Physics Nobel Prize given for quantum discoveries
3 winning scientists explored entanglements
STOCKHOLM – Three scientists jointly won this year’s Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for their work on quantum information science, a “totally crazy” field that has significant applications, including in the field of encryption.
Frenchman Alain Aspect, American John F. Clauser and Austrian Anton Zeilinger were cited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for discovering the way that unseen particles, such as photons, can be linked, or “entangled,” with each other even when they are separated by large distances.
“Being a little bit entangled is sort of like being a little bit pregnant. The effect grows on you,” Clauser said.
It all goes back to a feature of the universe that even baffled Albert Einstein and connects matter and light in a tangled, chaotic way.
Bits of information or matter that used to be next to each other even though they are now separated have a connection or relationship – something that can conceivably help encrypt information or even teleport.
“It’s so weird,” Aspect said in a telephone call with the Nobel committee. “I am accepting in my mental images something which is totally crazy.”
Yet the trio’s experiments showed it happening in real life.
“Why this happens I haven’t the foggiest,” Clauser told The Associated Press during a Zoom interview in
which he got the official call from the Swedish Academy several hours after friends and media told him. “I have no understanding of how it works, but entanglement appears to be very real.”
Clauser, 79, was awarded his prize for a 1972 experiment, cobbled together with scavenged equipment, that helped settle a famous debate about quantum mechanics between Einstein and famed physicist Niels Bohr. Einstein described “a spooky action at a distance” that he thought would eventually be disproved.
“I was betting on Einstein,” Clauser said. “But unfortunately I was wrong and Einstein was wrong and Bohr was right.”
Aspect, 75, said Einstein may have been technically wrong but deserves huge credit for raising the right question that led to experiments proving quantum entanglement.
“I’ve been struggling to understand quantum mechanics my whole life,” added Clauser, noting that he invented what might have been the first video game while in high school in the 1950s. “And I still don’t understand it.”
The Nobel-winning experiments observe a relationship that exists between particles or light that once used to be next to each other but no longer are, said Johns Hopkins University physicist Sean Carroll. It’s not something you can see or touch and while scientists can observe it, they have a harder time explaining why and how it happens, he said.
Zeilinger said he was “still kind of shocked” at hearing he had received the award.
“But it’s a very positive shock,” said Zeilinger, 77, who is based at the University of Vienna.