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Rochester Institute of Technology students can soon begin earning a minor in an emerging field that could disrupt the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines. RIT students can now take classes toward a minor in quantum information science and technology.

This is a hot field garnering a lot of attention and we are excited to offer students a chance to gain some technical depth in quantum so they can take this knowledge and go the next step with their careers, said Ben Zwickl, associate professor in RITs School of Physics and Astronomy and advisor for the minor. It will provide a pathway for students from any STEM major to take two core courses that introduce them to quantum and some of its applications, as well as strategically pick some upper-level courses within or outside their program.

Quantum physics seeks to understand the rules and effects of manipulating the smallest amount of energy at the subatomic level. Scientists and engineers are attempting to harness the strange, unintuitive properties of quantum particles to make advances in computing, cryptography, communications, and many other applications. Developers of the minor said there is a growing industry that will need employees knowledgeable about quantum physics and its applications.

Were seeing a lot of giant tech companies like IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Google get involved with quantum, but theres also a lot of venture capital going to startup companies in quantum, said Gregory Howland, assistant professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy. Howland will teach one of the minors two required courses this fallPrinciples and Applications of Quantum Technology. You have both sides of it really blossoming now.

The minor, much like the field itself, is highly interdisciplinary in nature, with faculty from the College of Science, Kate Gleason College of Engineering, College of Engineering Technology, and Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences offering classes that count toward the minor. The minor grew out of RITs Future Photon Initiative and funding from the NSFs Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes program.

Associate Professor Sonia Lopez Alarcon from RITs Department of Computer Engineering will teach the other required courseIntroduction to Quantum Computing and Information Sciencestarting this spring. She said taking these courses will provide valuable life skills in addition to lessons about cutting-edge science and technology.

Theyll learn more than just the skills from the courses, theyll learn how to get familiar with a topic thats not in the textbooks officially yet, said Lopez Alarcon. Thats a very important skill for industry. Companies want to know theyre hiring people with the ability to learn about something that is emerging, especially in science and technology because its such a rapidly changing field.

The faculty involved noted that they hope to attract a diverse group of students to enroll in the minor. They said that although the disciplines feeding into quantum have struggled with inclusion related to gender and race and ethnicity, they will work with affinity groups on campus to try to recruit students to the program and ultimately advance the fields inclusivity.

To learn more about the minor, contact Ben Zwickl.

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RIT offers new minor in emerging field of quantum information science and technology | RIT - Rochester Institute of Technology

Theres a new sci-fi book series thats taking the young adult genre by stormthe first book,The Upper World, written by Femi Fadugba has already caught the eye of studioexecutives, and Netflix has acquired the film rights[and] Queen & Slims Daniel Kaluuya [is] attached to produce and star.

Fadugbas debut novel was alsorecentlyshortlisted for the Waterstones Childrens Book Prizein the Older Readers category in addition to being longlisted for the 2022 Branford Boase Award which is given annually to the author of an outstanding debut novel for children.

One review attributed thenovelsunusual credibility to the fact that Fadugba is a real-lifephysicistand has based his ideas about time travel on real science, including Einsteins theories(even if you dont grasp it at all). Fadugba wrote the novel after many conversations about with people who would ask him to explain quantum physics. Theyd always be super fascinated and wanted me to recommend a book, but I couldnt find one that I could put my hand on my heart and say: Youll dig this, he toldThe Guardian.

Fadugba, 35, who splits time between the UK and the US, sat down with ESSENCE to discuss his inspiration for writing the book, his career path and meteoric rise to fame, as well as his upcoming projects.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ESSENCE: What inspired you to writeThe Upper World?

Its a complicated one because it has a few different angles. I went to university, and I ended up doing quantum physics, quantum computing, specifically and I thought I was going to be an academic physicist at that point. I published an article at PRL, which is the same publication that Einstein published a lot of his stuff in, so that was kind of like the peak of my career. I was looking for whats next, but the academic route just felt a little bit abstract.

As a Black African boy in the UK, there are lot more serious problems faced by people than partial differential equations. So, I decided, let me go into working world and see what impact I can have, and I went into business, I did solar energy. But it just wasnt quite cutting it. I felt like I hadnt found my voice and didnt have a platform. I started digging into things that excited me when I was younger, and I rediscovered my love for physics, and especially about time travel. In many ways the genesis of the book was after reading pretty much 100 books on relativity to thinking, how do I explain this in a way that 16-year-old me would have not only understood it, but also have a reason to give a st.

