The quantum revolution, birthed at the beginning of the last century, cast our understanding of our world and universe in a completely new light. It introduced strange, counter intuitive ideas – matter can behave like waves, a magnet can point in multiple directions at once, and two atoms can get so strongly correlated or entangled, making a measurement of one of them here on Earth can instantly determine the state of the other even if it is on the Moon (Einstein’s spooky actions). It gave rise to an extraordinary understanding of a range of phenomena—how stars radiate, how atoms and elements are constructed, how superconductors function, and more. It forms the basis of many of our creations from semiconductor technology to solar panels to MRI machines. And yet, many of its mysteries remain. In this talk, we will encounter glimpses of this marvelous quantum world. Here and there, I will invoke the poetic through excerpts of our narrative-music-visual performance piece, Quantum Rhapsodies, a creation inspired by the planetarium scripts of my late father, C. V. Vishveshwara, black hole physicist and founder director of the Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium.
