Quantum (pronounced kwon-tuhm)
(1) A quantity or amount.
(2) A particular quantity or amount.
(3) A share or portion.
(4) A large quantity; something ordered, delivered or
stored in bulk.
(5) In physics, the smallest quantity of some physical
property, such as energy, that a system can possess according to the quantum
theory; involving quanta, quantum mechanics or other aspects of quantum physics.
(6) A particle with such a unit of energy; the fundamental
unit of a quantized physical magnitude, as angular momentum.
(7) Of change: (1) classically, sudden or discrete,
without intermediate stages & (2) in modern adjectival use, something sudden
and significant.
(8) In mathematics, a definite portion of a manifoldness,
limited by a mark or by a boundary.
(9) In law, a brief document provided by the judge,
elaborating on a sentencing decision (now most often used in the sub-continent);
the total amount of something; the quantity.
(10) In computer operating systems, the amount of time
allocated for a thread to perform its work in a multithreaded environment.
(11) In computer design, short for "quantum computing" or "quantum computer".
(12) In medicine, the minimum dose of a pathogen required
to cause an infection.
1610-1620: From the Late Latin quantum, noun use of the neuter form of the Classical Latin quantus (how much). Quantum was imported from Latin to physics by German theoretical physicist Max Planck (1858–1947) to describe the concept of the "minimum amount of a quantity which can exist". Quantum theory is from 1912 and quantum mechanics from 1922, the latter much associated with German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) who in 1927 deduced his "uncertainty principle", declaring an electron may have a determinate position, or a determinate velocity, but not both. In physics, the term "quantum jump" (the abrupt transition from one stationary state to another) came into use in 1954 while "quantum leap" (sudden large advance) dates from 1963 and in figurative use (by non-physicists) describes some drastic change or radical advance in some aspect of something (and is thus often synonymous with that other favorite of post-modernists, the "paradigm shift". There are pedants (and one suspects few of them actually comprehend quantum theory) who insist “quantum leap” in the sense of “sudden & big is wrong but it’s just part of the evolution of English in its usual democratic way. Quantum is a noun and adjective; the noun plural is quantums or quanta.
In an announcement little noted outside the nerd community, in late 2021 IBM introduced the CLOPS (Circuit Layer Operations per Second) performance standard for quantum computing. As a measuring metric, CLOPS corresponds to the number of quantum circuits a QPU (quantum processing unit) can execute per unit of time, the innovation compared with previous standards such as FLOPS (Floating Point Operations per Second) and its variations (ranging from kiloFLOPS (KFlops:103) to yottaFLOPS (YFlops: 1024)), in that it expresses not only the actual speed at which the workload is processed and successfully completed but also adjusts to account for the latency of the interaction between the quantum and classical computing realms. It must be noted that to date, the pure quantum computer has existed only in theory and that functions now executed in the quantum space involve an interaction, being mediated via a classical binary computer which translates workloads into a QPU-compatible format, retrieves the workload's results and presents them in an understandable form. CLOPS thus accounts for not only the interval of time that the workload is actually being processed at the qubit (quantum bit) level, but also the time it takes for the system to translate and transfer information across both components. If written down, a yottaFLOP (1024) is a number with 24 trailing zeros (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) and that's one septillion calculations per second. It now sounds a big number and by most standards it certainly is; probably even trillionaire Elon Musk (b 1971) would be impressed (a trillion (1012) has twelve zeros (1,000,000,000,000). However, advances in computing (quantum as well as bio-computers that are a blend of manufactured hardware good at many things and a biological brain better at others) will continue and beyond yotta awaits ronna (1027) and quetta (1030). Numbers are infinite so if the FLOPs count ends up as something now inconceivably large, all that will be required is another tag in the lineage that began modestly enough with kilo (103) & mega (106).
