Quantum Engine Sculpture Melds Past and Future of Physics
Steampunk-Inspired Artwork Evokes Devices That Convert Energy From One Form to Another
From left, an illustration of a "quantum engine" sculpture and a small-scale realization of the work, partially created with 3D printing.
Image courtesy of Empire Group and Bruce Rosenbaum
Artist and designer Bruce Rosenbaum has made a career out of melding new tech and old gadgets in whimsical ways: an imagined “original Zoom machine,” a beer-dispensing aquarium tank, a time-traveling photo booth for a noted fantasy author.
He’s been dubbed “the steampunk guru” by The Wall Street Journal for his mastery of the genre that combines Victorian-era aesthetics like brass, gears and steam with modern technology. But he never tried imagining a device at the atomic scale until connecting with a University of Maryland scientist.
Nicole Yunger Halpern, who coined the term “quantum steampunk” to describe her retrofuturistic combination of 19th and 21st century physics, and Rosenbaum over the past five years led a team in crafting an artwork to represent the eclectic mashup: an 8-inch, metallic, partially 3D-printed sculpture of a quantum engine.
“It’s been a privilege to interact with someone who is based in such a different world. I’m in physics, Bruce is in art. And yet, we both have a very strong shared interest in connecting the steam-powered world of the Industrial Revolution to today,” said Yunger Halpern, a theoretical physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a fellow of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science, and an adjunct assistant professor in UMD’s Department of Physics and Institute for Physical Science and Technology.
Supported by UMD’s Arts for All program, the sculpture made its debut last week at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit in honor of the United Nations’ Year of Quantum Science and Technology, and is being brought to campus this week, where it will later go on display.
Yunger Halpern at the Global Physics Summit.
Rosenbaum, based in Massachusetts, first encountered Yunger Halpern by watching one of her lectures about quantum thermodynamics. He saw something extraordinary in Yunger Halpern’s work—in terms of cutting-edge science and artistic possibility.
"For me, steampunk is a fusion of history plus art plus technology, and trying to tell the story of moving from the past and innovating into the present and the future," Rosenbaum said. "Nicole's incredible realization that classical thermodynamics and engines on the macro scale could help us to explore a way to build a single atom engine on the quantum scale was our inspiration to build a steampunk quantum engine using movement, lighting and sound to tell the story."
For weeks, Yunger Halpern and Rosenbaum worked over weekend Zooms and emails to brainstorm before enlisting others to help bring their ideas to life. They were inspired by the strange behaviors present in quantum physics, a rapidly evolving field that deals with how things work at the tiniest possible scales. At these levels, objects don’t behave the same way as they do in our everyday world—for example, things can exist in multiple states at once, like a coin that is both heads-up and tails-up simultaneously. Much of the lure of future quantum technologies—computers that could do currently impossible calculations, inherently secure networks, sensors more precise than any before—lies in leveraging these counterintuitive states.
The pair focused their project on the concept of quantum engines, devices that convert energy from one form to another. According to Yunger Halpern, even a single atom can function as an engine, transforming random microscopic motion into useful energy.
Rosenbaum brought in illustrator Jim Su for the initial designs and design engineering company Empire Group fabricated the sculpture. He and Yunger Halpern coordinated a careful balance between artistic vision and scientific accuracy at every stage of the project.
Gradually, the team grew to include other UMD faculty and staff members, including Distinguished University Professors Christopher Jarzynski and William Phillips, Senior Faculty Specialist Daniel Serrano and Scientific Development Officer Alfredo Nava-Tudela. The UMD Quantum Startup Foundry and Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter also pitched in.
“Our sculpture depicts an engine that can operate at the atomic scale to convert heat energy— which is random, the energy of particles always jiggling around—into useful work. Work is coordinated energy, the kind that charges our computers and powers our factories,” Yunger Halpern explained. “Like the steam-powered tech of the Victorian era, this engine relies on thermodynamic properties to make its conversion. We wanted to bring those two themes from very different periods of history together.”
Yunger Halpern and her partners have ambitions beyond this first tabletop creation. They hope to create a much larger version of their steampunk sculpture in the near future—complete with antique brasses, lasers, touchscreens and other high-tech interactive and moving elements.
“We have plans for our sculpture’s next iteration, but it’s still early in the fund-gathering process,” Yunger Halpern said. “For now, we’re focusing on sharing our tabletop quantum engine with the world and creating a tangible connection to what’s usually an invisible world. We hope that it’ll capture that sense of adventure in quantum thermodynamics for scientists and art enthusiasts alike.”
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