UCL’s new Potter Institute will try to answer questions about space and time

Fahad Redha

August 25, 2026
6 min read

UCL’s new Potter Institute will try to answer questions about space and time

There is a question sitting underneath every physics department in the world that nobody has managed to answer for more than a hundred years: is the universe itself quantum, all the way down, or does something in nature refuse to follow the rules that govern atoms and particles? UCL has just been given £8 million to try to settle it.

The gift, from the David and Elaine Potter Foundation, establishes the David Potter Institute for Quantum Information and Spacetime, a new permanent institute based in UCL’s Faculty of Mathematical and Physical Sciences.

Based within UCL’s Faculty of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, the new interdisciplinary Potter Institute will bring together leading scientists in quantum information theory, gravity, and high energy physics to advance fundamental research into the nature of the universe.

The two theories in question are quantum mechanics, which governs the smallest building blocks of matter, and general relativity, which describes gravity as the bending of spacetime. Both have been tested and confirmed to extraordinary precision. They also flatly contradict each other, and nobody has found a way to make them agree.

What makes the Potter Institute worth noticing is that London already has, without much public attention, one of the more serious concentrations of people actually trying to answer this question experimentally rather than just on paper. Co-director Professor Jonathan Oppenheim developed a theory laid out in a paper in Physical Review X, which challenges the consensus and takes an alternative approach by suggesting that spacetime may be classical, that is, not governed by quantum theory at all.

Where most physicists have assumed gravity itself must eventually be “quantised” to fit inside quantum theory, Oppenheim’s 2023 work argued the opposite might be true, and that this results in random and violent fluctuations in spacetime that are larger than envisaged under quantum theory, rendering the apparent weight of objects unpredictable if measured precisely enough.

That is a testable claim, not just a philosophical position, and testing it is exactly what the new institute exists to fund. His co-director, Professor Sougato Bose, has been pushing at the same problem from a different angle for even longer. In 2017,

Bose and Peter Barker from UCL Physics and Astronomy, together with collaborators from around the globe, proposed a thought experiment based on the principle that local operations cannot create entanglement between non-interacting systems, in which two masses, each carrying a spin-like property, are made to gravitationally interact as they traverse adjacent interferometers, so that observing entanglement between them would certify the quantum nature of gravity.

Barker now leads the Potter Institute’s experimental programme, and the underlying idea from that 2017 paper, that gravity’s true nature might be caught in a tabletop laboratory rather than a particle accelerator, is now the institute’s actual working method.

Instead of modifying spacetime, Oppenheim’s theory modifies quantum theory itself and predicts an intrinsic breakdown in predictability mediated by spacetime.

The institute’s own framing of the work is unusually direct about what has changed.

At the heart of the partnership is a question that has challenged physicists for more than a century, how to reconcile quantum mechanics, which governs the smallest building blocks of nature, with gravity, which describes how spacetime bends to shape the universe, and despite significant progress in both areas, scientists do not yet know whether spacetime itself is quantum.

Oppenheim put it more bluntly in UCL’s own announcement: “Quantum gravity research has historically been pure blackboard physics. We are now in the position of being able to design and build towards experiments that could settle a question that generations of physicists have struggled with.”

The practical route to an answer runs through remarkably delicate engineering.

To probe the fundamental nature of spacetime, researchers will develop quantum sensors capable of measuring incredibly small forces with unprecedented precision.

The image UCL released alongside the announcement shows a nanosphere levitating inside a prototype interferometer, the sort of apparatus that will eventually try to place a tiny mass into two places at once and watch whether gravity can link its fate to a second particle in a way no classical explanation could account for. If that entanglement shows up, spacetime is quantum. If it never does, no matter how sensitive the equipment gets, Oppenheim’s classical picture gains real ground.

None of this is confined to abstract theory for its own sake.

Quantum sensing is expected to disrupt industries that rely on sensor technology, including healthcare and engineering, and the Potter Institute will be an incubator for spin-out technologies, working in tandem with the Quantum Biomedical Sensing Research Hub, led by UCL and the University of Cambridge, to develop quantum sensing technology deployable in high-impact healthcare settings that could enable significantly more sensitive detection of cells, molecules and processes in the body.

A sensor precise enough to detect whether gravity behaves like a quantum field is, by definition, a sensor precise enough to notice things in the body that current diagnostic equipment simply misses.

The institute carries the name of a man who spent his own career moving in the opposite direction, from the blackboard into the marketplace. Dr David Potter CBE, who died in June 2026, trained as a physicist before founding Psion in 1980.

Psion became a leader in software for microcomputers, and from 1984 pioneered the management of personal information with ‘The Organiser’, the world’s first handheld computer for personal use. In 1998 David led the creation of Symbian Limited, in partnership with Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola and Matsushita, whose operating system underpinned the first generation of smartphones.

Whether the institute actually resolves the question it was built to answer is, by its own directors’ admission, not something anyone can promise on any particular timeline. What has changed is that the tools to even attempt an answer now exist, and that the attempt is happening a short walk from Russell Square rather than in a particle accelerator on another continent. UCL’s new Potter Institute will try to answer questions about space and time

UCL’s own physicists have spent a decade building toward exactly this kind of experiment, and EyeOnLondon will be watching for the Potter Institute’s first results.

For more London news, visit EyeOnLondon at eye-on-london.com