The Knowmads Podcast

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Marine De Clerck on Quantum Chaos
Episode 8
Friday, 12 December, 2025

Hello Everyone, welcome to The Knowmads Podcast. I'm your co-host Prachi, and I'm your co-host Bhavay. `Chaos' is one of those words that has escaped physics and entered everyday language. We use it to describe messy rooms, traffic, even our inboxes. But in physics, chaos has a very precise meaning, (or it doesnt). Well, classically, chaotic systems are those, that even though they are completely deterministic, they are extremely sensitive to their initial conditions. Even the tiniest change in the initial conditions can lead to wildly different outcomes.\ But when we move to the quantum world, things become a little strange. When there are no deterministic trajectories in the quantum world, how do we even make sense of chaos.Our guest today is Dr. Marine De Clerck, a mathematical physicist at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge. Her work lives right at this intersection of chaos, gravity, and how mathematical structure is built upon quantum chaos. So if you’ve ever heard of the butterfly effect and wondered what chaos really means, you are in for a treat.