Lyne Starling Trimble Public Event Series
Science, Foundations, and Technology:
Lessons from the History of the Hundred Years of Quantum Mechanics
Olival Freire, Jr., Universidade Federal da Bahia & CNPq, Brazil
Friday, August 8, 2025
Sixth AIP Early-Career Conference keynote lecture
Salvador, Brazil
Attendance at this lecture is limited to conference participants. A video will be made available afterward.
Abstract
Olival Freire, Jr.
Quantum mechanics emerged laden with issues and doubts about its foundations and interpretation. However, nobody in the 1920s and 1930s dared to conjecture that research on such issues would open the doors to developments so huge as to require the term second quantum revolution to describe them. On the one hand, the new theory saw its scope of applications widen in various domains including atoms, molecules, light, the interaction between light and matter, relativistic effects, field quantization, nuclear physics, and solid state and particle physics. On the other hand, there were debates on alternative interpretations, the status of statistical predictions, the completeness of the theory, the underlying logic, mathematical structures, the understanding of measurements, and the transition from the quantum to the classical description. Initially, there seemed to be a coexistence between these two orders of issues, without any interaction between them. However, the connections among debates on foundations, scientific achievements, and potential technological applications opened the doors for a new chapter in quantum history, a chapter many call quantum technologies. In this talk we exploit the connections among scientific achievements, foundational debates, and technological applications exhibited by quantum mechanics throughout its history.
Speaker Biography
Olival Freire is professor of physics and history of physics at the Universidade Federal da Bahia in Brazil. He has published the books The Quantum Dissidents (2015) and David Bohm (2019), and edited The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Quantum Interpretations.
Top photo: a dilution refrigerator for a quantum computer. Photo credit: Graham Carlow, courtesy of IBM.