The 2022 Nobel prize for physics has been awarded to a trio of scientists for pioneering experiments in quantum mechanics, the theory covering the micro-world of atoms and particles.
October 8, 2022
The 2022 Nobel prize for physics has been awarded to a trio of scientists for pioneering experiments in quantum mechanics, the theory covering the micro-world of atoms and particles.
Alain Aspect from Université Paris-Saclay in France, John Clauser from J.F. Clauser & Associates in the US, and Anton Zeilinger from University of Vienna in Austria, will share the prize sum of 10 million Swedish kronor (US$915,000) “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.”
The world of quantum mechanics appears very odd indeed. In school, we are taught that we can use equations in physics to predict exactly how things will behave in the future—where a ball will go if we roll it down a hill, for example.
Quantum mechanics is different from this. Rather than predicting individual outcomes, it tells us the probability of finding subatomic particles in particular places. A particle can actually be in several places at the same time, before “picking” one location at random when we measure it.
Even the great Albert Einstein himself was unsettled by this—to the point where he was convinced that it was wrong. Rather than outcomes being random, he thought there must be some “hidden variables”—forces or laws that we can’t see—which predictably influence the results of our measurements.
Some physicists, however, embraced the consequences of quantum mechanics. John Bell, a physicist from Northern Ireland, made an important breakthrough in 1964, devising a theoretical test to show that the hidden variables Einstein had in mind don’t exist.
According to quantum mechanics, particles can be “entangled,” spookily connected so that if you manipulate one then you automatically and immediately also manipulate the other. If this spookiness—particles far apart mysteriously influencing each other instantaneously—were to be explained by the particles communicating with each other through hidden variables, it would require faster-than-light communication between the two, which Einstein’s theories forbid.
