At CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, this machine is smashing apart particles in order to discover their constituent parts and the quantum laws that govern their behaviour.
We are delighted to announce the winners in this edition of the Quantum Shorts flash fiction competition. Five stories claim prizes across the competition’s Open and Youth categories.
“The wildly divergent approaches to the quantum world and the constraint were inspiring,” says judge Colin Sullivan from Nature. Go here to find the winning stories, see what else the judges had to say about them and to read interviews with the authors.
Congratulations to the winners – and to all the writers who entered and made our decisions so difficult! Quantum shorts will be back again later this year with a call for short films.
Brian Greene is Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Columbia University in New York. He is widely recognized for groundbreaking discoveries in his field of superstring theory. He is also known to the public for his writing and media appearances. His first book The Elegant Universe has sold more than a million copies worldwide. It was finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, winner of Britain’s top prize for a book on science, and the basis for an award-winning three-part NOVA special that he hosted. He is also the author of The Fabric of the Cosmos, which inspired another NOVA series. His other books are The Hidden Reality, a considered exploration of the science of parallel universes and Icarus at the Edge of Time, which dramatises insights in relativity. That story was adapted for live symphonic presentation with an original score by Philip Glass. His many other media appearances include Charlie Rose and David Letterman. Professor Greene is also chairman of the board of The World Science Festival, which he co-founded with Emmy award winning journalist Tracy Day in 2008. The festival has been hailed by the New York Times as a “new cultural institution”. www.briangreene.org