UTC’s monthly Science on Tap series debuted Tuesday, Feb. 11, at the Tap House in St. Elmo.
Turns out, when you invite people to grab something to eat, drink and to hear directly from a world-class scientist, people in Chattanooga show up.
Almost 100 people, in fact, showed up on Tuesday, Feb. 11, for the debut presentation of Science on Tap. Organized by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Science on Tap is planned to recur on the second Tuesday of every month as an opportunity to share UTC expertise with the community in a relaxed, social setting.
Its presenter was the inaugural director of the UTC Quantum Center, Dr. Rick Mukherjee.
In his talk, “The Quantum All Around Us,” Mukherjee highlighted major developments of the first and second “quantum revolutions.” These are timely topics in 2025, which the United Nations has declared to be the international year for quantum science and technology.
His brief presentation was a roll call of some of the most significant theoretical physicists in history, including Nobel Prize winners Max Planck, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, along with John Stewart Bell.
About 125 years ago, Planck “came up with a completely pathbreaking interpretation of how light should be treated as photons,” or discrete packets of energy, rather than waves, Mukherjee said. Then came Einstein, “who saw how energy can be transferred from photons to electrons—the photoelectric effect, which is what his (1921) Nobel was awarded for, rather than his more famous theory of relativity.”
In 1922, Bohr won the Nobel in physics for his theories on atomic structure and quantum theory.
“That’s where he gave a quantum theory for matter, basically how to model atoms, and now you take matter and light and make them interact because that’s what’s happening every day in whatever object you see, whatever you do, it’s light interacting with matter,” Mukherjee said.
Bell was cited for the mathematical criteria he created to distinguish quantum correlations—such as involving entangled photons—from classical correlations. A classical correlation example, Mukherjee explained, is such as when a friend is wearing the left-hand glove of the only gloves you own, and you’re with your friend, looking for the other glove. You know the missing glove is for the right hand.
The work of these and others marked the “first quantum revolution.” It yielded applications and technologies we take for granted now, Mukherjee said, including lasers—along with related bar-code readers, laser surgery and laser lights; computer semiconductors; magnetic resonance imaging and GPS systems.
In the “second quantum revolution” on which the world appears to be embarking now, Mukherjee said, potential future applications include quantum computing, quantum sensing and quantum cryptography.
“People are trying to build better quantum sensing. There are exotic materials, new drug discoveries that can come from quantum research. That’s quantum materials,” Mukherjee said. “Then there is secure quantum internet and distributed quantum computing where there’s an active area of research going on. Of course, the holy grail is to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer.”
That’s a computer that could overcome the inherent fragility of quantum information so that it could continue functioning despite the presence of errors or imperfections.
Over the course of a robust Q&A session that followed Mukherjee’s talk, he described what’s happening at the UTC Quantum Center, which he joined in December. Experiments with quantum networks, quantum sensing and developing quantum algorithms are underway or planned.
Mukherjee praised the Center’s high-profile collaborators, EPB and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, for what their partnership is enabling UTC to do within the research community and for Chattanooga, the state and beyond.
Mukherjee came to Chattanooga from serving as a scientist at the Center for Optical Quantum Technologies at the University of Hamburg in Germany. He earned a doctorate from the Max Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany. He has had research stints at Harvard University and Rice University, as well as a research associate post at Imperial College London—a global top 10 university in science, engineering, business and medicine.
He is organizing an unprecedented Quantum Technology Workshop that will bring scholars from around the world to Chattanooga in June when UTC hosts this event.
Next event
Robert Lake Wilson Professor of Geology Amy Brock-Hon is the featured presenter at the next Science on Tap, which will take place from 5-7 p.m. on Tuesday, March 11, at the Tap House in St. Elmo. Brock-Hon will discuss how Raccoon Mountain Caverns—newly gifted to UTC—will be used as an asset for research and teaching.
Science on Tap inaugural event photo gallery
Dr. Rick Mukherjee is the inaugural director of the UTC Quantum Center.
