Quantization of Sawara — 佐原の街並み・人々を数式で表す

Quantization of Sawara — Expressing the Townscape and People of Sawara in Formulas

Expressing the Townscape and People of Sawara in Formulas

Inō Tadataka's yearning to understand the size of the Earth and the nature of the cosmos led him to create the first map of Japan. In his time, the world was still seen through flat maps approximated by straight lines and triangles, and drawing clear boundaries was the way of understanding the world.

Today we have three-dimensional maps such as Google Earth. We can see the Earth from space, and we know that no borders exist upon it. And in the future, the realization of quantum computers — technology grounded in quantum mechanics — promises yet another new way of seeing the world. In quantum mechanics, all matter possesses the properties of both particles and waves.

The townscape and people of Sawara — the town where Inō Tadataka was born and raised — captured by 3D scan photography, are converted from triangles into simple superpositions of sine and cosine waves, imagining a future in which boundaries dissolve entirely.