“The experiments beginning with the earliest one of Clauser and continuing along, show that this stuff isn’t just philosophical, it’s real-and like other real things, potentially useful,” says Charles Bennett, an eminent quantum researcher at IBM. “Without any doubt, the prize is well-deserved.”
It was long overdue,” says Sandu Popescu, a quantum physicist at the University of Bristol. They equally split the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.” (“Bell inequalities” refers to the pioneering work of the Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell, who laid the foundations for this year’s Physics Nobel in the early 1960s.) Colleagues agreed that the trio had it coming, deserving this reckoning for overthrowing reality as we know it. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the demise of local realism has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.īlame for this achievement has now been laid squarely on the shoulders of three physicists: John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger.
This is, of course, deeply contrary to our everyday experiences. As Albert Einstein famously bemoaned to a friend, “Do you really believe the moon is not there when you are not looking at it?” Instead, the evidence shows objects are not influenced solely by their surroundings and they may also lack definite properties prior to measurement. Investigations at the frontiers of quantum physics have found that these things cannot both be true. “Real,” meaning that objects have definite properties independent of observation-an apple can be red even when no one is looking “local” means objects can only be influenced by their surroundings, and that any influence cannot travel faster than light.
One of the more unsettling discoveries in the past half century is that the universe is not locally real.
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