Picture Victorian London, but its skies are filled with airships. Steam-powered robots crowd the streets, mingling with people in top hats and petticoats. That type of retrofuturistic mash-up is the fantasy realm of steampunk, a genre of literature, film and other creative media. Theoretical physicist Nicole Yunger Halpern sees her specialty, the field of quantum thermodynamics, as the real-world version of steampunk.
In steampunk, “there’s this strange juxtaposition of the old setting and futuristic technology,” Yunger Halpern says. “That’s what we do in quantum thermodynamics.”
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