[“Steampunk Quantum Engine” downloaded from https://thequantuminsider.com/2025/03/15/quantum-goes-steampunk-umd-physicist-helps-sculpt-quantum-mechanics-into-reality/ on March 17, 2026]
I eventually came across the example of quantum steampunk art/science work you see in the above after seeing this notice in a November 20, 2026 newsletter from Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI; received via email),
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Quantum steampunk: we explore the art and science
Explore the art of steampunk and how it is influenced by the technology of the 19th century.
Here’s more about the artist responsible for the quantum steampunk engine depicted and the podcast mentioned in the above, from Hamish Johnston’s October 30, 2025 podcast “Quantum steampunk: we explore the art and science” for Physics World, Note: Links have been removed,
Earlier this year I met the Massachusetts-based steampunk artist Bruce Rosenbaum at the Global Physics Summit of the American Physical Society. He was exhibiting a beautiful sculpture of a “quantum engine” that was created in collaboration with physicists including NIST’s [US National Institute of Standards and Technology] Nicole Yunger Halpern – who pioneered the scientific field of quantum steampunk.
I was so taken by the art and science of quantum steampunk that I promised Rosenbaum that I would chat with him and Yunger Halpern on the podcast – and here is that conversation. We begin by exploring the art of steampunk and how it is influenced by the technology of the 19th century. Then, we look at the physics of quantum steampunk, a field that weds modern concepts of quantum information with thermodynamics – which itself is a scientific triumph of the 19th century.
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Nicole Yunger Halpern, the physicist who pioneered quantum steampunk, wrote a May 1, 2020 article for Scientific American,
Quantum Steampunk: 19th-Century Science Meets Technology of Today
Just as fictional steampunk unites Victorian style with sci-fi tech, a new branch of physics is updating thermodynamics for modern quantum systems
London, at an hour that made Rosalind glad she’d nicked her brother’s black cloak instead of wearing her scarlet one. The factory alongside her had quit belching smoke for the night, but it would start again soon. A noise caused her to draw back against the brick wall. Glancing up, she gasped. An oblong hulk was drifting across the sky. The darkness obscured the details, but she didn’t need to see; a brass-colored lock would be painted across the side. Mellator had launched his dirigible.
Welcome to steampunk. This genre has expanded across literature, art and film over the past several decades. Its stories tend to take place near nascent factories and in grimy cities, in Industrial Age England and the Wild West—in real-life settings where technologies were burgeoning. Yet steampunk characters extend these inventions into futuristic technologies, including automata and time machines. The juxtaposition of old and new creates an atmosphere of romanticism and adventure. Little wonder that steampunk fans buy top hats and petticoats, adorn themselves in brass and glass, and flock to steampunk conventions.
These fans dream the adventure. But physicists today who work at the intersection of three fields—quantum physics, information theory and thermodynamics—live it. Just as steampunk blends science-fiction technology with Victorian style, a modern field of physics that I call “quantum steampunk” unites 21st-century technology with 19th-century scientific principles.
Our goal is to update the laws of thermodynamics—the study of work, heat and efficiency—to meet the demands of cutting-edge experiments, technologies and theory. Thermodynamics was born when steam engines drove the Industrial Revolution. But as technology shrinks, thermodynamics and information couple in smaller and smaller systems. The spotlight has swept from trains to nanoscale engines, living cells’ molecular motors and the smallest possible refrigerators. We must now investigate how to apply traditional thermodynamic concepts such as heat, work and equilibration to modern quantum systems.
Victorian physics meets millennial science
By 1800 Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen had invented, and James Watt and Matthew Boulton had refined, the steam engine. Thinkers then wondered how efficiently such engines could pump water out of mines. Their studies grew from practicalities to questions of fundamental physics, such as why time flows only in one direction. The field of thermodynamics is grounded in this work.
This branch of physics describes many-particle systems, such as steam, in terms of large-scale properties, such as temperature, pressure, volume and energy. Energy in transit falls into two classes, work and heat. Work is well-organized energy usable for a purpose, like turning a mill wheel. Heat is the energy of random motion—of particles jiggling.
Thermodynamicists quantify randomness with a number called entropy. Every particle in a canister of steam has a position and a momentum (the particle’s mass times its velocity). The set of all the particles’ positions and momenta we call the steam’s microstate. We cannot know the microstate, because the canister contains about 1024 (1 followed by 24 zeroes) particles. Imagine trying to locate them all! Instead we track the probability that the steam occupies this or that microstate. Entropy quantifies our uncertainty. According to the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy of a closed, isolated system cannot shrink. This fact underlies the reality that time flows in a single direction.
But the steam engines central to traditional thermodynamics resemble today’s technologies about as much as top hats resemble virtual-reality headsets. Many modern inventions and experiments involve small, complex quantum systems. Quantum theory is the physics of atoms, electrons and other constituents of matter. They can behave in ways impossible for larger, classical systems, such as steam canisters, factories and people. For instance, quantum particles can share entanglement, a type of ultrastrong correlation. If you entangle two atoms and measure one, the other atom changes instantaneously, even if it is across a continent. Physicists can use entanglement to process information in ways impossible with classical systems. The study of how we can solve computational problems, communicate, secure information and enhance measurements with quantum systems is called quantum information theory. This theory is a useful mathematical tool kit for implementing our update to thermodynamics. How do the two fields connect? To reason about information, we have to confront ignorance. Information theorists quantify ignorance with entropy, just as thermodynamicists do.
