How many times have you heard about quantum in popular media? All kinds of ideas have been tossed around like different reincarnations of Schrodinger’s Cat, random things quantized, and something along the lines of uncertainties maybe. Through all these avenues, there’s misunderstanding about what quantum theory is, and it’s scaring the public from understanding how awesome it is. Chad Orzel created a beautiful animation on what all this quantum madness really is below.
However, we took the idea of quantum and used it however we please. With a quick search online, I managed to find a plethora of businesses with “quantum” in its name. Some of them granted are research orientated on quantum physics, but others simply had nothing to do with physics at all.
One business that did catch my eye was Quantum Coffee. I had many questions going into their page. What do they sell? Is their product a cappuccino and a latte at the same time? Would I not be able to know until I tasted it? Is the coffee in a quantized state where it can only be seen in certain discrete volumes? Those were just a small subset of the questions I had, but lo and behold there was a Quantum Coffee in downtown Vancouver. I could go and find answers to all the questions I had. So that’s what I set out to do.
Fig 1. Different observed coffee levels at Quantum Coffee. In the top left is the highest energy state inside our finite cylindrical well, the bottom left is one of the middle energy states and the right is the lowest energy level possible, the ground state. Photo by Fareez Sanif
Sitting down in Quantum Coffee was pretty good. It’s a nice coffee place, but it didn’t really seem to scream physics at me. The coffee was amazing, but I think I was thoroughly disappointed by the lack of quantum mechanics. No physics equations, no cats and certainly no double slit experiment to be seen. Not to mention that I couldn’t order a superposition of latte and cappuccino. In their defense, there was some sort of educational business nearby them which accounts for their naming but still doesn’t excuse that the shop is not representative of quantum mechanics.
The shop could have showed off cool artistic renditions of the double-slit experiment on the walls or even write in big words that “The Ultraviolet Catastrophe was Solved!” which just sounds awesome. Instead, they took the name quantum for no reason and promoting the weirdness of quantum that people are afraid of.
Quantum is a cool concept with all kinds of weird phenomenon that people would have fun understanding, such as tunneling, Heisenberg uncertainty, entanglement, and wave particle dualities. We all don’t need to understand the complicated math behind it, because why would you want to? Isn’t it cool that the universe works at a completely unintuitive way? I think so at least. So, let’s spread how awesome, weird and whack quantum is, rather than fear people with math and confuse them about quantum theory.
If you would like to know more about quantum mechanics, Crash Course on YouTube has a wonderful introduction into this weird world we live in right here.
