Quantum Frontiers » Nicole Yunger Halpern

In 2020, many of us logged experiences that we’d never anticipated. I wrote a nonfiction book and got married outside the Harvard Faculty Club (because nobody was around to shoo us away). Equal...

https://quantumfrontiers.com/2024/10/27/sculpting-quantum-steampunk/

Why not run a quantum-steampunk creative-writing course? Quantum steampunk, as Quantum Frontiers regulars know, is the aesthetic and spirit of a growing scientific field. Steampunk is a subgenre ...

https://quantumfrontiers.com/2024/09/18/announcing-the-quantum-steampunk-creative-writing-course/

I met boatloads of physicists as a master’s student at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. Researchers pass through Perimeter like diplomats through my current ...

https://quantumfrontiers.com/2024/08/11/always-appropriate/

Whenever someone protests, “I’m not a rocket scientist,” I think of my friend Jamie Rankin. Jamie is a researcher at Princeton University, and she showed me her lab this June. When I first ...

https://quantumfrontiers.com/2024/07/07/my-favorite-rocket-scientist/

If I ever mention a crazy high-school English teacher to you, I might be referring to Mr. Lukacs. One morning, before the first bell rang, I found him wandering among the lockers, wearing a white...

https://quantumfrontiers.com/2024/06/09/quantum-frontiers-salutes-an-english-teacher/

One day, early this spring, I found myself in a hotel elevator with three other people. The cohort consisted of two theoretical physicists, one computer scientist, and what appeared to be a norma...

https://quantumfrontiers.com/2024/05/12/let-gravity-do-its-work/

Many people ask why I became a theoretical physicist. The answer runs through philosophy—which I thought, for years, I’d left behind in college. My formal relationship with philosophy origina...

https://quantumfrontiers.com/2024/04/14/how-i-didnt-become-a-philosopher-but-wound-up-presenting-a-named-philosophy-lecture-anyway/

Even if you don’t recognize the name, you probably recognize the saguaro cactus. It’s the archetype of the cactus, a column from which protrude arms bent at right angles like elbows. As my hu...

https://quantumfrontiers.com/2024/03/17/the-quantum-gold-rush/

My husband taught me how to pronounce the name of the city where I’d be presenting a talk late last July: Aveiro, Portugal. Having studied Spanish, I pronounced the name as Ah-VEH-roh, with a v...

https://quantumfrontiers.com/2024/02/18/the-rain-in-portugal/

The most ingenious invention to surprise me at CERN was a box of chocolates. CERN is a multinational particle-physics collaboration. Based in Geneva, CERN is famous for having “the world’s la...

https://quantumfrontiers.com/2024/01/21/colliding-the-familiar-and-the-anti-familiar-at-cern/