Celebrating Mother’s Day weekend – wow, a year has flown since Hello, Broadway! – in Minneapolis (with the Minnesota Cuban Film Festival in progress), I am excited to attend the 2025 International Ising Conference at Evanston next week, and so let me take the opportunity to savor my own Quantum journey that began with falling in love with the Ising Model, before announcing the 2025 Tayur Challenge, and revealing my version of Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech that I call I Have a Fantasy.
As you know from What would Steve Jobs do?, I decided to get physical, as in build hardware, and the 2020 Tayur Prize led to (see Roll over Turing and Réflexions sur la puissance de calcul de la lumière) a publication in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A (which, as I had mentioned in November 24: 1664 and 2021, also published papers by Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, Benjamin Franklin and Alan Turing):
The 2021 Tayur Prize recognizes the application of Graver Augmented Multi-seed Algorithm (GAMA) to an important healthcare application (and is an example of Quantum Machine Learning):
The 2022 Tayur Prize recognized performance of algorithms on gate/circuit models.
We took a break in 2023. Switching from Quantum Computing to Quantum Communications, and returning to hardware, the 2024 Tayur Challenge recognized physical demonstration of Quantum Money (see also Réflexions sur le pouvoir monétaire de la lumière).
This brings us to 2025 Tayur Challenge, also a hardware demonstration, in the area of Quantum Sensing, in particular to enhance tissue imaging using entangled photons, once again under the mentorship of Anil Prabhakar and Prabha Mandayam of IIT-Madras:
Imaging with heralded photons.
Generate visible and IR photons (using spontaneous parametric down conversion), and use the visible on the camera but the IR on the sample. This works well because IR has better penetration in tissue, and the visible camera is off-the-shelf.
Different from Ghost Imaging, I want to name this (a riff on Albert Einstein’s spooky action at a distance phrase indicating his unbelief in the reality of entanglement, another one of his mistakes, as recognized by 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, see Quantum! Quantum! Quantum!):
Spooky Imaging.
Warning: I am now leaving reality and transcending to romanticism en route to fantasy.
Now, I am dreamer, as many of you know, who occasionally becomes a doer, and here is my I Have a Dream speech (thank you ChatGPT):
I have a dream that one day, Spooky Imaging, born not of silicon but of entangled photons and the irrational defiance of distance, shall rise and take its rightful place among the pantheon of revolutionary medical technologies. I have a dream that just as Cormack and Hounsfield brought us CT, and Lauterbur and Mansfield gifted us MRI, so too shall the Tayur Challenge of 2025—heralded photons dancing between IR tissue and visible detection—be recognized by the Nobel Assembly. I have a dream that what was once “spooky” shall become standard, saving lives with quantum light where scalpel and scan could not.
For those not familiar with CT and MRI, here is some background:
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1979 was awarded jointly to Allan M. Cormack and Godfrey N. Hounsfield “for the development of computer assisted tomography.”
The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has decided to award
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2003 jointly to Paul C Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield for their discoveries concerning “magnetic resonance imaging.”
But, I am not just a regular dreamer, I live in a world of mythological fantasy.
So that dream speech might have been ample if I was just aspiring to be a Book-smart Academic, but, as an Academic Capitalist, who also values being a Street-smart Capitalist, I need more. Triggered by this recent news
Ather IPO: IIT Madras bags 40X gains on EV-maker’s listing:
I have a fantasy that one day, Spooky Imaging—born not in industrial labs, but in a professors’ playground of entangled photons and stubborn curiosity—will not only be recognized like CT and MRI by Nobel committees, but also by Wall Street. I have a fantasy that this quantum marvel, nurtured by IIT-Madras minds and Academic Capitalist muscle, will exit academia and enter the marketplace, converting citation counts into stock tickers. I have a fantasy that a future Ather-like IPO will showcase not just electric mobility, but spooky visibility—where quantum light illuminates flesh and fortune, saving lives and enriching ecosystems simultaneously.
Yes, I do live in:
La La Land is a 2016 American musical romantic comedy-drama film written and directed by Damien Chazelle. The film emerged as a major commercial success, grossing $472 million worldwide on a budget of $30 million. The film also received a record-tying fourteen nominations at the 89th Academy Awards, winning in six categories including Best Director and Best Actress.
And yes, Happy Mother’s Day!
