Physics for DIY-ers

Pratima H

INDIA: You can call him a lifelong restless tinkerer but the obsession for constantly taking things apart and putting them back together may sometimes lead to the most fulfilling serendipity. As a Quantum Physicist at Tel Aviv University and founder of Quantum Experience, Dr. Boaz Almog often strays into many such alleys of stimulating questions and experimental thinking. For instance, he has recently launched a Kickstarter campaign for BRIXO, what he calls an innovative educational product that lets kids learn about electricity through building blocks. He likes devoting his time and energy to bring about a new educational experience that touches both traditional everyday physics and electricity with BRIXO and modern quantum physics with Quantum Levitation and its educational programs and experiments. Levitating between fantasy and possibility, this Quantum Physicist is eager to find out what the community will invent and create and how IT industry will translate the leaps that Physics is taking.

Tell us something about Quantum Levitation and BRIXO. What’s the latest exciting highlight that keeps you hooked to them?

Quantum Levitation is exciting at two levels - first, it’s an amazing educational tool. We keep developing educational programs and are dedicated to bringing this amazing and inspiring phenomenon to every high-school worldwide. It’s the only Quantum Physics experiment readily available to students! The second level is finding new and surprising applications. We are working on several applications (which I cannot disclose…) that will bring QL into our lives for the first time.

Next, BRIXO, electric building blocks, is a dream come true - An evolutionary step for building blocks. I’m thrilled to see the BRIXO inspired more than 10,000 backers worldwide and I’m eager to find out what our community will invent and create. That is the most exciting part, the involvement of our community and its contribution to BRIXO.

What are the most interesting implications or intersections of Quantum Levitation for the world of software, storage, processors, data centres and hardware? Are applications of superconductors’ type 2 and quantum locking moving as expected? Can they move beyond hover boards?

Wow. So many questions! Quantum Levitation is still at its infancy in terms of applications. Many directions to implement superconductor magnetic levitation were investigated over the years - energy storage (frictionless motion), transportation, motors, and generators. So far not much panned out. We’ve decided to start with education and continue from there to more exotic applications such as transportation. I expect we’ll have more on that in two to three years.

Is Casimir effect as attention-worthy as Meissner effect? What makes them different from a pragmatic view?

The Casimir effect is more exotic and less practical effect of Quantum Physics.

What would be the next areas of research to watch out for as we explore this concept further? Are temperature issues, material thin-ness dominant determinants of real-world applications here?

The most exciting breakthrough waiting to happen is finding a room-temperature superconductor. Theoretically feasible, such a room-temperature superconductor will change the world around us completely and bring energy efficiency (transport and storage), transportation and more to our lives.

Until this happens, we are bound to see in the near future new applications of HTSC, high temperature (liquid nitrogen) superconductors in areas such as medicine (MRI machine), heavy machinery (motor, generator) and energy storage.

Any specific potential use cases for healthcare, space and environmental-friendly data centres here (may be in the kitchen too? Specifically if a superconductor only half a micron thin can levitate more than 17,000 times its own weight, as your intriguing talk explains at one point.

Not yet. But we’re working on it.

Anything else that people are still not aware about? Something worth noting for IT industry?

(Smiles and says ‘A lot’). I think that BRIXO will be an amazing tool for every IT guy who's also a maker and DIY-ey. We made BRIXO a super-creative, easy and fun platform for creating 3D structure with embedded electric circuits. I’m eager to find out how modern computers and technology will be combined with BRIXO (and its app-controlled, IFTTT integration).