Thats why I ended up putting it into a narrative, because people like stories, thats how we learn things. Look at the book of Genesis, thats a story about nature. Its a story about physics in many ways and how the universe came to be, it told a story because thats how we absorb things, and I think the other side of my motivation was because of the actual story part, the specific characters I chose, the location, the theme I explored. Again, I think for me it was about writing the kind of book that teenage me would have fked with basically. A big part of that was, I dont want to lecture the kids. How do I meet young Black boys where theyre at and then give them a story that combines philosophy, physics, real-life st and elevate the conversation and never at any point underestimate their curiosity?

ESSENCE: How many drafts were there? How long, and what was the process like?

I would say that theres only four words that matter in your first draft: good enough and the end. When I started writing, I assumed that the world consisted of people were born good writers and people who were essentially not so good, and I thought I was in the second category. I had this moment, and I think it was partly from speaking with a couple of people who said, Oh, no everybody starts off rubbish, and then you practice and then you end up good. So I accepted that I was a rubbish writer and as long as I made improvement every day and I came to the page every day, I was gonna get a little bit better every day. It actually kind of worked, I mean, if you see the difference between different drafts, youd be amazed honestly. It came along, and I think there was something about that sort of amateur mindset where I was a nobody. I didnt have the weight of being a somebody, with the expectations of being a good writer. I was in a writing group with a bunch of people who were much better writers than me, and I found that most of them struggled to write a lot because they get to the end of just a couple of sentences or a chapter, or a paragraph and they will decide that its not good enough, there was that perfectionist kind of thing that made them just keep revising the first paragraph. Whereas I knew that my paragraphs were rubbish, so I just finished the draft and then went back and started again.

It took two and a half years from first words to pressing send to publishers. I think thats probably another thing that I did right in the first the first go-round when I was writing the first book, because I didnt have too much of an ego back then, so I just told people, Hey, Im not a writer, just read this. What do you think? I gave it to a lot of people, my wife read pretty much all eight drafts, whatever I produced. I probably sent it to like 10 other people, just friends, and I think the key thing for me was basically making it safe for them to tell me that my baby was ugly. Instead of just saying What do you think, which they probably would have said Its great, I asked, Did you care about the character? At what page were you hooked? What questions do you have in your mind? Does it make sense? Just basically digging for a no, rather than digging for a yes.

ESSENCE:The Upper Worldis being adapted by Netflixhow did that happen?

This all happened during June of 2020. The book went out to publishers, and out of nowhere, theres like essentially a bidding war, which was fking mental to be honest. Im just doing all these Zoom calls, with different publishers, and then maybe two weeks later the book leaked to Hollywood, I dont even know what that means. It leaked to a bunch of film studios, both in the UK and the US. And so, literally two, three weeks after the publishing thing closed, I was having calls with a bunch of the big studios and production houses. Then, Netflix came along, Daniel Kaluuyas agent got a hold of the script and then he read itI think pretty much in a dayand he said Yeah, Im keen to be involved. Its so sick, it just came together perfectly to be honest.

ESSENCE: You mentioned that you hoped for this book to be something that your teenage self would have wanted to read. Are there any other things that you hope the legacy of your book to be?

Im writing the sequel right now, literally just before I hopped on the call, burning through it. I had so many ideas, but I was surprised by how different my headspace was writing the second one versus the first one. I want the book to be a two-part booka duology. I think one of my inspirations isThe Godfather: Part II. Its a prequel sequel, and we essentially take the events in book one and then we go back in time, and we look at where Esso comes from, which takes us back to Africa, to Benin specifically, and we look at the mythology and the history of that country, and how it interweaves with the upper world. We also go forward, and we pick up from where we left off Rhia. Esso left off in the 2030s where Rhia is now going to uni and is facing a whole new host of challenges, both personally and with upper world and a maniac on the loose, whos trying to kill her and has ambitions on conquering the multiverses himself.

