Cultura als Campus

The quantum sense

Speaker: 

Marta García Matos

Marta García-Matos (Madrid, 1973) graduated in theoretical physics from the Autonomous University of Madrid in 1998. She continued her studies in the philosophy of science and language at the University of Helsinki, where she began her doctorate in mathematical logic. In 2002, she was a visiting scholar at Boston University. In Innsbruck (Austria), she completed her thesis and received her doctorate from the University of Helsinki in 2005. Until 2009, she combined her research with teaching, teaching mathematics at Pompeu Fabra University and in secondary schools (Aula Escuela Europea and Tecnos). She has worked on the scientific outreach team at ICFO-Institute of Photonic Sciences, leading projects that seek to bring science closer to the general public through a more humanistic approach. She currently works at CosmoCaixa.

She works on various expository and audiovisual scripts and is the author of a series of science fiction stories for children and adults about the physics of light.

Quantum physics dismantles realism and causality. In this talk, we will examine the paradoxes that have emerged from the clash between quantum principles, intuition, and the established order—paradoxes that led to a true crisis of foundations. Some of them—such as the stability of atoms or the ultraviolet catastrophe—highlight the limits of intuition and the pitfalls of overly simplistic assumptions about the systems under study. Others, like the double-slit experiment, demand a profound redefinition: a reconsideration of the very nature of those systems. Finally, others, such as Schrödinger's cat, alert us to the fact that we must be prepared for new surprises in our understanding of the world even after we have adopted the new quantum paradigm.

Free admission, limited capacity

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