Dating back decades, IBM has published many standards which the industry has adopted ranging from specifications for memory addressing to video displays (the once-famous CGA (Color Graphics Adaptor), EGA (Enhanced Graphics Adaptor), VGA (Video Graphics Array), XGA (eXtended Graphics Array)) and had for some time discussed the need for a harmonized standard for quantum computing. Until CLOPS was announced, the measures had usually been expressed in terms of two of quantum’s three planes: (1) scale which pertains to the number of qubits present in any given system and (2) quality which refers to the proportion of qubits that can perform usable work expressed via quantum volume. What CLOPS does is provide a formula to express a measure of (3) speed. IBM has published CLOPS results for some of its quantum computing systems using machines constructed with between five and 64 qubits and it was interesting to note all had a similar quantum volume score, their actual speed (expressed in CLOPS) varied between 753 and 1419 layers per second; as IBM predicted, it was latency which accounted for the difference. Noting that, IBM also published results from their Qiskit (Quantum Information Software Kit for Quantum Computation) project which focuses on reducing the latency in the quantum-classic computing translation layer seriously via closer physical proximity between the objects, some experiments reducing run-time cycles from 45 days to nine hours. The company expects CLOPS to be the defined measure of quantum computing in its present form as FLOPs and its variations were to super-computing.
Lindsay Lohan: Manifestation, Fame, and the Alchemy of Identity (2025) by The Universe Unveiled. A slim volume of 70 pages (ISBN-13 979-8294189518) the book is one of the less anticipated applications of the language of quantum mechanics.
The term “quantum theatre” does not come from theoretical physics but is, a little opportunistically, a figurative form. It’s used to refer to situations, environments or performances where there’s some felling of “instability” in reality, a perception multiple contradictory outcomes appear to be happening at the same time, one implication being the observer being able to “change reality” merely by the act of watching. What the term adapts from quantum mechanics are the concepts superposition, entanglement and the observer effect, applying them to aspects of human behaviour: politics, art or anything performative. So, while opportunistic, the re-purposing is compelling because “superposition” is best understood as the “illusion of choice” and that’s used to describe a situation in which all possibilities in theory exist but, at the point when a decision is made, the illusion collapses into a single reality and that can be satisfying, disappointing, chaotic, disastrous or any of the possibilities. In a number of interviews, Ms Lohan has reflected on the consequences of those “moments of decision”.
The “observer effect” is especially relevant. The essence of reality television, social media and such, it describes the phenomenon of the behaviour of individuals changing purely because they know they are being watched. The actions of living things are different from those of inanimate objects; a sofa does not respond to being looked at but people sitting on it might be so influenced, making a “performance” fundamentally artificial compared with what would have happened had they not become aware of being viewed. The now well-documented “perception-driven reality” (an environment where facts matter less than how the audience perceives them) is what underpins the success of social media, the mechanisms explained decades earlier in cognitive theory, the very “theatre” shifting shape based on a viewer's bias. Most intriguing of course is connected chaos (entanglement). In the figurative use, that’s a narrative or situation in which two unrelated events or people are deeply linked, an act in one place instantly changing the dynamics in another. As an aspect of the understanding of the “performative”, the possibilities of that have been explored in art, stage plays or interactive exhibits that allow the audience's choices or presence physically to change the story or ending and the advances in AI (artificial intelligence) hint this may the future of on-screen entertainment, the audience becoming part of the cast and interacting with the characters. A concept long possible in the pages of fictional texts, it may soon be coming to a screen near you.
German photographer Thomas Hoepker (1936–2024) was for decades attached to the Magnum Agency and on 11 September, 2001, while in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, he took what became a controversial photograph of the terrorist attacks on the twin towers of the WTC (World Trade Center). Herr Hoepker, for obvious reasons, was attempting to get close to southern Manhattan but he parked his car when he saw what struck him as a “strange scene” in the aftermath of the attack: A group of young people lounging on a bench as a cloud of black smoke drifted into the blue sky behind them. Without the knowledge or consent of the subjects, He took the image from a distance, later explaining: “If you started a conversation or asked permission, you would change any authentic situation in an instant.” Such was an old documentarian’s understanding of the “observer effect” and he also appreciated the effect the juxtaposition might have if published at the time; not until a retrospective of his work was exhibited in 2006 was the photograph publicly displayed. As he had expected, much comment suggested there was “callousness” being shown but two of the subjects subsequently responding in a letter to a magazine: “We were in a profound state of shock and disbelief. Had Hoepker walked 50 feet over to introduce himself, he would have discovered a bunch of New Yorkers in the middle of an animated discussion about what had just happened.” That would have been the “observer effect”.
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