still leaves room for plenty of ideas about what reality really is!

W is for ...
Wavefunction

The mathematics of quantum theory associates each quantum object with a wavefunction that appears in the Schrödinger equation and gives the probability of finding it in any given state.

G is for ...
Gluon

These elementary particles hold together the quarks that lie at the heart of matter.

S is for ...
Sensors

Researchers are harnessing the intricacies of quantum mechanics to develop powerful quantum sensors. These sensors could open up a wide range of applications.

K is for ...
Kaon

These are particles that carry a quantum property called strangeness. Some fundamental particles have the property known as charm!

A is for ...
Atom

This is the basic building block of matter that creates the world of chemical elements – although it is made up of more fundamental particles.

D is for ...
Dice

Albert Einstein decided quantum theory couldn’t be right because its reliance on probability means everything is a result of chance. “God doesn’t play dice with the world,” he said.

E is for ...
Entanglement

When two quantum objects interact, the information they contain becomes shared. This can result in a kind of link between them, where an action performed on one will affect the outcome of an action performed on the other. This “entanglement” applies even if the two particles are half a universe apart.

Z is for ...
Zero-point energy

Even at absolute zero, the lowest temperature possible, nothing has zero energy. In these conditions, particles and fields are in their lowest energy state, with an energy proportional to Planck’s constant.

R is for ...
Randomness

Unpredictability lies at the heart of quantum mechanics. It bothered Einstein, but it also bothers the Dalai Lama.

J is for ...
Josephson Junction

This is a narrow constriction in a ring of superconductor. Current can only move around the ring because of quantum laws; the apparatus provides a neat way to investigate the properties of quantum mechanics and is a technology to build qubits for quantum computers.

I is for ...
Information

Many researchers working in quantum theory believe that information is the most fundamental building block of reality.

C is for ...
Clocks

The most precise clocks we have are atomic clocks which are powered by quantum mechanics. Besides keeping time, they can also let your smartphone know where you are.

O is for ...
Objective reality

Niels Bohr, one of the founding fathers of quantum physics, said there is no such thing as objective reality. All we can talk about, he said, is the results of measurements we make.

E is for ...
Ethics

As the world makes more advances in quantum science and technologies, it is time to think about how it will impact lives and how society should respond. This mini-documentary by the Quantum Daily is a good starting point to think about these ethical issues. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qc7gpabEhQ&t=2s 

N is for ...
Nonlocality

When two quantum particles are entangled, it can also be said they are “nonlocal”: their physical proximity does not affect the way their quantum states are linked.

B is for ...
Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC)

At extremely low temperatures, quantum rules mean that atoms can come together and behave as if they are one giant super-atom.

D is for ...
Decoherence

Unless it is carefully isolated, a quantum system will “leak” information into its surroundings. This can destroy delicate states such as superposition and entanglement.

S is for ...
Superposition

The feature of a quantum system whereby it exists in several separate quantum states at the same time.

Q is for ...
Quantum biology

A new and growing field that explores whether many biological processes depend on uniquely quantum processes to work. Under particular scrutiny at the moment are photosynthesis, smell and the navigation of migratory birds.

A is for ...
Alice and Bob

In quantum experiments, these are the names traditionally given to the people transmitting and receiving information. In quantum cryptography, an eavesdropper called Eve tries to intercept the information.

C is for ...
Computing

The rules of the quantum world mean that we can process information much faster than is possible using the computers we use now. This column from Quanta Magazine ​delves into the fundamental physics behind quantum computing.

U is for ...
Uncertainty Principle

One of the most famous ideas in science, this declares that it is impossible to know all the physical attributes of a quantum particle or system simultaneously.

X is for ...
X-ray

In 1923 Arthur Compton shone X-rays onto a block of graphite and found that they bounced off with their energy reduced exactly as would be expected if they were composed of particles colliding with electrons in the graphite. This was the first indication of radiation’s particle-like nature.

A is for ...
Act of observation

Some people believe this changes everything in the quantum world, even bringing things into existence.

I is for ...
Interferometer

Some of the strangest characteristics of quantum theory can be demonstrated by firing a photon into an interferometer

T is for ...
Teleportation

Quantum tricks allow a particle to be transported from one location to another without passing through the intervening space – or that’s how it appears. The reality is that the process is more like faxing, where the information held by one particle is written onto a distant particle.

H is for ...
Hawking Radiation

In 1975, Stephen Hawking showed that the principles of quantum mechanics would mean that a black hole emits a slow stream of particles and would eventually evaporate.

S is for ...
Schrödinger Equation

This is the central equation of quantum theory, and describes how any quantum system will behave, and how its observable qualities are likely to manifest in an experiment.

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