Quantum computers, for instance, are systems where both quantum information theory and thermodynamics are key. Google, IBM and other institutions are hard at work building such machines, which aim to break certain encryption schemes and to model certain materials far more quickly than any classical computer. Most quantum-computing systems need to be cooled to a temperature near absolute zero. Cooling amounts to dissipating heat, a thermodynamic quantity. Yet quantum computers look nothing like the engines for which thermodynamics was developed.
Efforts to apply thermodynamic concepts to quantum settings date to the mid-20th century, when Joseph Geusic, E. O. Schulz-DuBois and H. E. Derrick Scovil proposed the first quantum engine.It was made from a maser, which operates like a laser but releases microwave light. Later, Ronnie Kosloff of Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his colleagues helped to turn quantum engines into their own subfield. Another pioneer is Marlan Scully, sometimes called the “quantum cowboy,” who works on quantum optics at Princeton University and Texas A&M University and also raises cattle. Meanwhile theorists Gian Paolo Beretta, the late Elias Gyftopoulos and the late George Hatsopoulos studied the arrow of time from a quantum perspective. And a seminal publication was Seth Lloyd’s 1988 Ph.D. thesis at the Rockefeller University, “Black Holes, Demons, and the Loss of Coherence: How Complex Systems Get Information, and What They Do with It,” which established many important ideas for the field of quantum thermodynamics.
Quantum Steampunk Tools
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Yunger Halpern’s May 1, 2020 article offers some intriguing insights. 2020 is also the year Yunger-Halpern was approached by a ‘steampunk’ artist according to a March 12, 2025 article by Resonance for the Quantum Insider, Note: Links have been removed,
Insider Brief
- Physicist Nicole Yunger Halpern and artist Bruce Rosenbaum collaborated to create a steampunk-inspired sculpture that visually represents quantum thermodynamics.
- The eight-inch metallic sculpture, designed with input from scientists and artists, illustrates a quantum engine that converts random microscopic motion into useful energy.
- Debuting at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit in 2025, the piece is planned as a precursor to a larger, interactive version blending antique aesthetics with modern technology.
In 2020, physicist Nicole Yunger Halpern received a rather unusual email out of the blue. Bruce Rosenbaum, a Massachusetts-based artist dubbed “the steampunk guru” by The Wall Street Journal, watched one of her lectures about quantum thermodynamics and was interested in collaborating with her. Rosenbaum saw something extraordinary in Yunger Halpern’s work—in terms of cutting-edge science and artistic possibility.
For Yunger Halpern, who coined the term “quantum steampunk” while earning her Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology, it almost felt like scientific serendipity.
“It’s been a privilege to interact with someone who is based in such a different world. I’m in physics, Bruce is in art. And yet, we both have a very strong shared interest in connecting the steam-powered world of the Industrial Revolution to today,” said Yunger Halpern, who is a theoretical physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a fellow of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science, and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Physics and the Institute for Physical Science and Technology at the University of Maryland.
The unusual partnership kicked off a multi-year quest to craft a piece of art that could represent two very different worlds. For weeks, Yunger Halpern and Rosenbaum worked over weekend Zooms and emails to brainstorm before enlisting others to help bring their ideas to life.
In late 2024, they finally created their masterpiece: an eight-inch diameter sculpture that marries steampunk (a popular genre that combines Victorian-era aesthetics like brass, gears and steam with modern technology) with quantum physics (a rapidly evolving field that deals with how things work at the tiniest possible scales). At these tiny levels, objects don’t behave the same way as they do in our everyday world—for example, things can exist in multiple states at once, like a coin that, in some ways, behaves as though it were both heads-up and tails-up simultaneously.
Inspired by these strange behaviors present in quantum physics, Yunger Halpern and Rosenbaum focused their project on the concept of quantum engines, devices that convert energy from one form to another. According to Yunger Halpern, even a single atom can function as an engine, transforming random microscopic motion into useful energy.
“Our sculpture depicts an engine that can operate at the atomic scale to convert heat energy— which is random, the energy of particles always jiggling around—into useful work. Work is coordinated energy, the kind that charges our computers and powers our factories,” Yunger Halpern explained. “Like the steam-powered tech of the Victorian era, this engine relies on thermodynamic properties to make its conversion. We wanted to bring those two themes from very different periods of history together.”
Linking quantum and art for all
Creating this visual representation of the invisible quantum world required an unusual team with varied skills. Rosenbaum brought in illustrator Jim Su for the initial designs and design engineering company Empire Group fabricated the sculpture. Rosenbaum and Yunger Halpern coordinated a careful balance between artistic vision and scientific accuracy at every stage of the project. Gradually, the team grew to include other UMD faculty and staff members, including Distinguished University Professors Christopher Jarzynski and William Phillips, Senior Faculty Specialist Daniel Serrano and Scientific Development Officer Alfredo Nava-Tudela. The UMD Quantum Startup Foundry and Caltech’s [California Institute of Technology[ Institute for Quantum Information and Matter also pitched in.
The result was a metallic, partially 3D-printed sculpture measuring eight inches in diameter, an eclectic mashup of both quantum science principles and artistic sensibilities.
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You can find out more at the Quantum Steampunk Engine (or Captain Okoli’s Magnificent Steampunk Quantum Engine)website and there;s Yunger Halpern’s 2022 book from John Hopkins’ University Press, Quantum Steampunk; The Physics of Yesterday’s Tomorrow.
