The Shape of Time: A Creative Journey Through the Universe

Name: The Shape of Time: A Creative Journey Through the Universe
Start: 2025-12-06T15:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-12-06T16:30:00-05:00
Location: 314 Main Street, Gambrill Center, Cambridge, MA, United States, Massachusetts 02139

Schedule

Sat Dec 06 2025 at 03:00 pm to 04:30 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

314 Main Street, Gambrill Center, Cambridge, MA, United States, Massachusetts 02139 | Cambridge, MA

Step into a workshop like no other: an imaginative voyage across the cosmos, where physics meets poetry and science becomes a canvas for wonder.
Led by Michele Reilly—an applied physicist and quantum information scientist at MIT with a gift for storytelling—this 90-minute experience invites you to explore time in all its guises: from the Big Bang’s first glimmer to far future possibilities.
Through vivid narratives and hands on creative exercises, you’ll craft your own “time souvenirs”: small works of art, writing, or design inspired by cosmology, entropy, and quantum mechanics. Along the way, Michele will connect your discoveries to real scientific concepts, illuminating how physics shapes our understanding of past, present, and future.
Accessible to curious teens and adults alike, The Shape of Time blends rigorous thinking with playful exploration. Join us to reimagine time itself—leave with a new perspective on the universe and a creative artifact uniquely your own.
About the Instructor — Michele Reilly
Michele Reilly is a scientist/storyteller at MIT, where she treats time, entropy, and computation as both equations to solve and worlds to imagine. An applied physicist and quantum information scientist, she pioneered some of the earliest designs for quantum random access memory (qRAM) and develops new frameworks linking thermodynamics, complexity theory, and cosmology. Her research explores how the deep laws of physics—particularly the nature of time and information—shape our universe, and she has collaborated across MIT’s Center for Brains, Minds & Machines and international quantum institutes. In all of her teaching, writing, and public programs, Michele combines rigorous inquiry with creative vision, making cutting-edge physics accessible and inspiring to audiences of all backgrounds.
December 6
3pm - 4:30pm
$30 general public; $10 for MIT ID Holders