So Tara was helping physicists hype up their work while at the same time she was working on a PhD, exploring the role of hype in science.

Hype is, I guess I describe it as exaggerated, sensationalized, simplified, sometimes a bit sexy stories about science and technology.

The reason that we use hype is that fields of science exists in this constant state of imagining a future where they've found new information, found a new application, but they're not there yet, so when they're looking for funding in order to make their research actually happen, they're painting this view of the future where certain things are going to work out really well in scientific research, and it doesn't always happen.

At first, Tara was looking at hype in space travel and how NASA used it to promote its missions.

And it just so happened that at the same time as my supervisor said, "Hey, do you wanna be a NASA historian? If not, you're gonna need to add to this thesis", quantum was also kind of taking off in terms of people actually picking up press releases, government sectors were like, "Oh, maybe we should have a national strategy for this." And I would say it was 2016 when I started to think, okay, I'm gonna add a quantum communication chapter to this thesis on hype because I don't see how I could not.