Quantum quirks in time and causality

Luck has not been on our side! After recent attempts to return to The Edge were quashed, BrisScience will be hosted online for the next few months. We're hoping to return to The Edge before the year is out and will keep you informed of any updates.

This September, we're delighted to have physicist and senior lecturer Dr Fabio Costa joining us online for BrisScience at home: Quantum quirks in time and causality.

The word “quantum” is thrown around a lot these days, an exemplar of weirdness and a harbinger of wonderful technology. But quantum mechanics is weird, and we do have high hopes it will help build better computers and communication systems.

So, what exactly is weird about quantum mechanics and how far can we push this weirdness?

We find that even strongholds of our understanding of nature, such as the distinction between cause and effect, become blurry. As baffling as this might be, it’s nothing our experimentalist friends can’t cope with. After showing the effect in experiments, they are now working to incorporate quantum causality into even more efficient technology.

Join us at BrisScience where Dr Costa will introduce the core feature of quantum theory—superposition—and present some of his own research: exploring superposition of the order in which things happen.

Watch the recording

Recording of "Quantum quirks in time and causality" talk (YouTube, 39min)

Meet the presenter

Dr Fabio Costa is a Senior Lecturer at The University of Queensland. He completed his undergraduate studies in Milan, Italy, in 2007, and received a PhD from the University of Vienna, Austria, in 2013. He joined The University of Queensland since 2014, where he received an ARC Discovery Early Career Award (DECRA) in 2015 and the Queensland Young Tall Poppy Science Award in 2021.

His works deals with the most counterintuitive aspects of quantum theory, with the goal to shed light on fundamental physics and find applications of quantum effects to modern technology, such as computation and communication. His particular focus is how quantum theory changes established notions such as time and causality.

He has developed a theoretical framework to describe physical situations without assuming the existence of background time. He now applies this framework to improve emerging quantum technologies, where new perspectives can offer more efficient solutions to certain problems.