American physicist John Clauser won the 2022 Nobel Prize for a groundbreaking experiment vindicating quantum mechanics—a fundamental theory governing the subatomic world that is today the foundation for an emerging class of ultra-powerful computers.
October 5, 2022
American physicist John Clauser won the 2022 Nobel Prize for a groundbreaking experiment vindicating quantum mechanics—a fundamental theory governing the subatomic world that is today the foundation for an emerging class of ultra-powerful computers.
But when he carried out his work in the 1970s, Clauser was actually hoping for the opposite result: to upend the field and prove Albert Einstein had been right to dismiss it, he told AFP in an interview.
„The truth is that I strongly hoped that Einstein would win, which would mean that quantum mechanics was giving incorrect predictions,“ the 79-year-old said, speaking by telephone from his home in Walnut Creek, just outside San Francisco.
Born in Pasadena in 1942, Clauser credits his father, an engineer who designed planes in the war and founded the aeronautics department at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, for instilling in him a lifelong love of science.
„I used to wander around his laboratory and say ‚Wow, oh boy, when I grow up I want to be a scientist so I can play with these fun toys too.'“
As a graduate student at Columbia in the mid-1960s, he grew interested in quantum physics alongside his thesis work on radio astronomy.
Quantum entanglement
According to quantum mechanics, two or more particles can exist in what’s called an entangled state—what happens to one in an entangled pair determines what happens to the other, no matter their distance.
