Google Doodle Marks World Quantum Day 2025 — What That's All About
A model of a quantum computer's chip, on display at the opening of an IBM quantum data center in ... More 2024.
Wondering what's going on in Monday's Google Doodle? The artwork illustrates a principle that's fundamental to quantum computing in celebration of World Quantum Day. The event, in its third year, takes place annually on April 14 to promote awareness and understanding of the fast-advancing fields of quantum science and technology.
The Doodle shows each letter of the word 'Google' as a thaumatrope, an optical toy that displays different pictures on either side of a spinning disk.
'When spun rapidly, our brains superimpose both images so they appear to combine and form one image,' Google explains of the animated Doodle. 'The thaumatrope helps illustrate the concept of quantum superposition: when a particle exists in multiple states at once.'
The April Doodle for April 14 pays tribute to all things quantum.
Quantum mechanics involves the study of particle behavior at the atomic and subatomic level. The Doodle launches as quantum computers, which can execute extraordinarily speedy calculations, promise to do everything from transform financial and manufacturing industries to reduce damage from climate change and push the boundaries of art.
Quantum scientists from around the world initiated World Quantum Day to spur engagement with quantum concepts. Quantum scientists from around the world launched World Quantum Day to spark public engagement with quantum concepts. It's celebrated on April 14, a nod to 4.14, the rounded first digits of Planck's constant, a key value in quantum mechanics.
Last year, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a bipartisan resolution introduced to commemorate and support World Quantum Day's goals.
'The World Quantum Day initiative is an important reminder of the progress already made in this technology field and the need to ensure our children have the skills they need to continue that progress in the future,' Senator Todd Young, an Indiana Republican who introduced the resolution with two fellow senators, said at the time.
World Quantum Day 2025 is part of the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology designated by UNESCO. The IYQ site lists numerous April 14 events hosted by governments, academic institutions and laboratories around the globe: in Armenia, Brazil, India, Japan, Jordan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the U.S., among other places. Most aim to make quantum concepts more widely accessible.
That's the goal of Turner Prize-winning artist Laure Prouvost, whose immersive installation 'We Felt a Star Dying' — showing in Berlin through May 7 — explores how we might perceive reality from a quantum perspective. Prouvost engage audiences in quantum fundamentals not through complex explanations of concepts like qubits, but through video and sound developed with a quantum computer, as well scent and sculptural elements reflecting quantum phenomena.
In the quantum realm, 'everything is untangled and belongs to one another,' the multimedia artist told me when we spoke earlier this year. 'Quantum-ness can break any sense of barrier that we didn't know was possible to break. There's this sense of everything at once.'
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