She works on the future of quantum science, and repairs the past of physics. A conversation about what quantum actually is, the woman written out of a Nobel-winning discovery, and who gets to shape the next century.
People assume quantum is exotic and far from daily life. Shohini's correction: the Wi-Fi, phones, and chips you use every day exist because we worked out quantum mechanics. We have been quantum tech users for decades without calling it that. The strange new machines are the second wave, not the first.
The biggest myth is that quantum just means faster. Her analogy: you would never call a lightbulb a very fancy candle, even though both make light. Quantum computers are not a souped-up version of what we have. They work in a fundamentally different way, which means rethinking what information itself is.
Tracing the real history of her field, Shohini found Bibha Chowdhuri, a Bengali physicist whose work fed two fundamental-particle discoveries, one of which won a Nobel Prize for someone else. She published repeatedly in Nature and was the first woman physicist hired at India's flagship institute, and was still almost entirely forgotten by the end of her life.
Told to treat the gender problem like a scientist, Shohini read the research and found we keep solving the wrong thing. Girls' camps and mentoring teach women to survive a broken environment instead of changing it. No amount of mentoring removes a bias. The real work is systemic: hiring, resources, and who gets credit and funding.