One Hundred Years of Uncertainty

Welcome to our series of short weekly or bi-weekly videocasts at a popular level, aimed at a lay audience, to celebrate the centenary of Quantum Mechanics #IYQ2025, and popularise the revolutionary ideas and most significant developments in the field over the last 100 years, right up to the latest quantum technologies, including:

1. Origins of Quantization
2. Commutators and Uncertainty – Matrix Mechanics
3. The Schrödinger equation – Wave Mechanics
4. Superposition and Complementarity – Postulates of Quantum Mechanics
5. The Copenhagen Interpretation – Classical and Quantum Probability
6. The 1927 Solvay Conference, the Bohr-Einstein debates and Schrödinger's cat
7. Hidden variables versus “Shut Up and Calculate” – John von Neuman and David Bohm
8. Exclusion, Spin, Statistics and all that
9. The Dirac equation
10. Successes of Molecular Quantum Mechanics
11. Lasers and Quantum Optics
12. Transistors, Semiconductors and Superconductors
13. Magnetic Resonance Imaging
14. Quantum Electrodynamics, Symmetry and development of the Standard Model
15. Electron Correlation and the rise of Density Functional Theory
16. John Bell's theorem – All Interpretations are Not Created Equal
17. Superluminal “spooky action-at-a-distance”
18. Entanglement, Qubits and Quantum Gates
19. Quantum Key Cryptography and Quantum Teleportation
20. Quantum Computing

Produced by N. Sukumar

Schedule: 25 April - 22 November 2025

• Introductory Episode
• Episode 1: An Act of Desperation – Max Planck and Birth of the Quantum
• Episode 2: Annum Mirabilis - the photoelectric effect
• Episode 3: The Bohr atom - the right answers for the wrong reason! 
• Episode 4: A wave on Mon, Wed, Fri, a particle on Tue, Thu, Sat. - the Compton Effect and Wave-particle Duality