Today, 14th of April, a new initiative from quantum scientists around the world has been launched: the “World quantum day”. The first global celebration will take place in one year, on the 14th of April 2022.
The aim of this recurrence is to raise interest in quantum science’s achievements and allow a general audience to better understand how quantum mechanics can lead to future scientific and technological advances, impacting our society.
Quantum physics has revolutionized the way in which we interpret nature, offering the most effective description of its fundamental components, namely the elementary particles and forces that constitute the Universe. In the last decades, it found a wide variety of applications, ranging from communication, to electronics, medical and computational purposes.
This date is a reference to Planck’s constant, indicated by the letter h and amounting to 4.135667696 × 10-15 eV s, whose rounded first digits are 4.14. This constant describes the smallest possible value of the physical action, implying that energy and other fundamental physical quantities are not continuous, but quantized. In other words, they can take only multiple values of Planck’s constant.
The Quantum Lab wishes you a happy World Quantum Day and remember that every day is a quantum day!