HYDERABAD: The University of Hyderabad (UoH)’s School of Physics has begun celebrations marking the centenary of quantum mechanics with a national-level conference titled ‘100 Years of Quantum Mechanics – 2026’, bringing together physicists, researchers and students from across the country.
Describing the centenary as “the best celebration any academic institution can undertake,” UoH Vice-Chancellor Prof. BJ Rao said the occasion marked not just a milestone in science but a triumph of human intellectual achievement.
He underlined the University of Hyderabad’s strong academic legacy and its contribution to foundational research in physics and related disciplines. Prof V Balakrishnan of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras delivered a lecture on the notion of closeness between quantum states, quantified through measures of ‘distance’ between corresponding probability distributions.
He focused on the relevance of these concepts to quantum mechanics and quantum optics. One of the key technical sessions featured Prof HS Mani of the Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI), who spoke on the enduring conceptual challenges of quantum mechanics, even after a century of remarkable experimental success.
“Quantum mechanics works with extraordinary precision, but it compels us to abandon many everyday notions of time, causality and motion,” Prof Mani observed. He discussed quantum tunnelling — a phenomenon in which particles traverse potential barriers that they cannot surmount in classical physics — and examined the long-debated question of how much time a particle spends within such a barrier.
What is striking is that the tunnelling time often appears independent of the width of the barrier,” he said, referring to the well-known Hartman effect. Addressing common public misconceptions, Prof Mani cited the bullet-melon analogy, frequently invoked in debates related to the Kennedy assassination.
“When a bullet passes through a soft object, the backward motion of the outer layer does not violate momentum conservation. The object is not rigid; rather, internal fluid motion transfers momentum forward, producing a recoil effect,” he explained, stressing that the phenomenon is entirely consistent with classical mechanics.
Another major theme of the conference was quantum entanglement. Prof Subrahmanyam of UoH discussed how experiments testing Bell inequalities overturned classical notions of locality and realism.
“Entanglement shows that quantum correlations cannot be explained by pre-existing local properties,” he said, referring to the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox of 1935 and Albert Einstein’s famous characterisation of the phenomenon as “spooky action at a distance”. He, however, clarified that entangl ement doe s not permi t fas ter- than- l ight communication.