Earth’s layers of ozone gas in the stratosphere and mesosphere protect us from solar ultraviolet radiation, which can be very damaging to living organisms. A team of engineers from Cornell and MIT have modified satellite TV equipment to look at the ozone and study its changes in concentration, velocity, and temperature over time. In this class, we will look at what makes these devices work, and what new things they’ve told us about the ozone. We’ll explore what this means for climate change and how we can better engineer machines to study our planet’s atmosphere.

Quantum information science is an emerging field that brings together multiple disciplines––physics, mathematics, computer science, engineering, and chemistry––in the quest to build a radical new kind of computing machine. In this class, we will first explore what distinguishes classical physics from quantum physics, how these distinctions can be interpreted in the context of information processing, and how the limits of Moore's Law provide the motivation for quantum computation. Then, we will construct a theoretical model of a quantum computer and explore quantum algorithms that such a machine could solve. We will end with a discussion on experimental quantum devices and possible future developments.