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Science 14 May 2004:
Vol. 304. no. 5673, p. 955
DOI: 10.1126/science.304.5673.955d
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Figure 2 Caution! Objects on screen may not be exactly where they appear--at least not in "Quantum Focus," a computer game that makes quantum mechanics child's play.

Just as children get a feel for classical mechanics by playing ball, the game's designer, Tarun Biswas, a physicist at the State University of New York (SUNY), New Paltz, hopes they can get a feel for quantum mechanics by playing with quantum objects.

In "Quantum Focus," three quarks, red, blue, and green, float on the black screen. The quarks move oddly, invisibly bound together to move just as they would inside a particle such as a proton. The colors diffuse and shift, fading as the probability of the particle's presence drops. The goal of the game is to get each quark's wave function (the colored space where the quark might be) to collapse into the same point with the other two quarks, using intuition and adroit clicks of the mouse.

"This game has the rules of the real universe, but it's a part of the universe you never see," says Richard Halpern, a colleague of Biswas's at SUNY New Paltz. And it isn't easy, he says. See for yourself--at www.engr.newpaltz.edu/~biswast

CREDIT: TARUN BISWAS/SUNY, NEW PALTZ




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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)