I mean, I think its part of a bigger story. Im really excited for you to have a look at the second book once its out and see, and we can have a discussion then on how it compares. My background, my life has been kind of strewn all over the place, and Ive seen a lot of different environments. One big contrast that I had growing up was going back and forth between Oxford and Peckham and then my parents were in Rwanda. One of the big things is showing people different worlds, just letting people imagine beyond what they see. Theres a practical aspect of that, which is literally showing different environments. In book two, youll definitely get that, in terms of going back to Africa and Rhia going to Cambridge. I think the other aspect of the legacy I hope for by the time Ive wrapped up, is that people who are religious will see just how similar they are to people who are atheists and scientists, and people who are just interested in how the world works, and what storytelling and metaphors mean and have a unified vision. I know thats a very abstract way to describe it. In book one, you saw a glimpse, where I combined physics with a concrete story in Peckham, and in book two I want to take it a bit further and incorporate Africa and religion into that.

I think for me, the biggest joy of writing is just the opportunity it gives me to like find my own joy, and also just share that with other people.

TOPICS: afrofuturism black authors

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Femi Fadugba Talks Netflix Grabbing His Debut Novel, Writing And Meeting Black Boys Where They Are - Essence

This years World Chess qualifying tournament brought a new twist: the heart rates of the players were broadcast live, with the help of AI software, so viewers could (supposedly) gain insight into the players emotions during a match. But can emotions be detected from mere heartbeats? When your own heart pounds wildly in your chest like a sledgehammer, does it necessarily mean youre frightened? Angry? Excited? Full of joy? What if youve just finished a strenuous workout or knocked back a bit too much espresso?

When it comes to the question of what your heart rate means, psychologically speaking, the scientifically correct answer is: it depends. Thats because physical signals from within your body have no inherent psychological meaning. A particular heart rate does not indicate any particular emotional state. Its not the case, say, that 100 beats per minute is happiness and 150 beats per minute is anger. The pounding in your chest during instances of both emotions can be physically identical. More specifically, your heart rate may vary just as much among different instances of anger as it does between instances of anger and happiness. Ditto for every spurt of cortisol, every trickle of dopamine, and every other electrical or chemical change in your body. What differs is the meaning that your brain makes of the physical signals in a particular context.

The same is true of physical signals from the outside world. When a tree falls in the forest and slams into the ground but no one is present, it does not make a sound. It does produce a change in air pressure. That change becomes meaningful to you as a sound only when it reaches sensory surfaces inside your ear (your cochlea), producing a different physical signal that travels to your brain, where it meets an ensemble of other signals that represent your knowledge of falling trees and what they sound like. You dont hear with your ears; you hear with your brain. If that same change in air pressure encounters your rib cage rather than your cochlea, you may feel a thudding in your chest rather than hear a sound.

Light waves similarly exist in the physical world, whether or not a human is present. But color is a feature constructed as your brain weaves those signals together with others of its own creation. So a statement like, The rose is red, is more precisely stated as, I experience the wavelengths of light reflecting from the rose as red. The redness isnt in the rose. The light waves detected by the sensory surface in your eye (your retina) modulate signals along the optic nerve that encounter other signals in your brain that reassemble past experiences and give those incoming signals psychological meaning and voila, you experience the rose as scarlet, ruby, or some other variety of red.

Your brain constantly runs a model of your body as it moves through the world. You come to know that world only through your cochlea, retina, and the other sensory surfaces of your body. Their signals, along with those streaming from within your body, continuously confirm or correct the ongoing signals in your brain. The implication is a bit startling: You cannot experience the world, or even your own body, objectively. Your experience is always from a particular perspective, and no perspective is universal.

Your brains internal model is formed from ensembles of sensory signals from your past, sourced from the body it is attached to, the world that surrounded it, and the other people who curated and inhabited that world. Their words and actions wired your brain with the concepts of your culture, empowering your brain to see red in a rose, hear trees fall, and understand your racing heart as joy in one situation and sorrow in another.

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This idea, called relational meaning, is familiar in quantum physics. As Carlo Rovelli beautifully explains in his latest book Helgoland, nature is not filled with permanent objects but with relations between quantities. When an electron is not interacting with anything, it has no physical properties. An electron only has a position or velocity relative to something else. The same is true for signals that arrive at the sensory surfaces of your body, whether the signals originate within your body or outside it. They become psychologically meaningful only in relation to the electrical and chemical activity in your brain a brain that continually creates a culturally-infused internal model of your body as it moves through the world.

