Spiros Michalakis Tells an Unfinished Story

Spiros Michalakis has little trouble finding an audience for his discussions of quantum mechanics. As we chronicled in the Random Walk article “Superhero Physics” in our Summer 2015 issue, Hollywood filmmakers actively sought his ideas for the movie Ant-Man.

Michalakis, the manager of outreach and a staff researcher at Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, also drew a crowd of science-loving students to his 2013 TEDxYouth@Caltech lecture, “Atoms—An Unfinished Story.”

The 11-minute lecture describes his quest—humorously framed as a lifelong bid to avenge a childhood chess-game drubbing—to build the ultimate quantum computer.