Wavefunction collapse at the Noches de los (muy jovenes) Investigadores (2016)

Revision as of 19:07, 12 October 2016

This year's European Research Night in Madrid (see [3]) was oriented to the very young public (at least this is how the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid understood it [4], and indeed a good fraction of the audience consisted of children).

Our group, that is generously funded by the EU, participated this year again to this event (see here for our last year's input), this time with Elena, Carlos & Camilo impersonated herself, Schrödinger & Newton, respectively, to explain the "collapse of the quantum wavefunction" (see what Wikipedia says about that).

Explaining to young people a concept that is still not very well understood by the most experts in the field is a real challenge. This was brilliantly tackled with things that really collapse when probed hard enough: balloons.

This was, this year again, successful, as it gathered a large public composed of very different people, of all ages but also of all background, and who expressed a strong interest, some people apparently even assisting to several sessions. While in the back to take some of the pictures we display below, I overheard an academic-looking person withdraw from the show to call on her phone and express enthusiastically "Estoy aquí con gente que está explotando balones para hacer un colapso de la función de onda, tienes que venir y ver esto!" (en). This is a gallery of the event.

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  The team: Erwin Sánchez, the know-it-all, Elena as herself, and Isaac Lòpez the unconvinced, inquisitive classical mind.

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  Ready to explain what is a wavefunction and how it collapses.

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  It deals with light as color corpuscules so Isaac L. was happy about that.

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  Elena formulating the problem.

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  Erwin S. explaining the superposition.

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  Isaac L. presenting his point of view.

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  Julia attentive to the public's reactions.

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  You never look close enough.

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  The public was called to participate to "make a measurement".

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  The presentation was performed over and over the whole evening, for an audience of about this size each time.

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  The moment of truth: observing the system...

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  And collapsing!

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  This time the measurement turned out to be a green balloon.

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  Discussions on the interpretation... the classical world is not too happy about something.

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  At any level of discussion, quantum mechanics involves some handwaving arguments at some point...

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  Summarizing the theory.

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  Now trying to convince the public!

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  Not everybody buys quantum jumps so easily, and the state was not even entangled! Maybe next year.