Around a century ago, Pandora's box was opened and the bizarre nature of the quantum world was revealed. In spite of its strangeness, quantum mechanics proved a most powerful theory that has yet to suffer an experimental violation. And yet its most dramatic consequences are largely absent from our everyday lives: few have ever observed a billiard ball passing through two holes at once, and fewer have witnessed a cat that is both alive and dead. So where does the strangeness of quantum mechanics go? What prevents it from reaching us? Imagine a dial that sets how quantum the world is. At one end sits the familiar: ordinary solids, liquids, and gases. As you turn up the quantumness dial, matter begins to wildly misbehave: crystals melt at absolute zero, liquids flow without friction and climb out of their containers, and a strange kind of solid flows through itself. The last of these, the supersolid, is among the strangest phases of matter predicted by quantum mechanics, and eluded observation for decades before it was detected in ultracold gases of dipolar atoms teeming with quantum fluctuations. In this lecture, we shall draw upon some theoretical, computational, and experimental ideas to grapple with an old and deep question: how does the strangeness of quantum mechanics give way to the familiarity of classical physics.
I am an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Physics. One of my longstanding interests is the boundary between quantum and classical physics, explored through condensed matter, ultracold atoms, quantum reservoir computing, and brain networks. This year, I teach introductory physics, electromagnetism, and classical mechanics. I greatly enjoy guiding students towards the revelation that physics is a science of depth, elegance, universality, and splendour; a universe of natural phenomena is hidden in a small number of profound ideas. Outside physics, I'm fond of classical music and opera, literature, and strength training.