This award winning film lets you experience what happens when solar wind slams into Earth’s magnetosphere. The results are downright spooky.
This is the short film 20hz, based on data from the CARISMA radio telescope array during a geo-magnetic storm in Earth’s upper atmosphere. The researchers converted the radio signals picked up by the telescope array into audible sounds, which the filmmakers then turned into a visual representation.
It garnered first place in the 2014 Quantum Shorts film contest put on by the Center for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore. Since 2012, the center has invited aspiring filmmakers to put together short films based on or inspired by the weirdness of quantum phenomena.
Second prize, and the People’s Choice Award went to Breaking the Bond, which definitely falls more on the “inspired by” side of things. It’s a funny take on a man struggling with addiction, his addiction to teleportation facilitated by graphene.
The winners were pulled from the short list of nominees published in March. One of my personal favorites of these is The Scarf Solution, where a scientist struggling with a particularly thorny quantum problem gets some unexpected help.
Definitely the most whimsical is The Quantum Flat, about an apartment where the classical laws of physics take a vacation from time to time.
It’s part of the Quantum Design Project, a partnership between the design students at ENSCI-Les Ateliers, one of France’s top design schools, and the physicists from université Paris Sud and the Centre national de la recherché scientifique French government research organization.