Broken Bridges of a Beautiful World

Sept 14, 2020 | By Daniel Chabeda ES ‘22

The natural world is beautiful. On a grand scale, the mountains arch toward the sky in their millennia-long and mile-high morning stretch. On the smallest scale, quantum theory invites us into a nanoscopic world where particles can teleport (quantum teleportation), exist in multiple places at once (quantum superposition), and physically pass through other objects (quantum tunneling). The most powerful microscopes in existence today, Scanning Tunneling Microscopes, are able to clearly resolve individual atoms to show us that even the quantum world is visually stunning.