Guided by Sapienza, the spirit of knowledge, two voyagers enter the microscopic realm of atomic landscapes and quantum conundrums to discover a magnificent and baffling world foreign to every day human experience. As in epic and fairy tales – say, the Metamorphosis or the Nutcracker, the voyagers explore land after land, each tickling the viewer’s imagination and, unlike fairy tales, offering glimpses of a world we believe actually resides around us. The trio confront terrifying prospects of being Dead and Alive at once, encounter electrons acting as waves, are pelleted by photons, glide through diaphanous orbitals of atoms, precess in Magnetic Resonant Imaging machines, levitate above superconducting surfaces, and navigate disordered quantum terrains within complex materials. The two voyagers emerge awakened to the miniscule scapes within us and the affirmation that things are never what they seem.

Quantum Voyages was a concept created by Smitha Vishveshwara and Latrelle Bright by combining scientific knowledge and the beauty of theater.  Their collaboration started in 2018 and is still going strong today!

Many of the students involved in Quantum Voyages study physics. Some aspects of Quantum Voyages include a more abstract, biological application of the science, so students visited the University of Illinois Biomedical Imaging Center to research these aspects of the production. There was plenty of inspiration for the props and light projections!

Scheduled to be a part of the American Physical Society's March Meeting, 2025 in the Grove of Anaheim, in Anaheim CA will be the fourth performance of Quantum Voyages. It premiered on March 30, 2018, at the I Hotel and Conference Center, in honor of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Anthony Leggett’s 80th birthday. A second performance on April 4, 2018, at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science was dedicated to the memory of Professor Charles Slichter, a revered condensed matter physicist who served on the Illinois Physics faculty for 57 years.  The third performance happened in 2019 for the American Physical Society's March Meeting, March 4-8 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.