BENGALURU: Science Gallery Bengaluru’s (SGB) new annual exhibition season QUANTUM, which seeks to tackle quantum mechanics – a frontier of science often fraught with esoterism – is now open for public viewing at the gallery. Chief Minister DK Shivakumar and Ambassador of the United States of America to the Republic of India Sergio Gor were present to preview the exhibits on Friday (August 7), the night before the exhibition’s official inauguration.
Across various installations, the current season tries to make the viewer experience the complexity of quantum mechanics as both a scientific and a philosophical or existential conundrum, rather than trying to “teach” it to them.
Bringing attention to perhaps the primordial and most well-known conceptualisation of quantum mechanics – Erwin Schrödinger’s experiment with his cat in a box – SGB’s new exhibition season holds quantum mechanics’ inherent unknowability or indeterminacy as a broader question than simply physical. This indeterminacy is made tangible and touchable across the exhibits, which often offer varying exteriors or “conclusions” depending on how one sees them. The exhibition also interrogates how quantum technologies can alter our relationships with each other, and the planet at large.
Among the installations lies one that highlights India’s quantum journey, by hailing theoretical physicist Satyendra Nath (SN) Bose as the staunchest and primary pillar of the nation’s quantum aspirations. Copies of correspondences between Bose and Albert Einstein are set on display, highlighting how despite the fact of both scientists being intellectual peers, Bose’s contributions and personage – much like those of women scientists’ – have never had a space in the Western hegemony of science.
The exhibition is contextualised within the present, global concern with quantum mechanics, across various operational fields such as quantum computing, sensing, cryptography, navigation, and communication. Although SGB’s decision for the theme was independently arrived at, it is superimposed with the state government’s pursuit to establish a Quantum City (Q-City); Arindam Ghosh, chairperson of the Q-City’s task force and convenor of the Quantum Technology Initiative at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), has been one of the academic advisors for the curatorial process.
SGB’s QUANTUM, available to the general public to be accessed free of cost, opens today, August 8 (Saturday).