Demystifying the quantum world with Emeritus Fellow, Bob Coecke

In October last year, Wolfson EF Bob Coecke took to the stage at the Royal Institution in London to present a new way to understand the quantum world. In his lecture, he shares how the principles of quantum mechanics, often reserved for undergraduates, can be made more accessible by replacing complex mathematics with intuitive diagrams.

Coecke and a team from Quantinuum and Oxford University Computer Science, ran an education experiment, teaching the pictorial method to UK schoolchildren aged 15-17, who then beat the average exam scores of Oxford’s postgraduate students OR Oxford’s postgraduate mathematics and computer science students.

Of the experiment, Coecke said, “At one point, I was going to call off the whole thing because I thought it was going to be a complete disaster. We’d originally wanted the kids to interact with each other on social media or communicate online, but that wasn’t allowed due to the ethical guidelines for the experiment. I thought, what sort of educational experience is it, if you can’t talk to each other? […] And then we got back the numbers. They did significantly better than we see from university-level students.”

Coecke’s maths-free framework using diagrams for total beginners, is outlined in Quantum in Pictures, his book with Dr Stefano Gogioso that was published last year.

For further detail on the experiment, you can read this article on The Guardian.