Some experiences, like imagining the future and reliving events from the past, are constructed completely by the signals within your brain. Even some sensations are entirely your brains constructions. An example is the feeling of wetness. Your skin has no sensors for moisture, so how is it that you feel wet when you take a swim or get caught in the rain? Your brain constructs this sensation by combining physical signals from sensory surfaces for temperature and touch, and entwining them with other signals that reassemble your knowledge of what wetness feels like.

Everything you see, hear, smell, or taste; every touch you feel; and every action you take arises from a complex web of interwoven signals, and some of the most important signals are found only in your brain. Your brain does not detect features in the world and body; it constructs features to create meaning. Some constructed features are closer in detail to raw sensory data, such as lines and edges and color. Scientists call them physical features. Mental features are more abstract. When you appreciate a beautiful painting, the beauty is not in the painting; its created in your brain. When you eat a delicious dinner, the deliciousness is not in the meal but constructed in your head. The same goes for the last jerk who cut you off in traffic: You did not detect the drivers jerkiness; your brain constructed it as an ensemble of signals.

Relational meaning also holds a key to understanding how emotions work. If you watch a World Chess match and see a player scowl, it may seem that you are detecting anger in their face, but really you are experiencing that chess player as angry. That experience is constructed in your brain by giving meaning to sensory signals that have no objective emotional meaning of their own. Pursed lips, flushing skin, and of course, a rapid heart rate are not inherently emotional. These physical signals take on emotional meaning only in relation to other signals, some of which are your past experiences that have been wired into your brain by other people in your culture. In this complex web of context, a grandmasters scowl might mean anger (about 30% of the time, studies show), but the same scowl can also mean that they are concentrating hard or even that they have bad gas.

Magnus Carlsen. (Credit: Dean Mouhtaropoulos / Getty Images)

If you find some of these ideas unintuitive, Im right there with you. Relational meaning the idea that your experience of the world says as much about you as it does about the world is not extreme relativism. It is a realism that differs from the usual dichotomy drawn between materialism (reality exists in the world and you are just a spectator) and idealism (reality exists only in your head). It is an acknowledgment that the reality you inhabit is partly created by you. You are an architect of your own experience. Meaning is not infinitely malleable, but its much more malleable than people may think.

So, what does all this mean for everyday life? If physical signals from your body and the world only become meaningful to you in relation to signals created in your brain, this means you have a bit more responsibility than you might realize for how you experience and act in the world. For the most part, meaning-making is automatic and outside your awareness. When you were a child, other people curated the environment that wired experiences into your brain, seeding your brains internal model. Youre not responsible for this early wiring or the meanings it engenders, of course, but as an adult, you have the capacity to challenge those meanings and even change them. That is because your brain is always tweaking its internal model, creating the opportunity for new meanings with every new ensemble of signals it encounters.

To influence your internal model, you can effortfully seek out new meanings. You can expose yourself to people who think and act differently than you do, even if its uncomfortable (and it will be). The new experiences that you cultivate will manifest as signals in your brain and become raw material for your future experiences. In this way, you have some choice in how your brain gives meaning to a racing heart, whether its a chess champions or your own.

You dont have unlimited choice in this regard, but everyone has a bit more choice than they might realize. By embracing this responsibility, you grant yourself more agency in how you automatically make meaning and therefore over your reality and your life.

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Are you a spectator to reality? Or are you its creator? - Big Think

This address was given by President Christopher L. Eisgruber during the Class of 2020's Commencement ceremony in Princeton Stadium on Wednesday, May 18, 2022.

Remarks as delivered

As you know from prior experience, Princeton tradition allows the University president to say a few words to each graduating class at its Commencement exercises. Giving that address is a special privilege, and one that I cherish.

That privilege today feels even more extraordinary than usual, since this ceremony is unprecedented in the Universitys history. No class since World War II has had to wait two years for an in-person graduation. No previous class has shown your unique combination of persistence, achievement, and patience. The undergraduate and graduate alumni who make up the Great Class of 2020 will always have a special place in Princetons history.

This graduation speech is also different from others that I have given for another reason, which is that I have already had an opportunity to address the Class of 2020 at your virtual ceremony two years ago. I am honored, but also slightly daunted, by the opportunity to speak to you for a second time. What wisdom can I hope to offer to a class that has already heard one round of graduation speeches?

