Story Motivation

Author’s opinion

Legio VIII Quantae arose as a consequence of the Quantum Shorts Film Festival 2018.  It is not always easy  to come up with a good story and, a quantum inspired one is not less.  I felt that every idea that came up to my mind would not be understandable for most of the people around me, despite of those at the Physics faculty and that, would have been really similar as if I had showed them a paper on quantum computing in which I have been working on. They would have listened to me, at least, apparently but, as it would have seemed very difficult to understand, too abstract, it would have not made too much impact on them.

Based on that, I wanted to do an story with a message, taking quantum into people every-day’s life. In a five minute video it is difficult to clearly explain concepts, but it is a starting point. For example, with the cast, working with people that never heard about quantum before, you could start noticing how they became intrigued and asked you questions about the scenes they were involved in during the film, even the oldest ones, they wanted me to explain them about the meaning of those quantum gates in their new cards! The thing is that if you have PATIENCE to explain, the best you can, of course, a quantum effect or a quantum concept in a simple way, people can get the idea or at least partially; in any case, what I am sure about is that, the word quantum will not sound unfamiliar to them anymore. In the video we just incorporated a bit of quantumness into some of their ordinary activities. The same happened for people on the streets that saw us filming. They approached to ask about the Moore’s Law or the Bell’s telephone numbers displayed on the posters. And this is like a domino effect, they will show the video to their sons, to their parents, their friends and so on…and those will make also questions about quantum physics.  However, this will never happen if the majority of scientists keep the nature’s quantumness  in complicated ” high-impact” publications, just understandable by their quantum community .

On the other hand, the ” technological apocalypses” by the end of Moore’s Law tries to catch, above all, the attention of people in my country. Spanish people is not concerned that research lead to progress and that it is not to be taken as something secondary. Those that are not ready to adapt to the new technology developments and, in this particular case, to the emerging  quantum technologies, will remain behind. Therefore, I think that a place like Legio VIII Quantae is possible if everyone put a bit of effort onto it, and to be honest, it would be a really cool place!