Several interconnected ideas informed the conception and design of Captain Okoli’s Magnificent Steampunk Quantum Engine. First, steampunk is a subgenre of science fiction. You can find this subgenre throughout literature, film, art, and handicraft. In steampunk works, 19th-century settings feature futuristic technologies. Think of the classics The Time Machine and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the bestselling book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and the film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen that stars Sean Connery. Dirigibles, automata, and steam-powered computers infiltrate Victorian London; the American Wild, Wild West; a newly liberated Haiti; and more. The past mingles with the future, creating an aura of adventure and innovation.

So does the past mingle with the future in quantum thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is the study of energy—of heat, work, and temperature. The discipline emerged jointly with the Industrial Revolution. Steam engines were motivating the construction of factories, which were transforming cities and civilization. Engineers and (what we’d today call) scientists identified fundamental limitations on those engines’ capabilities. The limitations pointed toward abstract laws that govern the processing of energy. The laws accompanied insights about foundational questions, such as why we can move only forward in time, whereas we can move forward or backward in space.

A few decades after thermodynamics crystallized, so did quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is the study of atoms, electrons, single particles of light, and other tiny systems. Such systems can behave in ways impossible for larger, more-massive objects, such as steam engines, top hats, octopodes, planets, and human beings. These larger objects are called classical. They obey theories of physics developed before quantum mechanics: classical mechanics (codified by Isaac Newton during the 1600s), electromagnetism (developed during the late 1800s), and general relativity (formulated by Albert Einstein during the early 1900s).

Quantum systems don’t obey these earlier theories. Rather, quantum systems exhibit behaviors unfamiliar from our everyday experience. For example, a quantum particle can be in a superposition, behaving as though it were in multiple locations simultaneously. Quantum particles can also share entanglement—information that isn’t in one particle, in another particle, or in the sum of particles probed individually. Rather, entanglement is information spread between the particles. Also, quantum uncertainty prevents a quantum particle from having a well-defined position and momentum simultaneously. And those aren’t even all the counterintuitive behaviors exhibited by quantum systems!

Scientists and engineers are harnessing these behaviors to enhance technologies. Quantum information science is the study of how quantum systems can process information in ways impossible for their classical counterparts. Information-processing tasks include computation, communication, encryption, and memory storage. For example, people are building quantum computers that will leverage entanglement to solve certain problems far more quickly even than a classical supercomputer could. Quantum computers are expected to boost research and development in chemistry, materials development, and drug design, as well as to transform cybersecurity and more.

What does quantum information science have to do with thermodynamics? Information-processing tasks parallel thermodynamic tasks, which include charging batteries, cooling hot systems, and powering motion. Just as quantum phenomena enhance information-processing tasks, they can enhance thermodynamic tasks. Scientists figure out how in quantum thermodynamics. The original theory of thermodynamics emerged before quantum mechanics did; so the laws of thermodynamics need re-envisioning to accommodate, for example, entanglement. Quantum thermodynamicists accomplish this task using the mathematical, conceptual, and experimental tools of quantum information science. Practitioners have proved that entanglement can aid tiny refrigerators, uncovered how quantum systems experience the flow of time, and even designed and built quantum engines from single atoms. Those engines inspired Captain Okoli’s Magnificent Steampunk Quantum Engine.

Quantum thermodynamics blends the old and the new—Victorian-era thermodynamics and partially cutting-edge, partially futuristic quantum information science. (Why partially futuristic? We don’t yet have large-scale, fully functional quantum computers!) So quantum thermodynamics shares the spirit—the aesthetic—of steampunk. Captain Okoli’s Magnificent Steampunk Quantum Engine makes quantum steampunk visual, tangible, and accessible.