Conversations on Quantum Mechanics  

POPULAR MEETING OPEN TO THE PUBLIC AT PALAZZO DEL MONTE DI PIETÀ

On Friday, October 27, at 5:30 p.m., in the Conference Room at Palazzo del Monte di Pietà, (Piazza Duomo 14 – Padua), the first of the meetings in the “Quantum Frontiers” series will be held.

It is an event open to the interested public and of a popular nature entitled “Conversations on Quantum Mechanics,” not a lecture, but a dialogue between Guido Bacciagaluppi, from Utrecht University, an expert on the history and interpretations of quantum mechanics, and Federica D’Auria, a journalist who collaborates with the University of Padua’s ilBolive magazine.

This series of meetings, which originated within the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Padua, winner of a grant of more than 9 million euros provided by the MUR thanks to the call for proposals Progetto Dipartimenti di eccellenza, aims to strengthen and raise awareness of the activities and expertise within it.

In fact, the project also includes a series of popular initiatives on topics related to the “quantum world” that will enable the general public to grasp the importance of research in this field, its spin-offs in the technological sphere and the challenges that open up in the cultural, social and economic spheres.

“God does not play dice with the Universe,” says Flavio Seno, Director of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, “is one of Einstein’s most famous phrases regarding the interpretation to be given to quantum mechanics, which was born almost a century ago between 1925 and 1926 and from which the great physicist’s discontent with a theory that immediately proved to be highly effective in understanding and predicting the behavior of the minute components of matter and light and their interactions, but which from the point of view of interpretation raised great controversy.

Controversies that immediately triggered a debate in the scientific community, emblematically represented by the debate, in many ways philosophical, between the figures of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr.”

Since then, scientific and technological developments in quantum mechanics have shown their full fruitfulness, sparking the first quantum revolution around the middle of the last century with the development of electronics, computers and lasers.

Instead, the second quantum revolution is being talked about in the very last few years, when many of the singular and counterintuitive behaviors of the quantum world have opened and are opening new and fascinating prospects for the realization of new communication systems and quantum computers. It is precisely these latest developments that the project entitled “Quantum Frontiers” of the Department of Physics and Astronomy (DFA) of the University of Padua will address.

2 “The Ministry of University and Research established in 2016 the call for proposals ‘Progetto Dipartimenti di eccellenza,’” Flavio Seno continued, “which selects the best Italian departments in all disciplinary fields.

This selection is made on the basis of five-year projects submitted by Departments and gives access to additional funding. The DFA, already ranked among the Departments of Excellence in the five-year period 2018-2022, was the Department of Physics and Astronomy that won the selection with the best evaluation in Italy in the five-year period 2023-27 precisely with the project “Quantum Frontiers.””

This project aims to enhance the expertise of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, whose activities are already recognized as being of the highest profile nationally and internationally, in all frontier areas of research in which the quantum nature of matter and radiation plays a fundamental role.

The first meeting could only address the history of the birth of quantum mechanics and the interpretative debate that, since the time of the confrontation between Einstein and Bohr, has accompanied it, also marking significant turning points in its technological applications.

Biographical notes by Guido Bacciagaluppi His training took place between ETH Zurich and the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford.

His fields of research include the philosophy of physics, and in particular the philosophy of quantum mechanics, and the history of physics.

He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics at Utrecht University.