Originally published on LinkedIn
World Quantum Day 2025 and Quantum Intuition XR
Apr 15, 2025 | Charles Tahan
This is an archived copy of a LinkedIn post. The original is at the link above.
On the west coast it’s still World Quantum Day! So I’ve just made it.
I’m extremely grateful that the annual event that the National Quantum Coordination Office helped officially launch back in 2022 has grown bigger each year.
I always had this dream of making the entire internet “go quantum” on World Quantum Day. We’ll get there.
But today I want to share some progress on a project I wrote about back in February of 2022. I’ve always wanted to make quantum mechanics a real thing you can experience. I really believe that intuition comes from practice, and that developing quantum intuition could be possible even as a kid if we just could come up with the right tools and visualizations. That’s why I made MEQANIC many years ago (http://meqanic.com). And that’s what inspired me to write “A Quantum Wish” (https://www.quantum.gov/a-quantum-wish/), which imagined a museum exhibit I could take my daughter to that lets you “see inside a quantum computer”.
(Kind of cool, because a friend got me early access to OpenAI’s DALL-E, I believe I made the first picture book generated by AI based on that essay: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tahan_a-quantum-wish-activity-6920549222027026432-6JMx (copy on this site))
When I left government a year ago we teamed up with Professor Myungin Lee and his group at the University of Maryland and got an “Arts for All” ArtsAMP grant to take a step toward that direction. They and Matt Brooks did a great job on a very minimal budget. (I didn’t do much.)
“Quantum Intuition XR” is an extended reality simulator that starts to realize, at least virtually, manipulating and interacting qubits as real physical objects you can touch, see, and even hear. It’s accurate, in that the visualizations are based on real calculations and generally depict how physicists think of qubit states.
There’s much work to do and it can get so much better. I’m hoping we can get some more friends to help out…and also make it more widely accessible.
Check out the preprint for now: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.08984
