IB Physics students attended a public lecture in IST Austria

What better way to cele­brate the suc­cess­ful com­ple­tion of VWA pre­sen­ta­ti­ons than to attend a public lec­ture by the Uni­ver­si­tät Wien Pro­fes­sor, Insti­tute for Quan­tum Optics and Quan­tum Infor­ma­tion (IQOQI) Phy­si­cist, and Aus­trian Aca­demy of Sci­en­ces Pre­si­dent Anton Zei­lin­ger?

It was a won­der­ful oppor­tu­nity for the IB Phy­sics stu­dents to meet and listen to such an emi­nent sci­en­tist. The idea was to get a glim­pse of the kind of state-of-the-art rese­arch that is hap­pe­ning in »Quan­tum Com­mu­ni­ca­tion”. Prof Zei­lin­ger spoke about quan­tum cryp­to­gra­phy, long-dis­tance quan­tum tele­por­ta­tion and a future quan­tum inter­net.

The icing on the cake was the chat the stu­dents had with Prof. Robert Sei­rin­ger. While hap­pily mun­ching on yummy food, the stu­dents asked him ques­ti­ons about what it takes to make a career in sci­ence. The warm, down-to-earth Prof Sei­rin­ger ans­we­red all their ques­ti­ons and talked about how his curio­sity lead him from stu­dy­ing Astro­nomy to working on many-body sys­tems in quan­tum mecha­nics. When Fabian asked him about job secu­rity, he talked to them can­didly about how he had never worried about such things as a teen­ager him­s­elf. He said that the skill sets one acqui­res while stu­dy­ing sci­ence can be put to use in lite­r­ally any field – the key is to learn cri­ti­cal thin­king and ana­lyti­cal rea­so­n­ing.
COPY­RIGHT of the photos belong to IST Aus­tria.