After considering this challenge for some time, I decided to share with you a quirky Princeton story that may perhaps, with some imagination, provide insight into what you have experienced over the last two years, and what you will experience in the years ahead.

The story begins in 1935, when Albert Einstein and two post-doctoral researchers named Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen published one of the most famous papers in the history of physics. All three were appointed at the Institute for Advanced Study, temporarily housed in what is now Jones Hall on the Princeton campus.

The paper was about quantum science, and it discussed a phenomenon that Einstein would later mock as spooky action at a distance. Quantum mechanics, the authors pointed out, rests on an other-worldly idea called superposition, which says that physical systems can be in a combination of two inconsistent states at once. A particle can be, for example, in a combination of an up state and a down stateit is both and neither, but if someone observes it, it immediately becomes either up or down, but not both.

In their paper, Einstein and his co-authors argued that these strange concepts led to the bizarre conclusion that observing a particle in one placefor example, right here on the Commencement stagecould instantly affect the state of another particle somewhere elsefor example, at the opposite end of this stadium, or in Hawaii, or, for that matter, out by some distant star.

Podolsky annoyed Einstein by leaking the paper to theNew York Times.Lots of professors, I can assure you, would love to leak their papers to theNew York Times. In general, theTimesdoes not care. But a paper by Einstein was a different matter.

TheTimesran the story on page 11 under the headline Einstein Attacks Quantum Theory. Podolsky told theTimesthat Einstein and his co-authors had proven that, even if quantum mechanics made plenty of correct predictions, its consequences were too strange to provide a complete description of the physical world.

Everything in that bold and controversial 1935 paper has proven correctexcept for its conclusion. What Einstein derided as spooky action at a distance, and what scientists now call quantum entanglement, is a feature of the physical worldone with increasingly important practical applications. When people talk about quantum computing, for example, they are talking about devices that use spooky action at a distance.

There is something marvelous in the fact that one of the most exciting and practically important fields of 21stcentury science depends on something that Albert Einstein, perhaps the greatest scientist of the 20thcentury, got emphatically wrong in one of his most famous papers.

That insight should give us all a dose of humility when we are tempted to declare, as Einstein did, that some novel idea is too bizarre to be true. And, conversely, we can perhaps all draw inspiration from the fact that new and genuinely strange ideas, beyond the ken of the greatest thinkers the world has known, sometimes contain profound truths.

Quantum mechanical properties apply at the microscopic level; we do not see them in our ordinary lives. But I sometimes thinkand here is where I need to call upon your imaginationsthat the strange metaphysics of the quantum world can provide an alternative perspective on the paradoxes and ambiguities that color our lives.

Take, for example, the idea of superposition, which says that a physical system can be a combination of two inconsistent states: up and down at the same time. Could one say that about what you have experienced over the past two years? In your senior spring, you were both at Princeton and not at Princeton. You graduated, and yet you did not. You were together, still Princetons Great Class of 2020, and yet you were apart.

And though it does not technically count as what Einstein would call spooky action at a distance, were you not throughout this period, are you not now, sublimely entangled with one another and with Princeton? You dispersed throughout the country and the world, yet you were also connected by shared challenges, memories, and your identity as a class. What happened here, and what happened to each of you, affected all of you.

Though I recognize that not every member of your class can be with us today, I hope that this day and this week nevertheless help to resolve the pandemics strange superposition of states so that we can now say emphatically: yes, the Great Class of 2020 is not only connected but together! Yes, the Great Class of 2020 has graduated in every sense of the word! And yes, the Great Class of 2020 is here, observed and observable, roaring like Tigers on this campus once again!

I hope, too, that you remain entangled with Princeton and with each other. All Princeton classes are, in my thoroughly biased opinion, great classes, but they are also distinct. They acquire their own identities and personalities. Some people speculate that the events of the last two years might weaken the bonds that tie you together. I predict the opposite: that your resilience and your creativity will make your connections to each other and your entanglement with Old Nassau ever stronger.

We shall see. For now, just let me say, on behalf of the faculty and administration, we are so glad that you are here! Welcome back! And to everyone in the Great Class of 2020, undergraduate and graduate alumni, I say congratulations, and I hope to see you back on this campus many times in the years to come. 2020: Congratulations!

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Class of 2020 On-Campus Commencement Address by President Eisgruber 'Entangled with Princeton' - Princeton University