66 Scientific American, May 2020
L
ondon, at an hour that made rosalind glad she’d nicked her brother’s
black cloak instead of wearing her scarlet one. The factory alongside
her had quit belching smoke for the night, but it would start again soon.
A noise caused her to draw back against the brick wall. Glancing up,
she gasped. An oblong hulk was drifting across the sky. The darkness
obscured the details, but she didn’t need to see; a brass-colored lock
would be painted across the side. Mellator had launched his dirigible.
Welcome to steampunk. This genre has expanded across lit-
erature, art and film over the past several decades. Its stories tend
to take place near nascent factories and in grimy cities, in Indus-
trial Age England and the Wild West—in real-life settings where
technologies were burgeoning. Yet steampunk characters extend
these inventions into futuristic technologies, including autom-
ata and time machines. The juxtaposition of old and new creates
an atmosphere of romanticism and adventure. Little wonder that
steampunk fans buy top hats and petticoats, adorn themselves
in brass and glass, and flock to steampunk conventions.
These fans dream the adventure. But physicists today who work
at the intersection of three fields—quantum physics, information
theory and thermodynamics—live it. Just as steampunk blends
science-fiction technology with Victorian style, a modern field of
physics that I call “quantum steampunk” unites 21st-century tech-
nology with 19th-century scientific principles.
Our goal is to update the laws of thermodynamics—the study
of work, heat and efficiency—to meet the demands of cutting-
edge experiments, technologies and theory. Thermodynamics
was born when steam engines drove the Industrial Revolution.
But as technology shrinks, thermodynamics and information cou-
ple in smaller and smaller systems. The spotlight has swept from
trains to nanoscale engines, living cells’ molecular motors and
the smallest possible refrigerators. We must now investigate how
to apply traditional thermodynamic concepts such as heat, work
and equilibration to modern quantum systems.
VICTORIAN PHYSICS MEETS MILLENNIAL SCIENCE
by 1800 thomas savery and Thomas Newcomen had invented, and
James Watt and Matthew Boulton had refined, the steam engine.
Thinkers then wondered how efficiently such engines could pump
water out of mines. Their studies grew from practicalities to ques-
tions of fundamental physics, such as why time flows only in one
direction. The field of thermodynamics is grounded in this work.
Nicole Yunger Halpern is a theoretical physicist and an ITAMP
Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. She writes monthly
stories for Quantum Frontiers, the blog of the California Institute
of Technology’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter.
Follow her on Twitter at @nicoleyh11
IN BRIEF
The field of thermodynamics —which deals
with the physics of heat and efficiency—
arose during the Industrial Revolution. Scien -
tists today are working to update these laws
to address modern technology, particularly
quantum computers, quantum communication and
quantum information.
This melding of 19th-century science and futuristic
technology resembles the combination of Vic -
torian style and sci-fi invention in the genre of
fiction called steam punk, earning the field the
moniker “quantum steampunk.”
One recent quantum steampunk success is an
engine that scientists have proposed using quantum
and thermodynamic principles.
